How to brief an agency so month one produces something
Most first months are spent collecting things you could have handed over on day one. Here is the list.
Written from the agency side, honestly: the reason month one often produces little is rarely that the agency is slow. It is that the first three weeks go into access requests, chasing a decision-maker, and reconstructing what was tried before. Almost all of that can be removed in advance.
Prepare before kickoff
- Access, granted rather than promised — ad accounts, analytics, tag manager, CMS, the domain registrar and the CRM. Admin access, not view-only, and to accounts you own rather than the previous agency.
- What was already tried, and what happened. Even a rough list saves a month of rediscovery and stops anyone repeating a failed experiment.
- Your actual numbers: what a customer is worth, what margin looks like, what a qualified lead means to you. Without these any agency optimises towards volume, because volume is all it can see.
- The constraints — brand rules you will not bend, claims legal will not approve, channels that are off the table and why.
Decide two things before work starts
One named approver, with authority to say yes without a committee. And one primary metric for the engagement, with a target and a date. Engagements without both drift towards activity reporting, because activity is the only thing that can be reported when nobody has defined success.
What to insist on in month one
- A written audit of what they found, including the uncomfortable parts.
- Tracking verified before spend increases. Scaling on broken measurement is how a quarter gets wasted.
- One thing live in the first fortnight, even if small. Momentum is diagnostic — it tells you whether the working relationship functions.
- A named day-to-day contact who does the work, not only an account manager who relays it.
What not to do
Do not brief three agencies on the same task to compare. You will get three plans optimised for winning a pitch rather than for your business. Do not change the primary metric in month two. And do not withhold the bad news about the product, the pricing or the sales follow-up — those are usually the constraint, and an agency that does not know cannot work around them.
Prepared this way, month one produces an audit, working measurement and something live. That is a reasonable bar, and it is entirely within the client's control to make it possible.
The services behind this post.
Frequently asked questions.
Paid channels can move within weeks; SEO and content compound over quarters. Anyone promising both in month one is selling, not planning.
Yes, on accounts you own. Never let an agency run campaigns in an account you do not control — you lose the data and the history when the relationship ends.
Talk to the team that does this every day.
Tell us what you're trying to grow. You'll get a plan, not a pitch.
Contact Us