Marketing agency client onboarding checklist: getting the brand assets in

A marketing agency client onboarding checklist is the list of everything an agency needs from a new client before work can start: the signed contract and deposit, the answered brief, the brand files, the account access, and the names of the people who own each of those on the client side. The useful version tracks each item per client, with a state that says whether it was requested, has arrived, or is usable. That state is what tells an account manager on day four that the logo came in as a 300-pixel PNG and the ad account invite is still sitting in someone’s inbox.

Most checklists for this query stop one step too early. Sked Social’s 12-step social media onboarding guide tells the agency to “request their style guide” and to get access to the client’s social accounts, and admits that access “is one of the steps that hold back the project.” The DashClicks checklist covers the proposal, terms and conditions, and project planning. The Scaletime nine-step guide covers contracts, kickoff calls, and reporting. Neither one says how to collect files or logins from the client. None of them covers the day the brand kit arrives half-done. This page is about that day, and the list that gets an agency past it.

What goes on a marketing agency client onboarding checklist?

Five groups, in the order the client meets them.

The contract and the money come first. The signed agreement, or the master agreement and the first statement of work if the agency works that way. The deposit or the first month of the retainer. A purchase order number if the client’s finance team needs one on every invoice. Nothing else should be requested until the contract is signed, because a client who has not signed is a prospect, and prospects do not send their ad account logins.

The brief comes next. This is the onboarding questionnaire: the client’s goals for the first 90 days, the audiences they sell to, the competitors they watch, what they tried before and how it went, the words they never use in their marketing, and who approves the work. Keep it short and ask only what the client knows. The agency can read the client’s website and their last year of social posts without asking.

Brand assets are the third group, and the one this page spends most of its time on. The logo files, the color codes, the fonts, the style guide if one exists, photos the client owns, product shots, past campaign creative, and any templates the client’s own team uses.

Account access is the fourth. The ad accounts, the analytics property, the social profiles, the website CMS, the email platform, the tag manager, and the search console. Each of these has its own owner at the client and, for most of them, its own way to grant access without a password changing hands.

People are the last group, and the one that makes the other four possible. The sponsor who signed, the day-to-day contact, the person who approves creative, the person in finance who pays invoices, and whoever holds the admin rights on each account. An agency that sends the whole list to the sponsor is asking one person to do five people’s jobs.

Written out in full, this list runs to 30 or 40 items. No client should ever see all of them. A social-only retainer needs the contract, the brief, the logo, the colors, the fonts, the photo library, and access to three profiles. A paid search client needs the ads account, the analytics property, the tag manager, and conversion data, and almost none of the brand kit. Build the master list once, then cut a copy per service line, and send each client only their copy.

Why does agency onboarding stall on day four?

Because the brand kit arrives in pieces, and nobody tracks the pieces.

The contract is signed on Monday. The brief comes back on Tuesday, mostly complete. On Wednesday the client’s marketing coordinator sends a Dropbox link with “brand stuff” in the subject line. Inside is a logo as a JPEG with a white box around it, a PDF style guide from 2021 that names two fonts the client no longer uses, and 40 photos, half of them stock images the client licensed for a different website. The ad account invite went to the sponsor, who is on a plane. By Thursday the account manager has a folder that looks full and a project that cannot start.

The client was quick. They sent something within two days. What failed is the request: “send us your brand assets” has no shape. The client cannot tell what done looks like, so they send what they can find and call it done. The agency cannot tell what is missing without opening every file, so it either sends a long email that lists everything again or quietly starts work with the wrong logo.

There are four separate failures folded into that one week:

• The request named a category (“brand assets”) instead of items, so the client answered the category.
• Each piece had a different owner at the client, and the request went to one person.
• Files arrived but were not usable, and nothing told the agency which ones.
• The follow-up asked for “the rest” instead of the two specific things still missing.

Each failure has a fix, and the fixes all come from treating the asset list as a workflow with one item per file, each with an owner and a state, instead of one task called “brand assets.”

How to turn the brand asset list into items a client can finish

Split the request until every item can be finished in one sitting by one person. “Send your brand assets” becomes eight or nine items, each of which a coordinator can tick off between meetings.

A per-client asset list for a typical retainer looks like this:

• Primary logo, original vector file (SVG, EPS, AI, or PDF). Owner: marketing coordinator. Due Wednesday.
• Logo variants: one-color, reversed for dark backgrounds, and the square icon used on social profiles. Owner: marketing coordinator. Due Wednesday.
• Brand colors as hex codes, plus CMYK if the client prints. Owner: marketing coordinator. Due Wednesday.
• Font names and where the licenses were bought. Owner: whoever bought them, often the last designer. Due Friday.
• Style or brand guide, if one exists. A “we do not have one” answer counts as done. Due Wednesday.
• Photo library the client owns, with a note on which images came from a stock site and under what license. Owner: marketing coordinator. Due Friday.
• Past campaign creative from the last 12 months, with results if the client has them. Owner: sponsor. Due next Monday.
• Words and claims the client never uses, plus any legal disclaimers their industry needs. Owner: sponsor or the client’s legal contact. Due next Monday.

