8 Things You Should Include When Writing a Decent Brief for a PR Agency – 10 Yetis Insight

When we get new business enquiries here at 10 Yetis, the client doesn’t always know what exactly it is that they’re after in terms of services or activity; they just know that they want more people to know about them. It’s our job to look after the “hows”.

Sometimes, though, potential clients will have a very clear idea about what they want to get from a PR campaign and how they want to go about it, in which case we might be provided with a really in-depth brief. This is great, because it enables us to come up with ideas that tick all the boxes and means we’re less likely to come up with some wacky ideas that are far too ‘out there’ for the client (cue odd looks and awkward silences in pitches).

If you’re at the stage where you’re considering appointing a public relations company to handle some activity for your business, here a 8 things you should include when writing a decent brief for a PR agency.

1.Background

Start off by giving the PR agency some background about your company. Key information here would include details about the name and size of the business, how long it’s been running for (is it a start-up, or a more established brand?), who the founders are and what they were doing prior to this, as well as anything else of note (such as recent investment, growth and such like).

Getting this initial background information is really useful for agencies like us, because we can quickly get a feel for what a business is about. You can also include details on your key messages and brand proposition in the ‘background’ section of the PR agency brief.

2.Requirements

This is a really important part of any PR brief, because it outlines what it is that you want. If you fall into the ‘I’m really not sure, but I just wanted people to know about us’ camp, then don’t worry. You can be as vague as to say that you want more media exposure for your brand, or as detailed as saying that you would like a campaign that encompasses PR, video, social media and search engine optimisation activity.

It’s also here that you’ll need to outline what you’d like this activity for. For example, is it to coincide with a new product or service that your business is launching? Do you want the agency’s services to manage a crisis or keep something out of the press, as opposed to getting it in there? Or do you want the activity ‘just because’? Whatever the case, include as much detail as possible here to give the agency guidance on your situation, hopes and PR dreams.

3.Objectives

Best written in bullet point format, this section of the brief should include the goals of the activity/campaign. For example, they might read something like:

• Generate national media coverage for in print and online press
• Help to improve the SEO of by generating links within online coverage back to the company’s website
• Position as the go-to provider of .

4.Target Demographic

Any agency worth their salt should be able to determine more about your target audience from your company offering and objectives, but it helps to make it clear. So, if you’re targeting your product at 18-35 year old men in London, get it written in the brief. If you want to target people with a household income of £80,000+, include that too. You’d be surprised just how much this will help the agency determine what media titles they should be targeting with your activity; such as red tops like The Sun and Daily Star or publications that typically have more affluent readers, such as The Guardian or Forbes.

If you’ve run any focus groups or discovered anything about your target audience that it would be helpful to share with a potential agency, include these insights as well.

5.Competitors

Again, a bit of desk-based research will enable most PR agencies to work out your business’ key competition, but if there are certain brands that you’ve been keeping a close eye on and would consider to be your toughest competitors, pop this into a brief too. The agency pitching for your businesses will then look into what PR and marketing activity your competition has been engaging in and how effective this has been. All of this will help the agency to come up with bigger and better ideas that those of your competing brands.

6.Budget

Some businesses can be cagey about giving too much away with regards to their budget for marketing activity, but from an agency’s point-of-view it really helps to have an idea of what kind of spend we’ll have to work with; because it will impact the scale of the ideas we come up with. I understand that some businesses think that not keeping their budget cards close to their chests will result in the agency spending every penny they’re given unnecessarily, or quoting higher than they need to, but in all honesty most agencies just want to be able to deliver an impressive campaign that’s on-budget. There’s nothing worse than getting given a huge budget only to end up not getting the desired results, so as a matter of fact most agencies will want to come in under budget and save potential clients money.

7.Timeline

A decent PR brief should include a rough timeline, including when you’d like the activity to kick off and any important dates. This could be going-live dates if it’s a newly launching website or product, investment completion dates, or anything else of note.

An agency will want to map out their suggested activity against your timeline, to make sure it’s relevant to anything you have going on at the time. With that in mind, it’s also worth sharing any planned marketing activity with the agency within the brief, so that they can also use this to help form their ideas or timings. Also, the agency needs to know what deadline to work towards in terms of getting their brief response back to you and when any pitches might take place (should they be successful in getting through to the ‘judge’s houses’ round, as we like to call it). Key members on the team who’d be present at the pitch can then block these dates out in their calendar.

8.Key Contacts

Finally, the agency will be grateful to know who the key contacts are that they might need to get in touch with, should they have any questions or want to clarify anything before putting a brief response, proposal or pitch deck together for you. Include the key contacts from the business that will be dealing with the agency appointment, including an email address and phone number.

Hopefully this insight blog has gone some way towards helping you in your quest to put together a decent brief for a PR agency, but if there’s anything 10 Yetis can do to help guide you then feel free to get in touch.

Here's our free to download PR brief template should you require one.