Developing a Brief

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Developing a Brief

So you’ve established your content marketing objectives, and you’ve gathered your audience data and persona insights. Now, it’s time to develop your creative and media briefs.

A brief helps you to identify the most important insights that will inform your creative outputs. It forms the basis of your creative strategy and helps ensure that your strategy is aligned to your campaign objectives. These insights can be derived from audience, competitor, industry, and other research used in your strategy. Writing a brief challenges you to convert your insights into a usable action plan for your creative and media teams. You can then fully evaluate the scope of your campaign.

The two main briefs are the creative brief and the media brief. The creative brief is a document that includes product, audience, and competitor insights. Its aim is to inspire campaign ideas to deliver on your objectives. The outputs of the brief should be defined clearly. The outputs include copy and messaging, creative formats, banners, social posts, videos, and so on.

Following on from the creative brief, the media brief is a document that uses audience data, budget, timings, content formats, and creative formats to help you decide which promotional channels and media should be used to distribute the content to your audience. The output of the media brief should be a channel plan which details all channels (paid and free), as well as ‘go-live’ and run rates for each of the channels.

Another output from the media brief is the media plan. This plan details all of the paid media channels, including cost line items and delivery metrics, such as impressions and clicks for each paid channel. This is important for budgeting and distributing your content on paid media channels.