Every item names the file type, so the client knows what “right” looks like before they start looking. Every item has an owner, so the sponsor is not the bottleneck. Every item has its own date, so the agency can follow up on one late thing instead of the whole list.

“We do not have one” is a valid answer and the list should say so. A small business with no brand guide will otherwise leave that item open forever, too embarrassed to say there is nothing to send. Make the empty answer a choice they can tick.

The same split works for any batch of client content. The page on how to collect website content from clients applies it to the sitemap, one request per page, and an agency that builds sites as well as campaigns can run both lists from the same template.

Which brand files should you ask for, and in what form?

Ask for each file by what it is and what you will use it for, and say what a usable version looks like. Most clients do not know the difference between a logo file and a picture of a logo, and they should not have to.

The logo is the item that goes wrong most. Ask for the original vector file and tell the client where it probably lives: “the file your designer sent when the logo was made, or the one your printer uses for business cards.” A screenshot from the website is not a logo file. A large PNG with a transparent background is the fallback if nobody can find the vector, and it is worth saying so in the request so the client stops looking after ten minutes instead of giving up.

Colors should come as codes. “Our green” is not a color. If the client has a style guide, the codes are in it. If they do not, ask them to send the logo file and pull the colors from it yourself, then send them back for a yes.

Fonts need the name and the license. A paid font the client bought for their own website may not cover use in ads made by an agency. Ask who bought it and from where, and check the license before the first design goes out.

Photos need the rights. Ask which photos the client took or commissioned, and which came from a stock library. Stock images licensed for one use are often not licensed for paid ads, and the agency is the one that runs the ad. A short question on each upload (“Did you take this, pay someone to take it, or get it from a stock site?”) saves a takedown later.

Past creative is the item agencies most often forget. Last year’s ads and the emails that did well tell a new team more than any brief, so ask for the files and the numbers.

When a client uploads a phone photo of a printed brand guide, or a scan of a logo from a letterhead, catch it the day it lands. The page on clients who send blurry phone photos covers how to ask for a usable copy without making the client feel foolish.

How to get account access without collecting passwords

Most of the platforms an agency needs have a way for the client to grant access without sharing a password. Use it, and put the steps for each one in the request so the client does not have to search for them.

For Google Ads, the agency sends a link request from its manager account, and the client accepts it. Google’s help page on linking accounts says the client will “receive emails inviting you to link to the manager account” and can accept from that email or from the Managers section of their own account. The catch is that the person accepting needs admin access on the client’s ads account, and that person is often not the sponsor. Ask for their name first.

For Google Analytics, the client adds the agency’s email address in Access Management and picks a role. Google’s analytics access guide notes that the person adding users needs the Administrator role at the account or property level, and that roles can be set for a single property. Ask for the lowest role the work needs. A reporting-only retainer does not need Editor.

Meta keeps its own guide, “Give a partner access to business assets in your business portfolio,” in the Meta Business Help Center, and the agency should paste that link into the request so the client’s admin follows Meta’s own steps rather than a summary that may be out of date.

Each of these is one item on the checklist, with the client’s admin as the owner. “Accept our Google Ads link request (sent today from the agency’s manager account)” is a task someone can do in two minutes. “Give us access to your marketing accounts” is a task nobody starts.

For tools with no access-sharing route, such as some website builders and older email platforms, a shared login is sometimes the only way in. Move it through a password manager the client controls, never by email, chat, or a field in an onboarding form. Ask the client to change it when the engagement ends, and put that on the offboarding checklist now so nobody forgets.

The access group is also where the day-four stall is worst, because an access item can look done when it is not. The client says they sent the invite, and they did, to an old agency email address. The analytics access was granted at Viewer when the work needs Editor. Somebody at the agency should log in to each account the day access is granted and confirm it works at the right level.

What states should each onboarding item have?

Four states cover almost every case, and the gap between the second and third is where agency onboarding loses its week.

Requested means the item went out and nothing has come back. Arrived means something is in the slot. Usable means someone at the agency opened it and confirmed it is what the work needs. Accepted means it has been filed where the team will find it and the work can go ahead on it.

A tracker that only knows “received” will show the brand kit as complete on Wednesday afternoon, because there is a file in every slot. The logo is a JPEG. The style guide is out of date. The photo folder is half stock images. Every one of those reads as done, and every one is found by the designer on the first day of real work.

