You do not need a finished marketing strategy before speaking with an agency. You do need enough context to explain what the business does, where the current process is difficult and what help you are considering. A short preparation note lets both sides spend the conversation clarifying the work instead of reconstructing basic facts or jumping straight to a service package.
Describe the business and the customer situation
Summarize the services you provide, the area you serve and the kinds of customers the project concerns. Explain how those customers currently enquire or buy. Keep the description concrete and avoid assuming the agency knows your internal terminology. Include the public website and the specific pages relevant to the discussion.
Identify current capacity and any service you do not want to promote. A provider needs to know whether the team can handle additional enquiries and which work is a good fit. This context helps avoid a plan that generates interest in an unavailable service or requires a response process the business cannot maintain.
Bring the problem and the evidence behind it
Write the main issue in ordinary language: customers cannot find the booking information, enquiries lack essential details or the team has no manageable content process. Bring a few sanitized examples or aggregate observations. Explain what you know directly and what you suspect, without turning a weak signal into a confident diagnosis.
List work already tried, when it happened and what you observed. Include incomplete or inconclusive attempts, since they may reveal access, ownership or measurement gaps. Avoid presenting an isolated metric without its time period and definition. A useful discovery conversation can decide what needs investigation before recommending production work.
State the constraints and decision process
Share the available project budget or range you are prepared to discuss, the real deadline and the team time available for supplying information and feedback. Distinguish a fixed business event from a preferred date. A realistic constraint helps the provider propose an appropriate scope rather than assume unlimited time or access.
Name the decision maker and the people who approve service facts, brand presentation and technical changes. Note account ownership and access status, but do not place passwords in the discovery document. Ask how access would be granted through the relevant systems if you proceed and who would retain ownership of the resulting assets.
Ask questions that expose the proposed process
Ask what the provider would need to inspect before recommending work, which assumptions remain and what the first deliverable would be. Discuss how progress is reviewed, how factual changes are approved and what happens if the initial diagnosis is wrong. These questions help you understand the working process rather than only the finished portfolio.
Clarify what is included, excluded and maintained afterward. Ask who writes the content, supplies images, checks the customer route and handles the final handoff. If results are discussed, ask which outcomes are under the provider’s control and how others would be measured. Keep deliverables and hoped-for commercial effects distinct.
Illustrative discovery note
A fictional repair business wants help because customers repeatedly ask which items can be serviced. Its brief includes the current page, approved service scope, several anonymized question themes and a named approver. The first conversation explores whether clearer content and an enquiry-flow check are sufficient before considering a wider redesign.
Leave with a specific next step
At the end, summarize the agreed problem, unresolved questions and the next action. That action might be a scoped diagnostic, a written proposal or a decision not to proceed. Record who supplies any missing information and when. A useful conversation does not require an immediate commitment to a large recurring package.
When a proposal arrives, compare it with the discovery note. Check whether it addresses the stated need, uses the same assumptions and identifies acceptance evidence. Resolve differences before work begins. Keep the note as a reference so later discussions do not quietly replace the original problem with a more convenient service offering.
- Business, customer and service context.
- Observed problem and sanitized evidence.
- Previous attempts and unresolved questions.
- Budget, timing, access ownership and approvers.
- Questions about process, scope and handoff.
- A named next action after the conversation.
Your next step
Prepare a one-page discovery note using the checklist, then choose the three questions you most need answered before deciding on a project scope.
