July 11, 2026

Marketing & PR Consulting Intake Forms: What to Document Before the First Campaign

A marketing consultant who starts building a social media strategy without knowing the client's budget, approval chain, or what they have already tried is going to produce a plan that either gets rejected ("we tried that last year, it did not work") or dies in committee ("the CEO needs to approve every post before it goes live"). Both outcomes waste time and erode trust. The consultant looks like they did not do their homework, and the client wonders whether they hired the right firm.

Marketing and PR consulting covers an enormous range of services — strategy, content, social media, paid advertising, public relations, email marketing, event promotion, crisis communications — and the intake requirements are different for each. But the underlying need is the same: before you start doing any work, you need to understand the client's business, their audience, what they have already done, what they want to accomplish, how much they are willing to spend, and who gets to say yes. A structured marketing and PR consulting intake form collects all of that in one place, at the beginning, so the strategy you build is grounded in reality rather than assumptions.

Service scope: what exactly are you hired to do

The word "marketing" is doing too much work in most engagement conversations. A client who says "we need help with marketing" might mean they need a content strategy, or they might mean they want someone to run their Facebook ads, or they might mean they need a full rebrand with a media relations push and an event series. Each is a different project with a different team, timeline, and price point. Your intake form should force the scope into specific categories so both sides agree on what is included:

• Marketing strategy and planning — market research, competitive analysis, positioning, messaging framework, channel strategy, campaign planning. This is advisory work that produces a plan. The client may execute it themselves or hire you for execution too, but strategy and execution are separately scoped.
• Content marketing — blog posts, white papers, case studies, email newsletters, website copy, video scripts. Content has ongoing production costs and requires a publication calendar, so your intake should capture whether this is a one-time content project or an ongoing retainer.
• Social media management — which platforms, how many posts per week, community management and comment responses, paid social advertising, influencer coordination. Social media is a daily commitment, and the scope directly determines staffing.
• Paid advertising — Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, programmatic display, retargeting. Paid media involves a media budget separate from your management fee. Your intake needs to capture both — what the client pays you and what the client spends on ads — because they are different line items on different payment schedules.
• Public relations — media outreach, press releases, media training, crisis communications, thought leadership placement, event PR. PR has longer lead times and less predictable outcomes than paid media. Managing expectations at intake is essential because PR does not produce guaranteed placements.
• Email marketing — list management, campaign creation, automation sequences, A/B testing. Email requires access to the client's email platform (Mailchimp, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Constant Contact) and their existing subscriber list, both of which need to be established at intake.

Current marketing efforts: what has been done and what is working

Starting a marketing engagement without understanding what the client is already doing is like a doctor prescribing medication without asking what the patient is currently taking. Your intake should assess the current state:

• Current channels — which marketing channels is the client active on? Website, social media (which platforms), email marketing, paid advertising, content marketing, events, print, direct mail, trade shows? A complete channel inventory tells you where the client has infrastructure and where they are starting from scratch.
• What is working — the client's own assessment of which efforts are producing results. This is subjective but valuable. A client who says "our email open rates are great but nothing converts" is giving you a different starting point than a client who says "we have no idea what is working because we do not track anything."
• What has been tried and abandoned — previous campaigns, agencies, platforms, or strategies that did not work. Understanding why they failed prevents you from repeating the same mistakes and gives you context for recommending alternatives. If they tried Google Ads last year and stopped because the cost per lead was too high, you need to know that before recommending Google Ads again.
• Current tools and platforms — CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho), email platform, analytics tools, social scheduling tools, ad accounts, CMS. You will need access to most of these to do your job. Knowing what exists at intake lets you plan the technical onboarding alongside the strategic work.
• Analytics access — does the client have Google Analytics (and which version — UA or GA4), Google Search Console, Meta Business Suite, LinkedIn Campaign Manager? Are tracking pixels installed? If there is no measurement infrastructure, building one is a prerequisite to any campaign work, and that needs to be in the scope.

