Is your brief pants?

You’ve made the decision to hire a creative agency – whether it’s to build you a website, develop a brand, create an ad campaign or roll out a full marketing strategy. Before you invest a penny of your marketing budget, you need to make what is arguably the most important investment in the marketing process – the creative brief.

A Creative Brief is a plan for the project. It describes your intentions, identifies what success looks like and how success will be measured. So often, organisations appoint a company to conduct some kind of marketing or creative work and end up feeling disappointed as the end result isn’t what they’d hoped for. That usually means that the goals and expectations weren’t clearly laid out to start with.

So how do you create a good brief? Here are five tips on getting it right:

• Gather background information to understand where you are today – who are your customers, what do they buy from you, where are they located, what’s working, what’s not? Get your team together to discuss this so that you’re in agreement.
• Set out clear, measurable goals that you want to achieve. Without these, there is no way to measure success. Vague targets such as ‘improve awareness’ are difficult to measure. All objectives should be considered in terms of a business problem that costs money to solve. Ask yourself: ‘What is the rationale to spend this money?’ What does success look like?
• Use a framework outlining:  Your goals, the objective of the project, the proposition i.e. what you’re trying to communicate, who your target audience is, product information, brand background, the execution, the timetable and budget.
• Provide insight. Giving too little or very dry, factual information is a recipe for disaster. The more insight, personality, descriptors and understanding you can provide the better. The agency needs to get under your skin to know who you are and what you want to be.
• If possible, write the brief in partnership with the agency. They know what they need and can help you clarify what it is you need. And it takes some work off your plate!

Click here to down load our guide to the perfect brief

By Melissa Talago of Creative