What Your Intake Form Is Really Telling You

I've seen a lot of agency intake forms over the years. Some are one page. Some are ten pages. Some are Google Forms, some are Typeform builds with conditional logic and progress bars. The production quality varies. But the questions are remarkably similar across almost every agency I've encountered.

Who is your target customer? What makes your product different? Who are your competitors? What's your monthly ad budget? What does success look like for you?

These are reasonable questions. They're the right things to ask. And if you've been running your agency for any length of time, you've probably refined your intake form more than once, adding questions, removing ones that never got useful answers, reordering sections to get better information earlier.

But here's what I want you to consider: your intake form isn't failing because the questions are wrong. It's failing because you're asking the right questions to the wrong person.

Your client doesn't have the answers you need

When a supplement founder fills out your intake form and writes "health-conscious women 30-50 interested in gut health" in the target customer field, that's not laziness. That's the best answer they have. And it's important to understand why.

Most supplement and skincare founders come from one of three backgrounds. They're formulators who understand ingredients and science. They're entrepreneurs who spotted a market opportunity. Or they're passionate users who built a product to solve their own problem. What they almost never are is consumer researchers. They haven't done audience segmentation work. They haven't run psychographic analysis. They haven't studied which sub-segment of their broad market has the highest purchase intent, the lowest competitive density, and the best lifetime value potential.

They know their product. They believe in their product. But when you ask them who it's for, they're giving you their intuition, not their research. Because the research doesn't exist.

And here's the thing: that's completely reasonable. Why would a supplement founder have deep consumer research? That's not their job. They built a great product. Your job is to sell it. The research required to sell it well should live somewhere in the process. The question is where.

The intake form is a mirror, not a tool

Most agency owners think of their intake form as a data collection tool. You send it out, the client fills it in, and you use the answers to build your strategy. That's the intended workflow.

But if you look at the answers honestly, what you're actually collecting isn't data. It's assumptions. The client's best guesses about their market, filtered through their personal experience and packaged in language that sounds more certain than it is.

"Our target customer is active adults 25-45 who prioritize natural ingredients." That sounds like a target. Read it again. It's a description of a preference, attached to a demographic range wide enough to include 80 million people. There's nothing in that answer you can use to build an audience, write a headline, or choose an angle for a landing page. Not with any confidence.

This isn't the client's fault. And it isn't your fault for asking. It's a structural gap. The intake form assumes the client has done work that the client hasn't done and shouldn't be expected to do. And when you accept those answers and start building campaigns from them, you've inherited that gap. It becomes your problem now, except you're solving it with ad spend and iteration instead of research.

Your intake form isn't broken. It's telling you something important. It's telling you that the research step is missing from the process entirely.

What the answers are actually saying

Once you start reading intake form responses as signals rather than data, they become much more useful. Not for campaign building, but for understanding exactly what you don't know and what your client can't tell you.

"Health-conscious adults 25-55" means: "I know my product is in the health space but I haven't identified a specific customer within it. I'm describing the broadest possible audience because I don't want to exclude anyone who might buy."

"Our product is for anyone who wants more energy" means: "I believe in this product so much that I think everyone should want it. I haven't narrowed down who actually will."

"We're different because we use premium ingredients" means: "I know my formulation is strong but I haven't figured out how to translate that into a customer-facing message that matters to a specific person."

"Our competitors are [three large brands]" means: "I know the big names in my category but I haven't analyzed which specific niche I can actually win in. I'm thinking about the market from the top down instead of the bottom up."

"Success looks like $100K/month in revenue within six months" means: "I have a financial goal but I don't have a customer acquisition model that maps to it. I'm hoping your campaigns will figure that part out."

None of these are bad answers. They're honest. They reflect exactly where the founder is in their understanding of the market. The problem is when we treat them as the foundation for a media strategy. They aren't a foundation. They're a starting point that requires significant research before you can build on them.

The question your intake form can't ask

There's a question that would change everything about how the first 60 days of every engagement unfolds. But it's not a question you can put on an intake form, because no client can answer it.

The question is: Of all the people who might buy this product, which specific person needs it the most, is the least well-served by existing alternatives, will pay the highest price, will buy repeatedly, and will tell others about it?