Target audience: who are we trying to reach

Every marketing decision flows from the audience definition. The channel mix, the messaging, the creative direction, and the media spend allocation all depend on who you are trying to reach and where they spend their attention. Your intake should capture the audience in enough detail that your team can make informed strategic choices:

• Customer profile — B2B, B2C, or both? If B2B, what industries, company sizes, and job titles? If B2C, what demographics (age, income, geography, education) and psychographics (values, interests, lifestyle, pain points)? "Everyone" is not a target audience, and a client who says "anyone who needs our product" needs help narrowing the definition before any campaign work starts.
• Buying process — how does the target audience discover, evaluate, and purchase the client's product or service? What is the typical sales cycle length? Is it a single decision-maker or a committee? The buying process determines whether your marketing strategy focuses on awareness, consideration, conversion, or all three.
• Geographic focus — local, regional, national, or international? A local restaurant and a national SaaS company need completely different channel strategies. Local businesses need Google Business Profile optimization, local SEO, and geotargeted ads. National companies need different approaches entirely.

Budget: the number that shapes everything

Marketing budgets determine what is possible. A $3,000 monthly retainer and a $30,000 monthly retainer buy fundamentally different scopes of work. Your intake should establish the budget early and clearly, because a strategy built for $30,000 that gets delivered to a $3,000 client is a waste of everyone's time.

Separate the consulting or management fee from the media spend. A client with $5,000 per month total may think that buys both strategy and advertising, when in reality $5,000 barely covers one. Clarify how the budget is allocated: what goes to your team for strategy and execution, and what goes directly to ad platforms or content production. Also establish whether the budget is fixed or flexible — can it increase if early results justify it? Is there a test period with a smaller budget before the full commitment? These questions prevent mid-engagement budget surprises.

KPIs and success metrics: what does "working" mean

The most damaging ambiguity in a marketing engagement is what success looks like. If the consultant defines success as "growing social media following by 40%" and the client defines it as "generating 50 qualified leads per month," the engagement will feel like a failure to the client even when the consultant hits their own target. Your intake should establish specific, measurable goals that both parties agree on:

• Primary KPIs — the metrics that matter most to the client. Revenue, leads, website traffic, conversion rate, brand awareness, media placements, email subscribers, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. Pick two or three that are most important, not ten that dilute focus.
• Baseline numbers — where are those metrics today? If the client wants 50 leads per month and they are currently getting 12, you know the gap. If they are currently getting zero because they have no tracking, you know the first phase of work is measurement infrastructure.
• Reporting cadence — how often does the client want performance reports? Monthly is standard for most engagements. Weekly may be appropriate for active campaigns with significant ad spend. Quarterly is too infrequent for any engagement where real-time optimization matters. Your intake should also establish the format — a dashboard they can access anytime, a PDF report, a live review call, or a combination.

Brand voice and approval workflows: the operational guardrails

Two questions will determine whether the day-to-day work flows smoothly or grinds to a halt: what can you say, and who has to approve it?

Brand voice. Does the client have brand voice guidelines? If yes, get the document. If no, your intake should capture enough to establish guardrails: formal or casual? Technical or accessible? Authoritative or conversational? Are there specific words or phrases the client always uses or never uses? Industry jargon that is expected or avoided? The brand voice shapes every piece of content, every social post, every ad, and every press release. Getting it wrong at the start means reworking everything later.

Approval workflow. Who signs off on content before it publishes? This single question predicts more about the engagement experience than any other. If one marketing director approves everything and responds within 24 hours, campaigns will move on schedule. If every blog post needs to go through a marketing director, a VP of sales, a compliance officer, and a CEO who travels three weeks out of four, your three-day content turnaround becomes a three-week content turnaround, and your editorial calendar collapses. Document the approval chain at intake, agree on turnaround times for each approver, and build the production schedule around the reality of how long approvals actually take.

For agencies that also handle the visual side of brand work, our graphic design and branding intake form covers the design-specific onboarding fields. For digital-focused engagements where the website is a core channel, the web design and development intake form covers the technical requirements. See the full professional services collection for all available categories.