Write a one-page brief before you speak to any agency

The most useful thing you can do before you speak to an agency costs nothing and takes an hour: write down what you want. Most proposals are hard to compare because each agency answered a slightly different question. A written brief fixes that.

What goes in the brief

Keep it to one page. I would cover five things.

First, what needs to change in the business, in a sentence or two, without naming a tactic. "More qualified enquiries for the Dubai showroom" is a brief. "A new Google Ads campaign" is a solution someone has already chosen.

Second, how you will know it has changed. Name the figure you would look at, and where you would look at it. If you cannot name one, say so, because helping you decide is a fair part of what an agency should do.

Third, what you can spend each month on advertising, kept separate from the agency's fee. Proposals that blur the two are the hardest to compare.

Fourth, what you cannot give up. For many businesses that is ownership of their advertising and analytics accounts and the customer data in them. Say it in the brief, so that an agency which cannot accept it says so before the second meeting. The reasons are in who should own your ad and analytics accounts.

Fifth, the constraints: your timeline, the approvals needed on your side, and anything already in place such as a website, a CRM or existing campaigns.

Why it works

An agency that has the brief can propose against it, and you can read proposals row by row against the same text. It also changes the first call. You hear fewer rehearsed credentials and more questions about your business, and the quality of those questions tells you something about how the agency will work.

Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO suggests asking what results to expect and over what timeframe, and how success is measured. Google Search Central lists those among its questions for a prospective SEO. A brief that already names your measure of success makes that question easier to ask and much easier to check.

What to do with the answers

Send the same brief to every agency on the list, ask the same questions in each conversation, and record the answers side by side. The shortlist scorecard holds a set of questions for exactly this, and the full method is in how to choose a marketing agency in the UAE.

If you would like to see how I respond to a brief, I describe my services on the services page of my own site. I am an agency owner as well as the author of this site, so please score me with the same card as the others.