That's not a demographic question. It's not even a psychographic question. It's a strategic question that requires real research to answer: ingredient analysis, competitive landscape mapping, sub-market segmentation, behavioral profiling, and some rigorous method of testing the answer before you bet a campaign on it.

No intake form in the world can surface this. No founder, no matter how thoughtful, can answer it off the top of their head. And no amount of platform data during the testing phase will reveal it fully, because the algorithm optimizes for whoever happens to convert, not for who the ideal customer actually is. Those aren't always the same person.

And this gap has gotten more expensive. Meta's algorithm increasingly uses the language in your ad copy, not just your ad set settings, to help decide who sees the ad. The pain points you name, the desires you speak to, the specific words you use, all of those signals influence who the algorithm targets. Your ad set inputs still matter. But the creative now plays a much larger role in delivery than it did two years ago. Which means the intake form isn't just failing to tell you who to target in your audience settings. It's failing to give you the language your customer actually uses, the language that the algorithm reads to find the right person. When your copy says "support your gut health naturally" instead of "I've tried everything for the 3pm bloat," that's not just weaker copy. It's a weaker targeting signal.

This is the research that should happen between "sign the client" and "launch the campaign." In most agency workflows, that space is occupied by the intake form and a week or two of competitive research. That's it. The deepest strategic question in the entire engagement gets answered by a Google Form and some gut instinct.

Two versions of every engagement

Here's what this looks like in practice. Two versions of the same engagement, same client, same product, same agency.

Version one: Client fills out intake form. Says they're targeting "women 35-55 who care about skin health." Your team accepts that, does a competitive scan, builds audiences around skincare interests and anti-aging demographics, launches campaigns, and spends the first four to six weeks testing and iterating until performance stabilizes. You find something that works eventually. The client's ad spend during that phase: $8,000-$12,000. Your team's time: 60-80 hours. You're now in month two and just starting to get traction.

Version two: Before campaigns launch, someone does the research. Not a survey. Not a focus group. Actual analytical work: studying the formulation, mapping the competitive landscape, identifying the specific sub-markets where this product has the strongest advantage, profiling the customer within that sub-market down to their fears, their buying triggers, their objections, and the language they use to describe their problem. Your media buyer gets that profile on day one. Your creative team writes to a real person, not a demographic bucket. The first campaign isn't a guess. It's an informed bet. Performance stabilizes in two to three weeks instead of six. The client's ad spend during the discovery phase drops by 40-60%. Your team's hours drop by half. And the client's first impression of your agency isn't "let's see if this works." It's "these people understand my customer better than I do."

Same product. Same team. Same platform. The difference is whether the research happened before the spend, or during it.

What your intake form should actually be for

I'm not suggesting you throw out your intake form. You need it. But I think it's worth reframing what it does.

Your intake form shouldn't be the foundation of your strategy. It should be the brief for your research. The client's answers tell you where to start looking. They tell you the category, the general market, the founder's instincts about who the customer might be. That's valuable input. But it's input, not output.

The output, the actual strategic foundation, should come from a research process that takes those inputs and does the work the client can't do themselves: identifying the specific customer, validating that choice against the competitive landscape, and building a profile detailed enough that every downstream decision can be made with confidence.

When that research exists, your intake form becomes what it was always meant to be: a starting point. Not the strategy. Not the targeting. Not the foundation for a $10,000/month ad spend. Just the beginning of a process that turns a founder's intuition into a media buyer's conviction.

The gap isn't in the form

If you've been refining your intake form for years, trying to get better answers, asking more specific questions, adding more fields, you've been solving the wrong problem. The issue was never the form. The issue was what happens after the form.

Your clients are giving you the best answers they have. Those answers aren't enough to build a campaign on. Not because the clients are lazy or unsophisticated. Because the work required to produce a real answer, rigorous customer research, hasn't been done yet. By anyone.

The intake form is telling you exactly that, every single time a client writes "health-conscious adults 25-55" in the target customer field. It's not an answer. It is a signal that the most important question in the entire engagement is still unanswered.

The agencies that figure this out don't need better intake forms. They need a research step that turns those intake form answers into something they can actually build on. And the ones who add that step will wonder how they ever launched a campaign without it.