How to Brief an Agency: Focusing on What Really Matters
Crafting a brief for a marketing or advertising agency is a pivotal step in ensuring the success of your campaign. While there are countless resources online offering templates and advice, many fail to address the core elements that truly make or break a brief. This blog post highlights the key aspects often overlooked and provides guidance on how to create a brief that leads to actionable, impactful strategies.
Briefing an agency adequately and working as a team are key success factors.
1. Start with the Buyer, Not Just the Audience
One of the most critical yet often misunderstood components of a brief is defining your typical buyer. This goes beyond the generalised concept of a target audience.
Typical Buyer: Who is most likely to purchase your product or service? What are their habits, preferences, and decision-making processes? These are the individuals driving your revenue, and understanding them is paramount.
Target Audience: This is the broader group you aim to attract. While the agency should understand the target audience from your perspective, they should also be tasked with conducting research to refine or challenge this understanding.
Agencies are hired for their expertise. Encourage them to leverage their insights to help identify not only who you think your audience is but who your buyer truly is.
2. Clarify the Message and the Product
You cannot expect an agency to deliver a successful campaign without clarity on what you’re advertising and the message you want to convey. Shockingly, this fundamental detail is missing in most briefs.
What Are You Advertising? Ensure you’ve clearly defined the product or service. Describe its features, benefits, and unique selling proposition (USP).
What Is the Message? The message serves as the campaign’s backbone. Is it about quality? Innovation? Affordability? The message defines the tone, creative direction, and media strategy. Without it, the agency is left in a vacuum, guessing at your intentions.
3. Share Past Marketing Efforts and Learnings
Another crucial yet often missing element is providing a historical context of your marketing activities. Agencies need to understand what has been tried before to build on successes and avoid repeating past mistakes.
What Worked and Why? Share data and insights from campaigns that met or exceeded expectations.
What Didn’t Work? Be candid about failures and the reasons behind them. This transparency helps the agency refine its approach and avoid pitfalls.
Past performance is a goldmine for shaping future strategies, so be as detailed as possible in this section.
4. Start Objectives with Macro Goals
Many briefs dive straight into granular objectives like click-through rates or social media engagement. While these are important, they should stem from overarching macro goals:
Brand Building: Is the goal to enhance awareness and establish long-term value?
Sales: Are you aiming for immediate conversions and revenue?
A Combination? Clearly outline how you’d like to balance these priorities.
These macro goals influence everything from budget allocation to media planning. A campaign designed to build brand equity will look vastly different from one focused purely on driving sales.
5. Empower the Agency to Be More Than Prescribers
Agencies are not just vendors; they are partners with specialised expertise in marketing and advertising. Treat them as collaborators by:
Giving them the freedom to challenge assumptions and propose innovative ideas.
Providing them with comprehensive information and insights so they can offer value beyond execution.
The agency’s role isn’t to simply follow instructions but to leverage their experience to shape the strategy and drive results.
Structuring the Brief
To help you put these principles into practice, here’s a recommended structure for your brief:
Project Overview
Campaign name and context.
Buyer and Audience Insights
Define your typical buyer and your target audience.
Encourage the agency to refine this understanding.
Message and Product Details
What is being advertised?
What is the core message?
Objectives
Start with macro goals (brand building, sales, or both) and then move to specific KPIs.
Past Campaigns and Learnings
Share data, insights, successes, and failures.
Timeline and Budget
Define clear deadlines and financial parameters.
Additional Tip: Ask for the Agency’s Brief Template
Many agencies have their own templates for briefs, designed to extract the most relevant information for their process. Don’t hesitate to ask for one. If an agency cannot provide a template, it could be a red flag regarding their preparedness or professionalism.
Ok, So You Got Your Brief. What Do We Recommend?
Before passing on a brief to an agency, we recommend engaging in a chemistry meeting with the agency. But don’t limit this to speaking with Client Services or Account Managers. Ask to meet the team that will work hands-on on your campaign.
At the end of the day, your campaign’s success relies on the talent of the team—who they are and how many years of experience they bring to the table. This is especially crucial in a world increasingly shaped by AI, where fundamentals and empirical experience outweigh mere technical training.
By ensuring you align with the right people, you increase the likelihood of a campaign that not only meets but exceeds your expectations.
