Vague Briefs Get Vague Marketing

Most of the AI conversation is about which tools to use: which model, which app, which subscription. I’d rather talk about the step before any of them, which is knowing what you want clearly enough to say it.

One line versus a real brief

Say a service business owner asks a tool, or a freelancer, for Google ad copy, and the whole brief is “get more leads.” What comes back is competent and generic, because the brief gave it nothing specific to be good at. You get a generic headline, a generic landing page, and a result nobody can judge, since nobody said what a good one looked like.

Now add three things to the same request. Who it’s for, say homeowners in one service area with an urgent problem. The one action you want, a phone call and not a form. And how you’ll know it worked: calls from that ad that turn into booked jobs. The tool, or the freelancer, now has something to aim at, and you have something to judge the result against.

The same habit, applied to a system

When I build with Claude Code, I write the spec first: the goal, the audience, and what success looks like. Then I let it execute, and when the spec is vague, what comes back is vague too. That’s on my input, not the tool.

Those three questions carry over to a whole marketing system, whether it’s a reporting setup, a lead follow-up flow, or a website. What is it for, who is it for, and how will we know it’s working?

The third question is where people stall

Success criteria are the hardest of the three, because you have to decide what counts as working before you build anything. That means picking an outcome you’re willing to be held to, and skipping it is more comfortable. The tools will produce plenty of output either way, and a full marketing calendar looks like progress whether or not it is.

What a clear brief doesn’t fix

A clear brief won’t make the first draft right. It makes the wrong parts easier to spot, because you know what you were aiming at, and sometimes what it shows you is that the brief itself needed work. I’d still take that over a polished result I can’t evaluate.

When you last briefed someone, or something, on a marketing task, what did you leave out that you only noticed later?