Have you ever started a creative project without any clear sense of direction or purpose? It might’ve looked like this: long, vague talks with team members on what to do next, blurry lines on where the project begins and ends, and endless back and forth on things like “what did you say you wanted this part to look like again?” or “how should it sound?”
(PSSST….Looking for the free creative brief templates? Go here.)
Yikes. It’s stressful just to think about. Not to mention an incredibly wasteful way to approach your marketing and creative projects.
Let’s talk about using a map instead. A blueprint, if you will. Let’s talk about how to write a creative brief.
What Is a Creative Brief?
Explorers have maps. Architects have blueprints. We—marketers, advertisers, artists, writers, creators, project managers—have creative briefs. Let’s break it down.
A creative brief is:
- an outline for a creative project
- written by project managers, marketing managers, or account executives
- for creative service team members (web designers, graphic designers, writers, illustrators, artists, advertising and marketing strategists)
- to describe the goals, scope, timeline, style, deliverables, and target audience of the project.
Whew! That’s a mouthful.
There’s lots of different types of creative briefs and they’re probably most famous for their role in advertising.
But since we’re project management experts and not advertising experts, we’re going to focus on the role of creative briefs in marketing project management.
Creative briefs are how marketing managers and account executives often give project details to their creative service team. They include details about project dates, style, design notes, themes and more. For this piece, we’ll be focusing on writing briefs for in-house projects and not so much on using briefs with outside clients, though the process is often very similar.
Still—our definition of a creative brief above doesn’t change. It’s all the same thing—just know that as we dive in to the why and how, we’re going to be looking at things from the project management angle.
Why Use a Creative Brief?
Remember that nightmare of a scenario we painted up there in our intro? Not using a creative brief = bad. Not using a creative brief often = frustration, sloppiness, unimaginative work, an angry you, angry team members, wasted time, and wasted money.
Invest Time Instead of Wasting Time
Fact is, using a creative brief does take time. And effort. But we’re not going to say it takes extra time, because often putting in the extra hour or two to whip a creative brief (or even less, with a template!) saves tons of time and heartache down the road. It’s just more time up front.
There’s just so many facets of a marketing project that need to be communicated to your creative team: tone/style, message, audience, call to action, due date, and so much more. You can’t leave getting all this important info across up to chance.
Creative Briefs Are Much More Efficient
Here’s one way to do things–by hope.
You can have a quick meeting with your creative team, drop all this info on them, hope they’re taking good notes, and hope you’ve covered all the bases.
You can hope you’ve told them everything they need to know to do a good job. You can hope you’ve saved time by just knocking everything out in a quick meeting.
Or…you could use a creative brief. You can use a structured template to communicate all of this crucial information in one well-organized page that:
- acts as an easy reference for your team members and for yourself (no more, “But you asked for this!” and then, “No, I asked for this!”);
- is sure to contain all the information your team needs if you’re using a well-thought out template like the one we’re offering free below; and
- helps mitigate the time-wasting back-and-forth that often comes with unclear direction.
Why use a creative brief? Direction. That’s why.
The kick in the pants answer? Because if you want to run a successful marketing campaign, you can’t afford not to. But there’s no point in investing the time up front of if you’re not going to do it right, so let’s dive into that next.
https://www.workzone.com/blog/top-marketing-podcasts/
How to Create and Use Creative Briefs For Your Projects
The process is simple. Get a few of these under your belt and it’ll get easier every time.
1. Getting Started: Your Tools
Your best tool: Pen and paper for brainstorming and sketching.
Your second best tool: a creative brief template. Like the one we’ve provided here, for instance. Save time by using a well-put together template—no need to reinvent the wheel.
And your third best tool? Project management software that’s built for sharing and using creative briefs. Like Workzone, for instance! In Workzone, you can create creative briefs with custom intake forms or attach them to projects and tasks so everyone stays on the same page.
