When you’re working with other professionals to develop amazing content, creating consistency and ensuring that content matches the brand message you’ve developed is vital to success. One way of accomplishing this goal is through a creative brief, but what exactly is it, what information goes into it and how does it help you focus your message? Here’s a quick overview to help you get started on the process.

Creative Brief 101: What it is, What’s Included and Why it’s Needed

Howard Margulies said it best, “When you write a creative brief, you’re not filling out a form. You’re crafting the story of your product and its reason to exist and thrive in the world.” Sounds important, right? But what is it exactly? In the most basic sense, a creative brief is a document that conveys background information on your company, your objectives, insights and strategy, your brand’s personality, tone and style, channels that are used, deadlines, mandatory items in the piece, your budget and criteria for success. By providing a content creator with that information, whether it’s for a graphics designer, writer, video producer or photographer, you’re giving them a basis to understand what the piece needs to accomplish. Here’s a quick overview of what you need to include:

• Describe the project: Who is the client, what products or services are being promoted, what’s the campaign’s goals and what are the client’s preferences?
• Describe the buyer persona: Who is the target audience? Why are they the target and what motivates them? What are their interests and needs? What’s their interests, politics or hot topics?
• Describe the product or service being pushed: What unique solutions does it provide? What are its top competitors? How is it different from these competitors? How does it meet the needs of the buyer?
• Describe the strategy: How will the tone, style and content fit into the big picture of your strategy? What’s the key message you want to convey to your audience? Where does this piece fall in the funnel?
• Describe the channel and end goals: What communication channels will you use? Are you focusing on promoting the content through LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter? What is the call to action and how should that be conveyed?

The creative brief often reads like a worksheet or form that needs to be filled out, but you need to give careful consideration to everything that is included or excluded from the finished brief. Unfortunately, the majority of times that content doesn’t meet or exceed its goals often starts with a poor creative brief. Providing a vague creative brief to a content creator that is vague or doesn’t mention the specific product or service you want to push in the piece, it will often fall far short of your goals, requiring significant revisions to develop the right piece and frustrating the creative process.

One thing I’ve noticed is that teams sometimes try to skip over the hard questions when putting these briefs together. Maybe they’re in a rush, or maybe they just aren’t sure what really matters until the creative starts coming back with endless clarifying emails. It’s wild how much time you can actually save by just spelling it all out up front, even the little things you assume everyone just knows. Did you ever try to write around a missing brand value or a fuzzy target audience? It’s like building a house with mystery bricks—probably won’t hold up.

It’s also worth saying—creative briefs don’t need to squash anyone’s spark. In fact, the detailed stuff can help creators figure out the boundaries, so they can think more boldly inside them. Sometimes, the weirdest or most unexpected ideas pop up when people know exactly what they can push against. That sense of direction (with a bit of wiggle room) keeps things less chaotic and way more rewarding, both for the client and whoever’s actually stuck making the thing.

Your creative brief should include all the information needed to give your creatives the tools they need while allowing flexibility to rock your content. But what if you don’t know how to find a creative that is a good fit to your company’s content needs? At WriterAccess, our dedicated staff can help you find the perfect writer to make your content shine.

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