How to produce an agency scope of work

 

Determining a scope of work when onboarding a marketing or PR agency is instrumental to the success of a partnership. Its purpose is simple – to agree on objectives, strategy, deliverables, and budgets. It also helps to manage expectations and ensure the deliverables are crystal clear to all parties. Here’s a guide to help you produce a scope of work so you can get the most out of working with your agency – scroll down to find the downloadable template!

 

 

Situation

This is the current ‘state of the nation’ of your business, product, service, and/or marketing function. It’ll help to contextualise the objectives and strategy later detailed in the scope of work.

Points to address include: 

• If you’re marketing a product/s, where are they at in the life cycle? What is the product roadmap ahead?
• Market share – how are you positioned against competitors? Consider this geographically if you’re a global business. 
• Sentiment – how is your business or offering perceived? 
• SWOT – what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? 
• Financials – if relevant and disclosable, consider positioning current revenue and forecasted targets.
• What is the current team structure and how will they work with and support you as the agency? What skillsets are missing and require attention from you?

You can provide a comprehensive breakdown or a top-level overview when it comes to the situation. More information means more context. A scope of work also provides the brief and deliverables – while market research, insights, and all of the granular detail can be shared during an immersion process once contracts are exchanged. 

Objectives

 

Be as SMART as possible when setting objectives, ensuring they’re Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This will help you to produce a clear and measurable scope of work. 

Begin at a top level before refining into the SMART framework, if it helps to decipher your requirements. For example: 

• We need to raise awareness for a new product. 
• More customers in the Nordics need to be using our technology. 
• Increase market share in the APAC region. 
• Demystify assumptions that our product is too specialist. 
• Grow trust in our service in the UK’s broadcast sector.

This offload gives you a basis for refining your objectives and determining how you can complement and deliver on them through strategic marketing and PR activities. 

Now take this one step further and make them SMART. Don’t be afraid to ask us for help with refining this – we’re here to provide expertise and support after all! 

Let’s make the following objective SMART: ‘Grow trust in our service in the UK’s broadcast sector.’ 

Specific

Refine and expand on this statement – why is trust needed? A more specific example would be, ‘Grow more trust in the value proposition of our service in the UK’s broadcast sector – driving awareness for cost efficiencies, alongside high-quality performance and delivery.’ 

Measurable 

Ensuring the objective is measurable will help to define your return on investment. Different marketing and PR activations require different KPIs – if you’re unsure of how to determine these, we can help set them up with you. 

If your requirement is purely PR support, this can be measured using a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. These include message penetration and sentiment across press coverage and social media, in addition to tracking more numerical KPIs like reach and engagement. 

There are many marketing and communications metrics to choose from, especially when it comes to ROI, but you should consider the objective at hand. Do relaying key messages and measuring trust require you to track CPM or CPV? Most definitely not! 

Attainable

Is this a realistic and achievable objective? Depending on the delivery timeframe, it may make sense to be more specific. 

Relevant

Does this objective serve an appropriate purpose — particularly in relation to overall marketing, communications, or wider business objectives? For example, while you may want to gauge trust in your service in the short term, will there be updates, launches, or pricing changes that will confuse the purpose and impact of your messaging? If so, you may want to reconsider or return to this objective later. 

Time-based 

The kindred spirit to ‘attainable’ – set deadlines and be realistic about them. Gaining trust in a service, product or business will take more than a press release or a PR stunt. Relaying messages in the longer term requires a long-term deadline. But driving attendance to visit an industry is a much shorter process. 

Strategy 

Now that you’ve refined your objectives, you need to detail the strategy. Again, we’re on hand to help. An objective isn’t a strategy and nor is a strategy a tactic (or deliverable). A strategy will outline how you implement your objectives – the deliverables are the tactics used to deliver the strategy. 

Your strategy will determine the methods and disciplines of activation and communication. This could be the utilisation of media relations, social media, influencer, or content marketing. Depending on your objectives, we can help you to determine your strategy. 

Insight and research are absolutely key here. The more background you can provide on your customers, business, and previous marketing activities, the more context you’ll have.

Deliverables 

Arguably the most critical element of a scope of work, this is the outline of what actually needs to be delivered to you, whether that’s acting as a press office, a social media campaign, or a monthly report.

Based on everything above, what would you like us to deliver to you? If it’s a project-based contract, this will likely be more concise and clear. If it’s a retainer, there may need to be more fluidity and readiness to adapt to changing strategies, resources, and budgets. This may require a broader definition.

Budget

Finally, you need to outline how much all of this will cost. This is inclusive of the project or retainer cost, as well as additional extras like travel expenses, event and campaign budgets, and so on. Summarising this in one place will help you understand the full cost requirements, and manage expectations accordingly.

Conclusion

A scope of work is the comprehensive guide you give us to ensure that we deliver the results you want to achieve. It provides clear objectives and deliverables. Directions and strategies can change, but a scope of work can help to set clear expectations for a client-agency relationship.

To get you started, feel free to download our Scope of Work Template.

To find out more about the scope of work we can deliver at Grammatik, take a look at our Services page.