So the usable check happens the day the item lands, and it is done by the person who will use it. The designer opens the logo. The media buyer logs in to the ads account. The copywriter reads the brief. If something is wrong, the reply names exactly what: “Thanks for the logo. This one is a JPEG with a white background. Could you look for the SVG or EPS your designer sent?” One item goes back to requested, the rest stay done, and the client sees that progress was made.

The client should see the same list the agency sees. When the marketing coordinator can open the list and see that six of eight brand items are done and two are waiting on them, they do not need a status email. When they cannot, every follow-up from the agency feels like an accusation.

How to chase clients for logo files without annoying them

Chase the item, not the client. A reminder that names one file and one person gets a reply. A reminder that says “just checking in on onboarding” does not.

Address each reminder to the owner of the open item. If the fonts are the only thing missing and the font license sits with the client’s former designer, the reminder goes to the coordinator who can email that designer, and it says so: “Still need the font license for Lato Pro. It was probably bought by whoever designed your website.”

Never chase for something that already arrived. Build each reminder from the items still in the requested state.

Space reminders against the kickoff date, not against when the request went out. For a two-week onboarding, a nudge on day four, another on day eight, and a call from the account manager on day ten for anything still open is a pattern that respects the client’s time. Use the channel the person reads. A coordinator at their desk reads email. A business owner on the move reads texts. The comparison of SMS and email for document requests goes through when each one gets the faster reply, and the document request email templates have wording for a first ask and a polite second one.

Put the kickoff cutoff in the welcome note. “Kickoff on the 18th depends on the logo files, the ads account access, and the signed contract being in by the 14th.” A date with a reason gives the sponsor a reason to chase their own colleagues, and the agency stops being the only one asking.

The hours an account manager spends on this are real. The article on the hidden cost of chasing clients for documents works through what that follow-up costs a small firm per month.

What do the first two weeks look like?

A working timeline for a new retainer client, counted from the day the contract is signed.

Day zero. The account manager calls the sponsor and asks for names: the day-to-day contact, the person who approves creative, the finance contact, and the admin on each account the work needs. The welcome note goes out that afternoon with the kickoff date and the cutoff. The deposit invoice goes to finance. The brief goes to the sponsor.

Day one. The brand asset list goes to the marketing coordinator, item by item, each with a file type and a date. The access requests go to each account’s admin, with the steps for each platform written into the request. The Google Ads link request is sent from the manager account the same day, so the email is waiting when the admin opens the list.

Days two to four. Files come in. Each one is opened the day it lands by the person who will use it, and marked usable or sent back with the one thing that is wrong. Access is tested as soon as it is granted. On day four, a reminder goes to the owner of each item still in the requested state, naming the item.

Days five to eight. The brief is read and any gaps go back as specific questions. The fonts and the photo rights are usually the last brand items, because they depend on someone outside the client’s team. The day-eight reminder goes out.

Days nine and ten. The account manager calls the owner of anything still open. If a blocking item is missing at the cutoff, kickoff moves now, and the sponsor hears which item and why.

Days eleven to fourteen. The team works from a complete, checked kit, and kickoff is about the work rather than the missing files.

A repeat client, or a second service line for an existing client, skips most of this. The checklist shrinks to the new brief and the access for the new platforms, which is why the template is built per service line and trimmed per client. The consulting client onboarding checklist uses the same per-engagement split for firms whose onboarding is heavier on agreements than on files.

What if the brand kit never arrives?

Some clients will not send the full kit, however clear the list. The coordinator left, the designer who made the logo cannot be reached, or the business never had a brand guide in the first place. When an item is a week past its date and two reminders have gone unanswered, stop reminding and change the ask.

Make the item smaller. “Send the vector logo” becomes “Tell us the name of the person or company that designed your logo.” The agency can often get the file from them directly.

Offer to rebuild it. A logo can be redrawn as a vector from a clean PNG, and colors can be pulled from the website. Say what it costs and let the client choose.

Use the contract. If the agreement says the work starts on a date and assumes the client’s materials are in by an earlier date, say which materials are late and what that does to the schedule. A clause the client agreed to in week one is much easier to raise in week three than a new demand.

Each of these turns a stuck item into one the client can finish today. The marketing agencies solutions page shows one onboarding workflow per client, with each upload checked as it arrives.

Where zendoc fits in client onboarding

zendoc lets an agency build the asset checklist once as a workflow template, with ordered steps that hold the brief as a form, each brand file as its own upload, and the contract as a built-in e-signature with a tamper-evident audit trail, then spin up a copy for each new client. The client gets one link by SMS or email and opens their own list on a phone with no password to create and no signup form, and the agency sees each step’s completion as it happens. Every upload is read on arrival by AI that flags a wrong file type, an incomplete file, or an unreadable scan as a suggestion for staff to review, and one grouped reminder goes out three days after the first notice for whatever is still open. Pricing for the one plan is on the pricing page.