A creative design brief template for devising efficient marketing campaigns
A creative brief template captures the essence of any effective marketing and advertising campaign in one place. It clearly outlines the most basic and important facts related to the campaign: the background, objectives, target audience, key messages, brand voice, and deliverables. Creative briefs are there to convey the message of your campaign to advertising agencies, internal teams, or other consultants.
What is a creative brief?
There are plenty of variations of creative briefs, but all of them serve to provide the best possible overview of the point of a marketing campaign. Creative briefs work best when they are short, succinct, and to the point. Other documents can elaborate on the campaign further. The brief is there to give stakeholders the most basic and important information.
Creative briefs are an essential part of any marketing and advertising campaign, but they can be useful in any other kind of creative process as well. When a creative team needs to collaborate on a joint project, it’s important to avoid tunnel vision and keep the big picture in sight. That is why the creative brief is there to ensure that the right goals and benchmarks are met.
Why use a creative brief?
A good creative brief can be of immense utility if you need to collaborate with a third-party creative team, and want to make sure that they get the basics of your vision right. However, they are of equal use to an internal creative team as well.
Think of creative briefs as your most readily available touchstone: it allows everyone involved to quickly reflect on the message, stay on brand, and deliver all of the required marketing goals. A common failure: teams write the brief at kickoff and never revisit it, so by review time it describes goals that already changed. Treat it as a living document and update it the moment objectives shift, not just at the start.
What should be included in your creative brief?
Your creative brief should include:
The Basic Information
The top of the creative brief should start with the most essential information about your campaign, such as:
- The Launch Date: allowing everyone to keep the most important deadline in mind
- The Budget: making sure that the financial scope of the campaign is immediately clear
- The Contact details: providing everyone with an e-mail and/or phone number for the point person of the campaign
The Background
Here, you can provide a brief textual description of the roots of the campaign: why it’s important, and the context behind its origins. It’s important for everyone involved to know the intent behind the campaign in addition to the relevant data.
The Objectives
The creative brief should also contain a clear, bulleted or numbered list of all of the objectives of your marketing or advertising campaign. This allows the creative team to have a set of defined priorities in sight as they work on their content.
The Target Audience
One of the most important parts of any campaign is the target audience. You can’t create a great advertising or marketing plan without knowing who it will be targeted at. Define the preferences and the needs of the target audience here, and perhaps provide links to the relevant buyer personas.
The Key Messages
You need to provide the stakeholders and your creative team with a quick outline of the main messages that the campaign is supposed to convey. That way, everyone will know what to center their efforts around.
The Brand Voice
If you have any additional guidelines and documents regarding your requirements on the brand voice used in the campaign, attach them here so that everyone involved has quick access to that information.
The Deliverables
Finally, provide a set of deliverables that you expect from the campaign, giving your creative team something practical to work towards.
