Marketing briefs serve as a roadmap to success for marketing initiatives and campaigns, outlining the creative and deployment plan for all stakeholders.
Tome (color icon) Tome (color icon) Feb 9, 2024As important as inspiration or enthusiasm are impactful marketing strategies, they are supported by far simpler practices: planning and documentation. Compiling details into a single source of truth allows all that inspiration and enthusiasm to be expressed exactly as you’ve intended.
The best way to do that is to write a marketing brief, a key touchpoint for marketing teams and their collaborators.
A marketing brief is a document that provides an overview of the various components and deadlines within a marketing campaign. Marketing teams write marketing briefs usually to serve a dual purpose:
Marketing briefs and creative briefs are close cousins, but they focus on different things and usually have different audiences. Creative briefs guide the development of creative assets—imagery, videos, and the like—while marketing briefs detail the deployment plan for those creative assets within a campaign.
What distinguishes a marketing brief from a glorified checklist? A combination of details, insight, and timing. In essence, good storytelling. Many of the elements in a standard brief are technical—capturing where and when certain pieces will be put into play—but the overall effect is a symphonic view of all the working parts.
Your marketing brief should include the following seven items.
Will the right name help kickstart your creative flow? Absolutely—but a campaign title is about more than a catchy moniker: it keeps your team on the same page and prevents confusion for anyone who might need to refer to the campaign during its various phases. Titles can be straightforward (“Spring/Summer Capsule 2023”) or cheeky (“World Domination”), and in most cases are for internal use only. When it’s time to share the campaign with the world, you’ll have another chance to give it an externally-facing name for media outlets to reference.
If your campaign is being created for an external stakeholder such as a client, this is a good place to provide background about their brand, especially as it relates to the campaign. Is this the first time your company, or your client, is doing something like this? If so, why? What is the overarching concept or story behind the campaign? Was it inspired by, or in response to, notable events or trends in your industry? Try to capture these contextual details around the product or service at the center of your campaign in a concise paragraph or bulleted list.
Next, identify the agreed-upon goals and objectives behind the campaign. Campaign objectives can be broad (“increase brand awareness”) as well as specific (“increase engagement by 10%), and elements of the campaign should tie back to these goals. Aim to provide a concise summary for each stated goal, along with any anticipated key performance indicators (KPIs) you plan to track. You’ll cover these in more detail in the final performance-related pages of your brief.
Stakeholders, those internal team members who are intimately involved in the campaign or will have final sign-off, are a critical piece of any marketing brief. Reserve a spot in your document to list any appropriate names alongside their position, contact information, and project roles and responsibilities.
Your campaign strategy should include an overview of your target audience and target market, that captures their demographic information, buying habits, and pain points, as well as the value propositions that address them. You’ll also want to outline the feelings you hope to elicit from your target audience, and the actions you want them to take as a result. These should map back to the objectives you established in the previous section.
Strategy in a marketing brief also contains messaging-specific dos and don’ts, like a list of key takeaways and talking points. If you’re launching a new product, which features do you plan to spotlight? Outlining these priorities, as well as any other considerations or guidelines, like style notes or press embargoes, also means your messaging stays consistent across the team. This may become important if multiple people will be sourcing talent or connections from their own networks.
Channel strategy is all about the “where” of your campaign, mapping how it will be distributed across multiple channels. This breakdown should include owned channels, like on-site blog posts and social media pages, as well as digital channels, broadcast channels like TV, podcasts, and radio, in-person events, along with device targeting or prioritization.
Don’t worry about detailing out individual social media posts, here; the goal is to provide an overview of your guiding strategy for each channel, and the key moments that will serve as anchors throughout the campaign.
Next, chart any major deliverables, budget parameters, and flight dates on a timeline for at-a-glance alignment, listing project managers and teams responsible for each piece.
You already established campaign objectives and the high-level KPIs you’ll use as assess, but this is where you dive into the details of how you’ll measure campaign performance. If the goal is total sales, this will be relatively straightforward, but if the goal is brand awareness, how do you plan to measure it? Outline what you (or your client) should expect to see once the campaign has ended, or what analysis you plan to do post-mortem.