How to scope your Performance Brief

As a digital agency, Door4 thrive on delivering improved performance, for our clients. We help them to sell more things, generate more leads, and close more customers. It’s what comes naturally to us.

The journey generally starts with a simple, high-level performance brief. This article briefly provides a simple template, for you to capture your own digital requirements in a structured format.

It asks most of the questions that we would ask, when interviewing prospective clients. Of course, every business is different, and approaches a project from a different angle – but this template is relatively flexible, and gives us a grounding.

If you are producing your own Digital Performance Brief, then try to cover as many of these points as possible. It’s important to be candid if you’re at an early stage of “digital maturity” – and also where there are gaps in your strategy or measurement.

Digital strategy and background

• Do you have a clear digital strategy document? Is it written down?
• Who are your digital team? What are their skills and responsibilities?
• Are you currently working with an agency, or agencies?
• What would govern your choice of agency? (eg culture, cost, experience, skillset, credentials, industry experience)
• How do you determine your budget for digital performance?

Commercial objectives

At the heart of your performance brief, should be the primary commercial objectives.  The things that the business wants to change. Marketing supports business/commercial objectives. These should be quantifiable.

• What are the core measurable KPIs and figures you’re looking to improve?
  • sales/revenue, margin %, leads, demos, trials, sample requests
  • average order value, cost per lead
  • sales cycle length
  • What are these figures now, and what is your target – for each core KPI?

• What are the softer performance metrics you’re looking to improve?
  • average customer size, customer ‘quality’
  • market share
• How quickly do you wish to reach these growth figures? 
  • 1 year, 2 years, 5 years?
• What is the commercial imperative behind this growth?
  • What happens if we achieve these figures? What happens if we don’t?
• What other changes in the business coincide with this plan?
  • New personnel?
  • Shift from traditional ‘sales’ to digital lead-generation?
• Other than digital performance, what type of sales activity takes place inside the business? 
  • How is it connected to marketing activity?

Customer types

• Do you have documented (written down) customer profiles, based on demographics, job role and/or employer type?  
  • Do you know WHO the people are, who buy?  What do they have in common?
• Do you have a documented customer journey, including touch points with digital platforms (websites), emails and sales staff?
  • Do you know HOW your customers buy from you, and what part the digital experience plays in this journey?
• Is part of your strategy to connect to new/different customer types (or more of the same)?
  • eg larger businesses, different buyers, international customers

Reach – acquisition

• How important to you is increasing your overall traffic?
• What activity, in each of these areas, do you currently undertake?
  • Paid search (eg Google Ads)
  • Organic SEO 
  • Content production/blogging
  • Social media (organic/boosted posts)
  • Paid social media advertising 
  • Google Shopping
• What is your typical media budget, if any, for paid advertising/search?
• What results have you achieved, historically? 
  • In particular how have these channels performed in the last 12 months?
• Which metrics do you measure?
  • ROAS – Return on Ad Spend
  • CPL – Cost per Lead

Convert – CRO

• What are the most important ‘conversion points’ on your website? (If several, list them in importance)
  • E-commerce sale
  • Demo sign-up, trial-sign up
  • Enquiry form completion
• Do you measure your conversion rate?
• Do you place a nominal value on each conversion? (eg a lead is worth £50, or £500)
• How important to you is increasing your website conversion rate?
• Have you conducted significant user experience improvements, over the last 2 years, to improve conversion rate?
• If so, have these been based on A/B testing? (eg with VWO, Google Optimise)
• Who decides what changes to make to the website, and how?

Scale – technology 

• How did your website come to be?
  • Who built it, when?  Who commissioned it internally, is that person/team still responsible for it?
• Do you measure – and are you satisfied with – the website performance/speed?
• What platform/software/CMS is your website built on?
  • eg WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Contentful
• Do new leads/sales get fed into CRM or other line-of-business systems? 
• Are there any other significant integrations with other software/platforms?
• Is there an ambition to improve/change the CMS/software?

Measurement and Analytics

• Do you use Google Analytics?
• Do you routinely monitor your Analytics performance, and make business/marketing decisions based on performance?
• Would you be happy to share your Analytics data with Door4?

Summary

• What are the 3 most pressing ‘problems’ that you would like Door4 to solve?
• What commercial impact would the business feel, if we helped to solve these problems?

With the above template, you should be able to produce a relatively compact, but informative briefing document.

If you are submitting it to Door4, you can email it to [email protected] – we’d love to take a look, and respond.

Image Credit: You X Ventures on Unsplash