According to Paver Smith, “the success of a PR campaign hinges on the ability of the agency to take an effective brief from the client.” The brief is possibly the most important thing to convey information from a client to an agency. Everything should flow from the brief.
So what are the key things to ask for a brief? The things you’re going to want to ask are:
- Where are they now? – Things like the client background, services, current market position, business opportunities or threats, etc.
- Where do they want to be? – Find out who the target audience is, what are the growth areas of the business, key messages, etc.
- What are the client objectives? – Things like what they want you to do, and the timeline to accomplish it in.
- What do they want to achieve from PR? – This would basically be the results. You must understand what success looks like to the client and the results must be measurable.
Muffy Lavens 