If you’ve ever developed a marketing campaign, you’ll most certainly have made a creative brief. If you haven’t, you should immediately rectify this and prepare a creative brief before you put your campaign into action.
A creative brief is a map of sorts, which marketers use to execute their marketing campaigns successfully. It:
- Sets the tone for a marketing campaign.
- Acts as a guide/blueprint that lists out the steps for campaign success.
- Identifies potential marketing risks, errors and pitfalls.
- Gives marketers clarity about the objectives they must meet.
It’s okay if you don’t know how to write a creative brief. These days, you have reputed content marketing companies who can develop a highly engaging and informative creative brief for you in no time.
But if you do have experience creating briefs and you need tips on fine-tuning your content, you should follow our 7-step guide:
1. Introduce the market, the brand and their product portfolio
It doesn’t matter if the person executing the campaign is from the company or an external agency. Information about the market/industry, the brand’s history and its successes, its competitors and its product portfolio will help everyone ensure that they put in place strategies that will be successful both in the short run and the long run.
So, as best practice, always introduce the brand in the first 2-3 lines of the creative brief.
2. Peg down their target customers/audience and their decision-making process
The success of any advertising, branding or promotional campaign lies in the marketer’s ability to target the communication to the right people. This is why it’s important to conduct audience analysis and define the target audience in your creative brief.
You’ll be able to design fool-proof and effective communication strategy only when you know who your audience is, how they think, which channels they peruse, and what they buy.
Image Credits: Pixabay
3. Talk about the brand’s opportunities and their challenges
Just identifying the audience isn’t enough. Your creative brief should also list out the various opportunities that you can take advantage of to gain the highest customer engagement and followership. This ensures that marketers across the chain don’t miss out on mining profitable opportunities.
In addition to this, the creative brief should also outline the problems that the campaign is designed to solve. This could be anything from low audience engagement to misconceptions about the brand. This information will help marketers remain purposeful and focused on achieving the intended goals of the campaign.
4. Outline achievable objectives
Not all objectives are achievable right off-the-bat. It’s better to start with smaller victories and then work your way up to bigger successes. Not only is this a smarter strategy, but also easier to implement, campaign-wise.
For example, if the final objective is to increase brand awareness, the achievable short-term objectives can be to post content on social media more frequently, to increase content distribution to more channels, to hire more brand influencers and so on.
At this stage, many companies prefer to seek the services of professional content marketers. The reason is simple. Professional content marketers have extensive experience working on a variety of advertising, branding and promotional communication. They’ll be better equipped to provide measurable milestones which companies can use to implement their campaigns more efficiently.
5. Summarise their project requirements & non-negotiables
Once the brand-related information is complete, it’s time to start working on the campaign requirements. Some of the questions the creative brief needs to answer include:
- What context should the campaign reference?
- What are the activities the company wishes to do as part of the campaign?
- What types of content/materials need to be prepared? What are their specifications?
- Which tone/style should be used?
- Which channels of distribution will be used?
- How is the marketing calendar scheduled?
Second, the brief should also specify the non-negotiables, such as project milestones, final objectives, the budget of the campaign, completion deadlines, actual deliverables, KPIs, and so on.
Together, this information will provide everyone in the company with clear-cut instructions about how the campaign should be put into action.
Image Credits: Pixabay
6. Draft the creative brief in alignment with the brand’s style
At this stage, you will have all the information you need to draft the creative brief.
When writing, it’s important to channel the brand’s core style/tone. This is the only way you can convey what the brand is trying to tell its audience and customers. For example, Netflix prides itself on its vintage style. All of its marketing – their graphics, design and content – look, feel and read very elegant, sophisticated and professional. It’s similar to companies like Fitbit, Apple and Tesla, whose styles are clean and futuristic. Log onto to their websites, and you’ll see what we mean.
As a best practice, it’s always best to use tried-and-tested, effective templates when writing your creative brief, if this is the first time you’re writing one. This will ensure that you don’t miss any information when drafting your brief.
7. Seek feedback from other departments
The last step you need to do before submitting your creative brief to your boss is to get feedback from your colleagues.
Since the creative brief is an indicator of how the final campaign (when implemented) will be like, you’ll need to get feedback from every department, which will be affected by the campaign. This includes the marketing department, product department and customer service department, to name a few.
Have them go over your work to ensure you meet quality requirements. Or better yet, have experienced copywriters develop the creative briefs for your clients. Make the necessary changes, and then you’ll be good to go.
Feature Image Credits: Pixabay
Author bio:
Nisha Prakash is a blogger specializing in social media marketing and content management. She is an avid runner and a bibliophile.