If you’re about to start your first marketing campaign and you’re looking for the best guide to help you craft a great marketing brief for the team, you have come to the right place. Starting a new project of any kind comes with many questions and worries, so having some guidelines on-hand when you need them can save you a lot of headaches.
In this article, we’ll explain what a marketing brief is and give you the ten essential elements of what it needs to include. We hope that after reading this guide, you’ll have a much better understanding of how everything works and be able to create marketing briefs with your eyes closed.
Let’s get started.
What Is a Marketing Brief?
Essentially, marketing briefs are a guideline for your marketing campaign. It provides a solid strategy to effectively achieve the marketing goals so that your business’s internal and external teams are aligned.
The marketing brief should cover these five critical points for the teams:
- Explaining the purpose of the marketing strategy.
- Providing details of the results that will determine the success of the campaign.
- Identifying potential customers.
- Ensuring the team gets to the expected outcomes of the projects.
- Setting clear goals, timelines, and responsible parties involved in the process of the campaign.
A good brief should be concise and straightforward yet cover the important grounds.
Now let’s take a look at how to create one.
How to Write a Marketing Brief in 10 Simple Steps
1. Background Summary
Firstly, you should provide an overview of your company, products, and services as a whole.
Try to cover everything about your business so that all people involved fully understand your business and its purpose. Doing so will also help the external parties like stakeholders, ad agencies, and copywriters know who they are working with.
Answer the following questions:
- What are your company’s core values?
- How did you come up with the mission statements for your brand?
- What’s the voice of your brand?
Doing so will help you paint a clearer picture of your brand, which will help to create an effective campaign strategy.
2. Define the Marketing Objectives
This is where you list the specific desired outcomes of the project, which often take the form of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Be very detailed, so everyone involved in the campaign knows what they’re trying to achieve. Keep in mind to align the objectives with the priorities of the company.
Try to answer these questions:
- Why are your proposed campaigns beneficial?
- What’s the overall goal of the campaign?
- What are the risks associated with it?
- What’s the campaign supposed to communicate?
Clearly define what you intend to achieve with the marketing campaign.
3. Set the Budget
The next thing to include is how much money you can afford to spend on the campaign. This is essential because it will determine what type of strategies the marketers can implement.
This is an often-overlooked section of the brief because marketers would write and tell the creative team to go as big as they need to, but in reality, they only have a limited amount of resources available in the first place.
To avoid such a mishap, you should create an overall marketing campaign budget, break it down, and provide a certain amount of money to each strategy. The team can then effectively come up with methods to achieve the objectives based on the budget.
4. Target Market Information
Here you should provide a breakdown of the demographics of your target audience. Try segmenting them into personas. There could be primary and secondary audience types. Try to include as many details as you can about your target audience’s segmentation.
Explain what type of messages you’re going to send to your target audience and what kind of strategies are most effective in reaching them.
Try answering these questions to start:
- Are you focused on consumers or other businesses?
- How do you intend to segment the market, and what products or services can serve your target audience?
- What type of consumer personas are interested in your brand?
- What factors influence their buying decisions?
- What are the barriers preventing them from purchasing your product?
This information is useful when creating all marketing strategies, so make sure to put in the required work to gather the most accurate data.
5. Product Details
In this section, give an in-depth explanation of each of your products or services. List their benefits and any additional information that will help sell them and raise awareness of your brand.
The things you sell should solve the consumer’s problems and give them some additional benefit in return.
Keep these in mind when describing your product or service:
- Does it have any unique features? If so, what are they?
- Is it the first of its kind?
- Does it bring the best value to the industry? If yes, elaborate on how.
- How can it be substantiated?
Write everything you can about the product, don’t assume that your product designer, creative team, and ad agency knows precisely what the product is about.
6. Competitor Analysis
You may want to include an overview of the competitive landscape of the industry that you’re in. Follow all new trends and market conditions that can impact your industry. Pay attention to your competitors’ projects and marketing materials, and see what makes it a success.
The competitor analysis will highlight the amount of risk you’ll face. An in-depth analysis and market research may also let you know how your campaign can outperform your competition.
Ask the following:
- What are your competitors doing?
- Who’s currently leading in the market?
- How can you differentiate yourself from the rest?
- What are the latest trends that are heavily influencing the industry?
Brainstorm other relevant questions, as this information can be a life-changer when it comes to increasing brand awareness.
7. List of Stakeholders
Here, list everyone involved in the marketing campaign along with their responsibilities. Everyone in the company should know at least:
- Who’s in charge of the design?
- Who’s executing each marketing strategy?
- Who will keep the teams in check? See if they’re on the right timeline?
- Who’s the overseer of the entire campaign
Having an explicit knowledge of who does what will make the internal communication process easier and more efficient.
8. Set Your Marketing Channel
Since you now have your target audience information, the next step is to determine which marketing channel is best to reach out to them while also coming up with the marketing mix.
You need to incorporate your marketing plan into the right channel to reach your consumers effectively. This can involve email marketing, social media marketing, ranking on organic search, doing paid ads, or even through television.
9. List Mandatories
Here you should list what must be included and what should be avoided in your marketing campaign. Things like call-to-actions, logos, telephone numbers, web addresses, and social media links must be included in your campaign.
Make sure you also list the guidelines, legal requirements, terms and conditions, disclaimers, and project deliverables. This is so all the expectations of the campaign are laid out to avoid any surprises.
Also, highlight the tone and voice of your brand so everyone is on the same page when communicating the campaign’s message.
10. Set Up Measures
The last thing you need to do is set up and clearly define how the campaign’s success will be measured. Whether it is to increase sales by a certain percentage or gain a certain percentage of market share, break down the mechanism of how and when it will be measured.
Remember to be specific. Have a set time frame and measure the results based on the specified time, be it quarterly or yearly.
Once a project is done, you should evaluate and compare the results to the predictions to see if you’re on the right track.
All of these steps are the necessary elements of a marketing brief, so be sure to include all of this in your brief. You can break them down into more detailed sections or add other areas as you see fit, but these ten are the must-have ones.
Why Is a Marketing Brief Important?
- It serves as a communication document between clients, agencies, and teams involved in the campaign objectives, target audience information, product or service details, and media channels.
- It becomes a document that measures the marketing journey to achieve the business objectives and keep the marketing team on course.
- It is a guide for the marketing team that’ll help them craft the best marketing plans for the campaign and get them on the same page towards the same goal.
Conclusion
Now you know what a marketing brief is, the essential elements it should involve, and why it is crucial for your business. Let’s recap on its most essential components:
- Background summary of your business and brand
- Your marketing objectives
- A set budget
- Target market information
- Product details
- Competitor analysis
- List of stakeholders
- A set marketing channel
- List of mandatories
- Set-up of measures
All that’s left to do now is for you to start implementing these elements into your marketing briefs.
Remember to take your time when crafting this, do the necessary marketing research and analysis first, communicate with your team, and ask for their suggestions.
It takes a lengthy approval process before you can proceed with your marketing briefs, so try to create the best game plan for your marketing initiative. Ultimately, this is a document that will help the entire team reach the objectives.
Good luck!
