The ultimate quality of any content, no matter what format it takes, depends upon the quality of its briefing.
As an agency, our number-one objective is to strive to exceed our clients’ expectations and help them craft the content they need to achieve their marketing goals.
There’s a fair share of war stories to turn to on the agency side when it comes to briefing quality. We've been handed the gamut of briefs from the people we work with – many of which have been detailed, precise, and articulate, explaining what is needed from our side and what key themes should emerge from the end product. Others have been muddled, obtuse, or simply too nebulous to be helpful, leaving our team either battling against deadline to seek further clarification, or playing detective to build on what little information exists, to work out what the client truly wants from our side.
A good content marketing brief should never be a token effort. It should act as a bona fide blueprint to success, giving your collaborators all the relevant tools they need to deliver the content you require. Without that high-quality raw material, your content will invariably suffer.
So, in this article, we’ll be sharing what we think separates a winning brief from a poor one, and how your business can ensure that any briefs you deliver will give you the best possible results from the agency you might choose to work with. Read on to learn more.
The first and most important aim of any content marketing brief is to clearly define the purpose of the content. Is the aim to promote thought leadership in your industry? Is it to connect with your customers? To encourage debate, educate followers, or showcase your brand’s values?
With this in mind, when writing a brief or filling out a briefing form, please try to be as specific as possible about the true aim of the content. You might assume it’s obvious, but your creatives may well be left scratching their heads.
How you word a piece of content is almost as important as the substance of the content itself. With so many brands competing to be heard, creatives need to know what makes your brand unique.
So, when filling out a brief, think long and hard about your brand’s identity. That means providing as much information as possible about your Tone of Voice (TOV), logos, values, and even your grammatical/word choice preferences. In doing so, you’ll make it easier for creatives to understand your brand’s unique characteristics and filter them into the work itself.
All too often, creatives are expected to know a brand inside-out and talk at length about specific subjects they might not yet have a mastery of. And, in any case, much of the job of a content marketer involves translating these complex topics into layman’s English. Often, creatives might misconstrue which insights or data points are the most significant, or even lack clarity on where to gather those hard stats from in the first place.
With this in mind, it’s essential to ensure that your briefs contain enough hard data, or at least links to helpful resources, to get creative teams up to speed quickly and effectively. They don’t need a comprehensive education, but they can get to grips with your content faster if you point them in the right direction.
It’s always easier for creatives to provide you with the content you’re looking for when they already have an existing sample to reference at a moment’s notice.
So, when filling out your brief, it's handy to include a couple of examples of content that has worked well in the past or that captures the look and feel of your brand.
The target audience your content is designed to attract will invariably influence the tone and direction that the creative team takes throughout its development. Thus, it's important to establish clear audience personas before your creatives get to work crafting your marketing project. The more you tell the creatives about these audience segments, the more effective the end result will be.
If you're unclear about building your buyer/audience personas, you might want to develop them as part of a strategic workshop before the content creation commences. As with any reputable agency, Copyhouse will happily offer such services.
Staying with strategy, it’s also important when writing a brief to be clear about the larger objective that each piece of content serves. Where in the marketing funnel does this content sit? What overarching objectives is your business looking to achieve with it? And how does the next project lead on from it in a logical sequence that serves to tell a longer narrative?
By explaining this, your creatives will better understand what each piece of content requires, rather than seeing each blog post, article, infographic, or video as simply disparate elements that exist in a vacuum.
Ultimately, no matter what your final brief looks like, it’s important to remember that these documents are nothing more than a tool for open and easy communication between partners, whether that’s a large-scale enterprise with a massive agency or one marketing manager with a single creative.
By viewing a brief not as a set of commandments set on stone tablets, but as a guide that can help your creatives deliver the work you're expecting, you're more likely to end up with content that truly resonates with you and your target audience. Remember: when it comes to briefs, the more effort you put in, the more you’ll get in return.
However, here at CopyHouse, we’re experts at constructing briefs until we’re satisfied that we have all the tools at our disposal to get to work. We also offer strategy sessions to help our clients ascertain exactly what they’re looking to get out of their content, and provide the blueprint to success.
So, if you’d like to see what we could do with your trickiest briefs, then contact us.
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