2. Brainstorming: Your Project
Gather all the relevant info you can for your marketing project, swish it around in your brain, and get your ideas down on paper.
If it’s an in-house thing, you’ll want to focus on your company’s goals, target market, speaking/writing voice, and style.
If it’s for a client, you’ll need to sit down and have a interview with them: what’s their goal with this campaign? Who are their target markets? How would they describe their voice/style? (Here are some more important questions to ask.)
Simply get it all on paper—organization comes in the next step.
3. Writing: Your Brief
If you’ve got a good template on your side, just fill it in. It’s that simple.
It may not be easy, per se, knowing exactly what you’re looking for in this project. But it will be simple—simply having a template to follow alone will help you get your thoughts on the project in order.
Every good creative brief template for marketing project managers includes at the very least:
- a project name, or a working title for your project
- a project timeline, or a list of deadlines and milestones that break your project into manageable chunks, each with their own mini-deadlines
- overview and goals, which should describe the scope of your project and what results you and your company hope to achieve
- target markets, or profiles of what kind of people you’ll be trying to reach and affect with this project
- an explanation of deliverables, which works best as basic list that very clearly states exactly what forms all of the deliverables will take (could be Word documents, a Powerpoint presentation, a video for YouTube; could be more than one deliverable)
- a call to action, or a very clear request for action by your customers that lets them know what they should do next (“get in touch now”, “call this number”, “create an account for free”)
- style notes, or any information you have on formatting, design direction, or written and visual tone.
This section is basically your creative vision for the project, no matter how vague.
Go through your notes and organize them into these categories. Get it allllll in there; we’ll worry about polishing it down in the next step.
4. Distilling: Your Ideas
Like a resumé, a creative brief should only be a page, if not two pages. After all, you’re not doing the marketing project yourself; you’re instructing your team on how they should tackle the marketing project. Let them do their jobs. We need to set them off in the right direction.
Your creative brief should have a clear single-minded proposition: your one true purpose, your most distilled and polished version of what you want from this project. Cut out anything that does not serve to communicate this purpose.
Channel your inner Hemingway and ruthlessly cut it down. What’s left will be even more powerful and give your creative team the space to do what they do best: get creative. As long as they understand your single-minded proposition, you’re golden.
5. Collaborating: Your Team
Sock it to ‘em and let them do their thing.
Again, it’s efficient to have a system or guide for handling creative briefs in place—sort of like a road map that explains where the creative brief can be accessed, what channels to communicate through during the project, how to find out about any changes, edits or feedback and how to share deliverables.
6. Handling Changes, Edits and Completion
The question isn’t whether or not you’ll have changes to the creative brief or edits on the working product, it’s how you’ll handle things when the need for them arises.
Changes and edits are almost always a factor, another reason having a home base in the form of a creative brief is crucial.
Keep communication with your creative team open and get ready to make yourself available for questions and feedback. Tell your team know if you’ve made changes to the creative brief and let them know when you expect the finished work.
If you use a project management system like Workzone, you can input your tasks, set task dependencies, assign to the apNealpropriate creative teams (in-house or freelancers) and upload files so they’re all in one place.
And when your team completes the project beautifully like the creative champs they are?
Launch campaign, pop bottles, and all hail the creative brief.
7. Reviewing
How’d it go? How did this project turn out vs. projects you’ve worked on without creative briefs?
It was worth it, right? Using a creative brief?
Get introspective for a minute on your brief and your project. What went well? What can you and your team do better next time?
Review your process often and work on strategy to grow more proficient at it over time.
The Dark Days Are Behind You
Trust me: once you’ve used a creative brief, you won’t want it any other way for your marketing projects. Any project without a creative brief will now feel like a long, desperate, and thirsty trek through the desert.
Goodbye, unclear objectives.
Goodbye, lack of direction.
Hello substance and giving customers exactly what they need in a marketing campaign.
Hello creative briefs, the heroes that’ll keep you pointed towards true north throughout any marketing project.
