How to write a marketing brief that an agency can use

The short answer: a good marketing brief is one or two pages that say what you want to change, for whom, by when, with what money and how you will know it worked. It does not need to be clever. It needs to be specific enough that two different agencies would read it the same way.

Most weak proposals trace back to a weak brief. If the brief says "we want more visibility", every agency will answer with the same menu of posts and ads. If it says "we want qualified enquiries from companies in Cairo before the end of the year", the answers start to differ, and you can compare them.

The ten parts of a brief

1. The objective. One sentence: what should be true in six months that is not true today?
2. The audience. Who exactly are you trying to reach? Role, industry, place, and what they care about.
3. The offer. What are you selling, and what makes someone choose you over the alternatives? Write the real reasons, not the slogans.
4. The market. Where do you sell, who are the main competitors and what is the season or timing that matters?
5. The budget. The amount you can commit, and whether it covers media spend, agency fees or both.
6. The timeline. A start date, an end date and any fixed moment such as a launch or an event.
7. The constraints. Brand rules, legal limits, things you will not say, channels you cannot use.
8. The success measure. The one number that decides whether this worked, and how it is counted today.
9. The approvals. Who signs off, how long they need and what slows you down.
10. The history. What you have already tried, what happened and what you believe about why.

Make the objective measurable

An objective is not a topic. "Improve our social media" is a topic. "Reach the point where most enquiries come through WhatsApp from companies, not individuals" is an objective, because you can look at the enquiries and tell.

If you cannot yet say how you would count it, write that down. It is useful for an agency to know that a baseline does not exist, because the first job then is to build one.

An illustration: one brief, two versions

Imagine a company that supplies branded gifts to other companies and wants help before its busiest season.

The weak version: "We want to promote our products on social media and get more customers before year end. Budget to be discussed."

The useful version: "Objective: qualified WhatsApp enquiries from companies in Cairo and Giza between now and the middle of November. Audience: people who order gifts for a company, such as HR, procurement and marketing managers. Offer: ready-made sets with the company logo, minimum order stated. Success: the number of enquiries that name a company, a quantity and a delivery date. Constraint: no prices in the ads. Approvals: the owner, within one working day."

The second version can be answered with a plan. The first can only be answered with a price list.

Mistakes that make a brief useless

• Hiding the budget. Without a figure, an agency has to guess, and the proposal will be built for the wrong amount.
• Listing channels instead of goals. "We need Instagram, TikTok and Google" is a shopping list. Say what you want to happen and let the plan choose the channels.
• Several objectives at once. If everything is a priority, nothing is. Pick one and name the rest as secondary.
• Leaving out what failed. The history saves weeks. If an earlier agency tried something and it did not work, say so.
• Writing it for the agency instead of for the decision. A brief is also how your own team agrees on what you are buying.

How an agency should use it

A good agency reads the brief, asks questions and sends them back before it writes a proposal. If you receive a proposal in a day that does not mention anything specific in your brief, treat that as a warning sign.

The brief is also the first document in a planning phase. In our own work, the first weeks are used to test the brief against the market, which is why the first month is six weeks long and the extra two are free. You can read what happens in them in what an agency should deliver in month one.

A one-page template you can copy

Copy these headings into a document and fill each in one or two lines:

• Objective: what must be true by [date]?
• Audience: who, where, in which role?
• Offer and proof: what we sell and why people believe it.
• Market and competitors: who else they consider.
• Budget and timing: the amount, what it covers, the dates.
• Success measure: the number, and where it is recorded.
• Constraints and approvals: what we cannot say, and who signs off.
• History: what we tried and what we think happened.

If a heading takes more than two lines, that is a sign the thinking is not finished. It is better to discover that before the agency does.

Questions a good agency will ask you after reading the brief

A brief starts a conversation; it does not end one. When an agency reads yours carefully, expect questions, and treat them as a good sign. The ones worth preparing answers for are these:

• "What happens to an enquiry after it arrives?" The agency needs to know who replies, how fast and what counts as a good enquiry, because it cannot judge its own work without that.
• "What did you try before, and what did you learn?" Past campaigns, even failed ones, save weeks. If nobody kept records, say so honestly.
• "Which customers do you want more of, and which would you rather avoid?" A business often has strong preferences it has never written down, such as order size, location or type of project.
• "What can we not say?" Legal limits, platform rules, brand rules and promises the business cannot keep all shape the copy. It is cheaper to hear them at the start.
• "Who has the final say, and how long does approval take?" Slow or unclear approval is one of the most common reasons good campaigns launch late.

If you can answer these in a few lines each, the brief is ready. If you cannot, you have found the real first task, and it is worth an hour of your own time before anyone else starts work.

Writing the brief with your team instead of alone

The person who owns marketing rarely knows everything the brief needs. The sales team knows which enquiries become customers. The operations team knows what the business can deliver without strain. Finance knows what a customer is really worth. A brief written alone tends to describe the business as the writer wishes it were.

A practical way to avoid that is a short meeting of thirty to forty-five minutes with one person from each of those areas. Put the draft headings on a screen and fill them in together. Ask each person one question: "What would make this a success from where you sit?" The answers often reveal conflicts early, for example sales wanting volume while operations wants fewer, larger orders. Settling that before the campaign starts is far easier than settling it after.

Afterwards, send the finished brief back to the same people and ask them to correct anything wrong. People support what they helped write, and the brief becomes a shared document rather than a marketing document that others ignore.

Keeping the brief alive after the work starts

A brief is not a contract to be filed. Markets change, a product is delayed, a competitor launches an offer. When something in the brief stops being true, update it and tell the agency, instead of letting the team work from an old version.

Keep a simple version history with the date and a line saying what changed and why. After the first month, review the brief against what actually happened. Which assumptions were right? Which audience turned out to matter more than expected? The second version of a brief, written with real results in hand, is usually the one that produces the best work.

How we use briefs

We ask for a brief, and when there is none, we write it with the client in the first conversation. It feeds our strategy and planning work and the plan we build for the full marketing service.

If you have a brief, or half of one, send it to us and we will tell you honestly whether we are a fit.