How long should a brief be, and which sections does it need?

Length is not the point; whether an outsider can reconstruct your reasoning is. Two or three pages usually covers it, and it helps to fix the order: goals, audience, current situation and resources, red lines, assets and timing, how success is defined, and who to contact by when. Product specifications, brand guidelines, and links to existing material belong in an appendix rather than the body. The usual imbalance is two pages of company history followed by three lines of actual requirement — suppliers read your priorities off the page count. When it is written, hand it to a colleague who was not in the discussion. If they can tell you what this round has to achieve and what it must not do, the brief is ready to go out.

Should the brief include our existing performance numbers?

Include them, but as a baseline rather than a scoreboard. Pull together how branded search has moved, what your website traffic mix looks like, inquiry volume, and the state of your reviews for a period before the engagement starts; only then can a supplier propose a target that is testable and a closing report be compared against anything. Two cautions: keep genuinely sensitive material — customer lists, cost structure, channel terms — out of documents circulated at proposal stage until confidentiality is agreed; and do not attach only the flattering parts, because a campaign that went badly is often the most informative thing in the pack. If no baseline exists, start recording one the day the brief goes out.

If we approach two or three agencies, should we tell them about each other?

Say that it is a competitive process, but you do not have to name the other firms. Most suppliers assume you are asking around anyway, so saying it up front keeps expectations aligned, whereas revealing it late tends to sour the working relationship afterward. Set out the process at the same time: how many firms, when you will respond, who decides, and whether unsuccessful firms will hear back. Two disciplines are worth holding to. Never pass one agency's proposal to another "for reference" — it is their intellectual property. And never ask a firm with no real chance to produce a full execution plan for free. How you treat the ones you did not pick travels quickly.

How to Write a Word-of-Mouth Agency Brief

Send the same requirement to three word-of-mouth agencies and three completely different proposals come back: one built on volume from everyday consumers, one built on a single high-profile creator, one handing you a content calendar for the year. You can see that they differ. You cannot say which one is more nearly right.

This is usually not the agencies’ problem. It is the brief’s. The vaguer the requirement, the more each supplier can only propose what they are best at — and what they are best at is not necessarily what you need. This guide covers getting the requirement written before it goes out; what to do once proposals land, and how to spot the firms you should not work with, is the stage handled in How to Choose a Word-of-Mouth Marketing Agency. Read in sequence, the two cover the whole process.

A brief is not an instruction sheet for them; it is a decision tool for you

Most people treat a brief as a document that hands over information, write it, and send it. Its greatest value actually happens while it is being written: once you are forced to put goals, audience, and red lines into words, the places where your own organization has no agreement rise to the surface.

Picture a supplements brand deciding to invest in word of mouth. The owner wants retail partners to feel the brand has presence. The marketing lead wants e-commerce conversion. Sales want material to show distributors. Those three things point toward completely different programs. If the brief does not name the tension, then whichever proposal you eventually pick, somebody internally will feel the wrong thing was bought.

So the first recommendation is simple: circulate the brief internally before sending it out.

Write the goal first, not the tactic

The most common opening line in a brief is “we want a batch of KOCs (micro-influencers) to write unboxing posts.” That is a tactic, not a goal. Specifying the tactic up front means giving up the most valuable thing the supplier has — their judgment about which method to use.

Goals are easier to write in three layers:

What you want commercially: a new product needs a base level of discussion; the first page for your brand name is too empty; a retail partner wants evidence of market presence; you want to depend less on a single advertising channel
The specific task for this round: over which period, for which product or service, and at which point in the customer’s decision you want the content to be seen
What is explicitly out of scope: this round does not handle a crisis, does not touch channel pricing, does not involve a rebrand

Writing down why you are doing it is what gives a supplier the chance to tell you that a different approach would cost less. If all you want is a price comparison and not advice, a quote is all you will get.

Describe the audience down to “how they will check you out”

“Women aged 25 to 45 who care about quality of life” is the same as writing nothing. The audience description that actually helps word-of-mouth work is where they go to check before deciding, what they type into a search box, and who they believe.

Worth writing down:

What problem has to appear before they start looking for a product like yours
Which platforms they use to research, and whether they ask people around them
The three things they care about most, and the one thing they worry about
Who they will compare you against

Get these down and the platform choices and content directions in a proposal have a shared basis for evaluation. Without them, all you can do is decide which proposal looks nicer.

Current situation and resources: include the parts that are not flattering

Many briefs list only strengths and hide the problems. The result is a proposal that looks excellent until, halfway through delivery, someone discovers the website has no page worth linking to, the social accounts have not been updated in three months, or there is an unhandled negative post on the first page of results for the brand name.

Be honest and list:

The assets you have now (website, social accounts, customer list, existing volume of reviews, real product photography)
The problems you have now (the state of your search results, known negative discussion, past collaborations that went badly)
The internal capacity and response speed you can commit (who approves copy, and how many days a round takes)

That last item matters more than people expect. A great many projects slip not because the agency is slow but because approval stalls on the brand side. Say it up front and the timeline can be planned properly.

