How to brief an agency that makes content
A good brief says who the content is for, what it must never say, what good looks like to you and how much you want each month. Almost every failed first month traces back to one of those four being assumed instead of written down before anything was produced.
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Briefing is the part clients believe is the agency’s job and the part that decides the outcome. A supplier can be excellent and still deliver a wasted month if the brief left them guessing about tone, claims or volume. The good news is that a useful brief is short, and it is written once.
What has to be in it?
Six things: the audience, the offer, the voice, the claim rules, the reference examples and the volume. Everything else is detail that can be settled as you go.
The audience is not a demographic, it is a person with a problem. The offer is what you actually want someone to do. Voice is best given as two examples you like and two you hate, because adjectives are useless here and examples are not. Claim rules are what you may legally and commercially say. References show what good looks like. Volume sets the rhythm.
| Brief section | The question it answers | Common failure |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Who is this for | Written as an age range |
| Offer | What should they do next | Left implicit |
| Voice | How should it sound | Given as adjectives only |
| Claim rules | What may we never say | Discovered after a takedown |
| References | What does good look like | Only competitors, no reasons |
| Volume | How much, how often | Agreed verbally, never written |
Why do references matter so much?
Because tone is nearly impossible to describe and trivially easy to demonstrate, and two examples save a month of revisions.
Give four: two accounts whose content you would be happy to have made, and two you would hate to be compared with. Say one sentence about why for each. That single exercise resolves more ambiguity than a page of brand guidelines, and it exposes disagreements inside your own team before they turn into rejected work.
What do people leave out?
Claim rules and the no list, almost every time, and both are the ones that cause real damage rather than mild disappointment.
If you are in a regulated category, the claim set is the most important page of the brief. Supplements, finance, health, gambling and adult all have hard limits that differ by market, and an agency that does not have them will write to the limit of what converts. We ask for it up front, which is why content production for supplement brands starts with the label rather than with a shoot.
The no list is the other one. Competitors you will not mention, topics you will not touch, staff who will not appear, phrases the founder hates. Thirty seconds to write and a month of friction if it is missing.
How much should you stay involved?
Heavily for the first month and lightly afterwards, which is the opposite of how most clients plan it.
The first month is calibration, so review closely and say specifically what is wrong rather than that it is not quite right. After that a good supplier should need very little from you. If you want to keep formal sign off permanently, that is a setting rather than a conflict, described on approval before anything publishes.
One thing a brief should never contain is a target for followers, views or revenue, because no supplier controls how a platform distributes content. Brief the work and the standard, and hold your supplier to those.
If you are not sure what you are buying in the first place, start with what user generated content really is, the managed service is content production, the month around it is on how it works, and every other question is on the answers hub.