Whether your agency is producing a website, app, brand identity, social or content campaign, or anything else, taking the time to establish a creative brief will result in a better managed project and better end result for your client.
A good creative brief should be collaboration between agency and client. Sitting down to a face-to-face meeting is useful, but the act of committing the brief to paper solidifies the ideas already presented and provides a framework for the project. A brief can be as open or as rigid as both parties are comfortable with, as long as it outlines parameters within which the agency has full creative jurisdiction.
The smaller the brief, the bigger the ideas – a short, 1-2 page brief will give your creative team the freedom to explore new concepts while still remaining within the bounds of the project.
The brief should encompass these sections
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Project summary
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Target audience
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Communication strategy
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Objective
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Competitive positioning
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Project specifics
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Any additional information or evidence
Basically, what is the project and why does it need to be done? What are the project's goals? What are the company's goals? You should include background information here like company history, branding info, and their place within the industry.
Target audience
This section involves a detailed profile of the target audience. If you have customer personas and demographic information, here is where you include them. If you don’t, profile a customer or invent a customer personality and give them all the common characteristic customer quirks.
Questions to ask:
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Who is your customer?
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What age/sex/marital status/income bracket/cultural group are they?
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What do they do?
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What are they interested in?
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What technology and media do they use?
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What are the pain points in relation to your product or service?
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How does your product meet those pain points for them?
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How often do they need your product/service?
Communication strategy
The communication strategy explains how you're going to get the client's message to their customers. It could be a website, print material, a marketing campaign – this will depend on the type of work your agency does.
In this section, you will examine the message you're trying to convey to the audience – get the client to brainstorm words relating to their message – reliable, cool, secure, efficient.
Objective
What are you trying to achieve with this project? How are you going to measure its effectiveness? Does your agency already have processes in place to measure a campaign's performance? Are these the client's responsibility?
Competitive Positioning
This section deals with the competition, and what they're doing. Identify the main competitors. How does the company compare? What sets them apart? How will the project take advantage of the company's strengths in the marketplace?
Project Specifics
In this section, you lay out the specific deliverables of the project – the format, scale, size, etc. What exactly is your agency going to do for the client? You should include past work for reference as well as the budget and timeframe.
Tips for a successful creative brief
An effective creative brief lets an agency start work on a client project with clear parameters within which to work their creative magic. The process of writing the brief also helps the client to solidify exactly what they want done and the results they want to see. The simpler the process of formulating the creative brief, the easier it is for you to do your job.
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Keep your brief simple – don't use lots of jargon. Both your client and your creative team need the brief to be clear and concise.
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Work with the client – use their input to generate the brief – don't just write it and get them to approve it. The process of writing the creative brief helps to client to solidify their own ideas.
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Refer to the brief – when you've created the brief, it should be the central focus of the project. Don't just toss it aside and do your own thing – a good brief enables your team to be creative within certain parameters.
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Control the strategy, and give the creative freedom – not the other way around!
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Think long term – help the client to understand how their project has to impact their long-term business goals.
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Keep it simple! I can't stress this enough. Focus on a single, simple brand message and how to get that message across in an effective way.
An effective creative brief lets an agency start work on a client project with clear parameters within which to work their creative magic. The process of writing the brief also helps the client to solidify exactly what they want done and the results they want to see. The simpler the process of formulating the creative brief, the easier it is for you to do your job.
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