Prohibited language and red lines: the more detail here, the lower the risk

This is the section most worth spending time on and the one most often skipped. Cover at least four areas:

What regulation does not permit — efficacy claims, implied therapeutic effect, guarantee language. Advertising and claims in healthcare, aesthetics, supplements, finance, and education are constrained; confirm before anything is published
What the brand does not want to see — certain adjectives, certain kinds of comparison, partners or client names you would rather were not mentioned
Limits on imagery — whether staff may appear on camera, whether the premises may be filmed, how anyone under age is handled
Methods you will not accept — no sockpuppet accounts, no ghostwritten content published under someone else’s name, no concealed paid relationships, no rewards traded for particular star ratings or positive opinions

Be very explicit about the fourth. Paid relationships carry disclosure duties in Taiwan, and where a commercial arrangement turns out to have been deliberately concealed, the consequences land on the brand rather than the supplier doing the work. For the full compliance picture, see Word-of-Mouth Marketing Compliance in Taiwan.

Assets, timing, and who does what

This section turns “who delivers what, by when” into a table. Leave it out and the delivery period becomes a series of mismatched expectations.

Assets: what the brand supplies (product, logo guidelines, photography, core messages, keyword list) and what the supplier produces
Approval process: how many rounds, how many working days each, and who has the final call
Publishing rhythm: when content starts appearing, when the peak is, and which sales period or product launch it is tied to
Deliverables: the list of content links, the performance report, and the license scope and storage arrangements for the original files

That last point gets forgotten most often: once the engagement ends, can the content still be used? Without an agreement in advance, a lot of material becomes untouchable the moment the relationship closes.

Defining success: agree on what counts before you start

If the brief does not define success, the closing report will define it for you, and the supplier will naturally choose the angle that flatters the work.

A practical approach splits the measures into three groups:

Output measures: number of pieces, platforms covered, completion rate. These confirm the work was done, not that it worked
Spread measures: organic engagement on the content, whether it was quoted or reshared, the substance of the comments. These show whether people actually saw it
Decision measures: changes in branded search volume, changes in the traffic mix to your website, inquiry volume and what people mention when they inquire, changes in review counts and ratings

The third group is the one that needs preparation, or there will be nothing to compare against at the close. The sources are all within reach: search console and keyword tools for branded search, your website analytics traffic-source report for the mix, a fixed field in the form your sales or support team fills in for what people mention, and a manual sweep of each platform for reviews. The rule for the baseline is to capture an equally long period before the work starts, and to note whether advertising or a sales period was running at the same time — without that, nobody can say later where a change came from.

Be equally honest about the limits of attribution: word of mouth tends to act later and resists being isolated cleanly. Writing that premise into the brief is more constructive than arguing about numbers afterward. For the full tracking approach, see How to Measure Word-of-Mouth ROI.

How to make proposals comparable

Receiving three proposals in three different formats is a problem you created. The fix is simple: specify the response structure in the brief.

Ask every agency to answer in the same sequence of sections: their reading of the goal, the strategy they recommend and why, the execution detail (quantity, platforms, formats), the timeline, the division of labor, a broken-down quote, how performance will be measured, and how they will handle the risks and red lines.

Three further practical suggestions:

Give a budget range. Without one you will receive three programs of entirely different scale, and the comparison becomes “who is cheaper” instead of “who allocates the same resources better.” For the underlying cost structure, start with The Complete Guide to Word-of-Mouth Marketing Costs
Require the quote to be broken down by line item. A single total shows neither where the money goes nor which part could be adjusted
Keep it to two or three agencies. Approach five and you will spend a great deal of time comparing and still decide on impression

Five common mistakes

Writing tactics instead of goals. What you buy is execution, not judgment.

Describing the audience with demographics alone. Platform choices then have no shared basis for evaluation.

Omitting the red lines and mentioning them verbally once proposals arrive. Risk control has to come first, or it is just rework.

Giving neither a budget nor a timeframe. They can only guess, and you have nothing to compare.

Sending it out before there is internal agreement. Whichever agency you pick, somebody will think the direction was wrong. This one is the root of all the others.

A good brief leaves you clearer about what you want before a single proposal arrives. The things you can write down are the things that will be easy to discuss later; the places where the words will not come are usually exactly where the project gets stuck.

Write the brief first, then go looking for a supplier — reverse that order and you lose both negotiating room and the ability to judge what comes back. If you want someone alongside you while the goals, the red lines, and the definition of success get settled, talk to a NETVANA consultant.

Further reading: for the terms that matter once a collaboration reaches the contract stage, see The Influencer Contract Checklist. For where to spend first when resources are limited, see Word-of-Mouth Budget Planning for Small and Medium Businesses. For choosing the tier of partner that fits the situation, see KOL vs KOC. And for connecting a single engagement back to a full-year rhythm, see Annual Word-of-Mouth Planning.