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Developing a Brief

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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.

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Will Francis

Will Francis is a recognised authority in digital and social media, who has worked with some of the world’s most loved brands. He is the host and technical producer of the DMI podcast, Ahead of the Game and a lecturer and subject matter expert with the DMI. He appears in the media and at conferences whilst offering his own expert-led digital marketing courses where he shares his experience gained working within a social network, a global ad agency, and more recently his own digital agency.

Connect with him on Twitter (X) or LinkedIn.

By the end of this topic, you should be able to:

  • Identify the benefits of using personas in content marketing 
  • Critically analyse the relationship between buyer personas, target audience and content marketing 
  • Systematically analyse techniques for sharing and promoting content and for measuring content performance
     

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Content Marketing
Will Francis
Skills Expert

This short course covers the principles of content marketing and demonstrates techniques and useful tools that you can use to develop and refine your content marketing strategy.

You will learn how to:

  • Apply best practices for developing and enhancing content throughout a content marketing campaign
  • Create buyer personas for use in content development
  • Develop a content brief
  • Conduct keyword research to inform a content strategy
  • Curate, personalize, and repurpose content
  • Craft a brand story
  • Schedule content development and publication
  • Promote content
  • Measure and analyze content performance

Approximate learning time: 3 hours