How to write a marketing brief

Background information

Briefly outline your company and the product or service for which you want to create a marketing campaign. Was there a particular personality given to your brand in the past? Did this work well? Does further research need to be done on how people react to your brand or do you already have useful data?

Reasons why

Describe what you want to accomplish with the campaign. What actions do you want potential customers to take? More traffic on your website, direct contact with new customers, online sales, etc.

Target audience

Make sure every campaign you create is targeted to your ideal customer. You can create personas for this purpose. Personas are descriptions of your ideal customer: gender, age, income, interests, why are they going to buy or why not, what type of customer is it, what are they reading, what are they listening to, etc.

Do you have multiple personas you want to target? Then make sure you include in your briefing how you will balance the message between those audiences.

Channels

Decide which channels are best for reaching your target audience. The best campaigns usually use a mix of some of the following channels:

• Email
• Social media
• Radio
• TV
• Search engines
• Print
• Web
• Courses

Deliverables

What materials should be provided? What content needs to be written, what assets need to be designed, what needs to be developed, what needs to be purchased or ordered, is additional infrastructure needed, etc.

Stakeholders

List everyone involved in the campaign, no matter how small their task is. Who is responsible for the design? Who will write the content? Who will manage everything and check that everything is complete? Who maintains the timeline? Is it helpful for the staff to know what relationships are at risk and who their work is benefiting?

Timing

Set both small and large deadlines. When should everyone have received the briefing? When should what deliverables be delivered? When will what part of the campaign be launched? When does the campaign end?

This can be a real hassle. Fortunately, there are some (free) planning tools that can help you with this.

Mandatories

List what should definitely be included on the different marketing items. This could be call to actions, disclaimers, logos, contact information, social media links, tone-of-voice, brand guidelines, legal requirements, etc.

Tracking

How will you measure the success of the campaign? When will you call your campaign successful? What exact goals do you need to achieve for this? Be specific and don't be afraid to throw numbers around. For example: a 10% increase in sales after one year, double the monthly number of visitors to the website by the end of the year, have 20 new customers in the portfolio in one quarter.

Explain how and when these things will be measured. This part is very important because it will determine whether the campaign was worth it or not.

Budget

Give an indication of the budget you want to spend. This can eliminate some of the channels and that way you lose less time and resources.

There are some simple equations you can use to calculate how much you should invest but saying there is "no budget" either means you expect it to be free, or the sky is the limit! Wouldn't that be great?

Conclusion

When you properly research and implement the ten elements above, your campaign has a much better chance of succeeding. And that can only be a positive thing!

Now get started on your marketing plan and apply what you learned in this post.

Do you have any tips for formatting the perfect marketing brief? Let me know in the comments!