Content agencies: the brief that gets you content worth using.

The brief that gets you content worth using tells the agency three things: who the reader is, what the piece needs to accomplish, and how you'll decide whether it worked. Most briefs skip all three. They list a keyword, a word count, and a due date, then hope for the rest. What comes back is generic, on-brand in tone but empty in substance, and it sits in a drafts folder because nobody wants to publish it.

I've hired content agencies as a client and reviewed their output as a fractional CMO. The pattern is the same every time. The quality of the brief predicts the quality of the draft with more accuracy than the price you paid or the agency's portfolio. A strong writer with a thin brief writes generic filler. An average writer with a sharp brief writes something a real client would read to the end. Your leverage is the brief. So let's fix it.

Why do content agencies produce generic work?

Content agencies produce generic work because the brief gave them nothing specific to say. A writer who doesn't know your client, your market, or your point of view can only write what everyone else writes. They pull the top five ranking articles, blend them, and hand back a competent average of what already exists. That average ranks nowhere and converts no one.

This is not the agency being lazy. It is the agency doing exactly what the brief allowed. If the brief says "write 1,200 words on estate planning for families," the writer has no choice but to guess at everything that matters. What kind of families. What they're afraid of. What your firm does differently. What a reader should do after they finish reading.

The fix is not more words in the brief. It is the right words. A tight brief on one page beats a rambling brief on five. You are not writing the article for them. You are handing them the raw material they cannot get anywhere else — the parts that live in your head and your client conversations.

What does a content brief actually need to contain?

A content brief needs the reader, the job, the angle, the proof, and the standard. Five parts. Get these on one page and most of the guesswork disappears.

The reader. Not a demographic. A person with a problem. "A homeowner in their fifties who just watched a parent's estate go through probate and doesn't want to put their own kids through it." That sentence does more work than any persona document. The writer now knows the fear, the trigger, and the stakes.

The job. What does this piece need to do. Rank for a term. Answer a question people ask on a sales call. Give the sales team something to send after a consultation. A blog post that ranks and a blog post that closes are written differently. Say which one you want.

The angle. Your point of view on the topic. This is the part agencies cannot invent. If your position on estate planning is "most people over-buy trusts they don't need," say so. That single opinion turns a generic explainer into something with a spine.

The proof. The specifics only you have. A client story with the numbers changed. A local detail. A regulation that just changed in your state. A mistake you see clients make every week. Three real examples beat three paragraphs of theory.

The standard. How you'll judge the draft. "A prospect should be able to read this and know whether to call us." Give them the test you'll run so they can run it first.

How much should the brief tell the writer versus leave open?

The brief should lock down substance and leave structure open. Tell the writer what must be true — the reader, the angle, the facts, the call to action. Let them decide how to arrange it, where the examples land, and how the sentences flow. That is their craft. If you're rewriting their sentence structure, you hired the wrong writer or wrote the wrong brief.

Here's the line I use. Anything a reader would notice as wrong goes in the brief. Anything only a writer would notice stays out. A reader notices if the piece names the wrong fear or recommends the wrong next step. A reader does not notice whether the second paragraph or the third carried the statistic.

Over-specifying kills the draft in a different way. When you dictate every heading and every point, the writer stops thinking and starts transcribing. You get a filled-in template with no judgment behind it. The best content comes from a writer who understood the assignment well enough to make small decisions you didn't anticipate — and made them right.

This balance is the same reason a Fractional CMO works better than a pure execution shop for most small firms. The value is in setting the direction and the standard, then holding the vendor to it — not in doing the typing.

What separates a brief for a blog post from a brief for a sales asset?

A brief for a blog post optimizes for being found. A brief for a sales asset optimizes for closing the person who already found you. Same writer, same topic, completely different brief.

For a blog post, the search term matters. You tell the writer the question people type, the related questions they ask next, and the level of the reader. Someone searching "do I need a living trust in California" is early. They want clarity, not a pitch. The job is to be the clearest answer on the page so they trust you enough to come back. We've written before about how ranking and closing are two different jobs, and the brief is where you commit to one.

For a sales asset — a page the team sends after a consultation, a follow-up that handles the objection that killed the last deal — the search term is irrelevant. Nobody found this by searching. They got it from you. The brief now centers on the exact hesitation. "This goes to prospects who liked us but stalled on price. It needs to reframe the cost against the cost of getting it wrong." That is a different piece with a different shape, and only the brief can tell the writer which one you need.

Mixing these up is the most common brief failure I see. A firm asks for a blog post, describes it like a sales page, then wonders why it doesn't rank. Or asks for a sales asset and gets a keyword-stuffed explainer that no salesperson would ever send. Name the job. The rest follows.

How do you review the draft without rewriting it yourself?

You review the draft against the brief, not against the version in your head. Open the brief next to the draft. Check the reader, the angle, the proof, and the call to action. If those four are right, the draft is right, even if you'd have phrased things differently. If they're wrong, you don't rewrite — you send it back with the specific gap named.

The trap is the silent rewrite. You get a draft, you don't love it, so you spend three hours fixing it yourself and publish. You feel productive. But you just taught the agency nothing, and next month's draft has the same problem. You've become the writer you're paying to avoid.

Good feedback is specific and tied to the brief. Not "this feels flat." Instead: "The angle we agreed on — that most people over-buy trusts — never shows up. Add it to the opening and let it run through." Not "add more examples." Instead: "Use the probate story from the brief in section two. Right now section two is theory." Named gaps get fixed. Vague reactions get you a slightly different draft that misses in a slightly different way.

Set a rule: two rounds, then the piece ships or the assignment was broken. If a competent writer can't hit the mark in two rounds against a clear brief, the brief was the problem, not the writer. That rule protects your time and forces you to write briefs that can actually be met.

When we took on the content oversight for McShanes Solicitors, the first move was not new writers. It was rebuilding the briefs. The agency was competent. The instructions were empty. Once each brief named the client's real fear and the firm's actual position, the same team produced pages the solicitors were happy to put their name on.

What we won't tell you

A great brief does not fix a topic nobody searches for or a service the market doesn't want. If the demand isn't there, the sharpest brief in the world produces a beautiful page that no one reads. Get the topic right before you get the brief right. And if you find yourself writing a full brief for every piece and reviewing every draft, that's a signal the work has outgrown one person's evenings — which is a different conversation about whether you need a fractional CMO or just more hands.

The brief is the cheapest lever you have. It costs an hour and it changes everything downstream. Write the reader, the job, the angle, the proof, and the standard. Then hold the draft to it. That's the whole game.