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7 Creative Brief Secrets Every Marketer Should Know

Bob Angus — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:25:57 +0000

We’ve all written a creative brief. But there is a big difference between a good brief and a great one. Here are seven secrets that every marketer should leverage, but few actually use. Use these simple tips to improve your design brief and agency interactions. The results will be better creative results done faster and ultimately greater ROI.

1. Don’t tell your agency what to do creatively

Probably one of the biggest traps to fall into is telling your agency or freelancer exactly what to do. Resist the urge no matter how creative you are. You’ve hired them for their creative skills and to produce great work. Let them do it. Unleash creative teams to bring in their experiences and unique insights to develop an exceptional campaign. And frankly, the project won’t be as fun for them if you dictate the creative details you want in your creative brief.

2. Provide high impact proof points

One of the key difference makers in a creative brief is to include some key data points – meaningful facts, research results, milestones, 3rd party confirmed rankings, customer testimonials, anything that your creative team can leverage. These proof points give creative teams something to build on to develop influential messages and avoid blah, blah, blah marketing. From an audience standpoint, these proof points validate any marketing claims and help them affirm their decision to act.

3. Tell stories

Sometimes the “a-ha” moment coming from a creative brief isn’t in the bullet points. Good creative teams can tease out something meaningful or emotionally evocative from anecdotes and real world experiences with your company, product or service. You probably won’t be able to write out the whole story in your creative brief. Just add some reminders in the document and then be the storyteller when reviewing the brief with the team or agency.

4. Don’t use the same creative brief again and again

It is likely that you will work with the same agency or team more than once. Or you are promoting the same product, but just creating a different campaign. To avoid getting diminishing or mediocre results, I highly recommend that you don’t reuse the same design brief over and over again. Refresh the content of your creative brief with each project… even if the target audience and proof points are the same. It signals the creative team to stay engaged and thinking of the next exceptional campaign, because you are engaged too. If you feel the brief isn’t that important to update or don’t put in the effort, you should expect equivalent lackluster results from the project.

5. Define measurable objectives

We all know to make our goals measurable, right? Make sure to include objectives with more than just a generic statement like “increase ROI” or “drive more leads”. Give an actual target number. Better yet, substantiate that measurable objective with any baseline results or analytics you have. For example, let them know that your last three campaigns had an average conversion rate of 7%. That objective is much more actionable.

6. Better targeting through buyer personas

Describing the target audience and what motivates them can be considered the most important element of a design brief. Paint a picture of the types of people who will buy to get the most out that section of the brief. You want your creative team to be able to mentally step in that buyer’s shoes. What is their job? What do they do day-to-day? High-level industry or broad customer segmentation information is useful, but providing your creative team with personal details is where you get great ideas.

7. What drives action?

Building on the buyer persona tip, the next secret is to tap into what will drive the buyer act. Take the persona information a few steps further by 1) describing what motivates the target buyer and 2) identifying what emotion can induce action. What do they do to get a raise or make their life easier? Answer questions like that to uncover motivations and to show examples of what a person actually does, based on that motivation. Then figure out an underlying emotion associated with that action. For example, do they feel something positive like association or comparative advantage or something negative like scarcity or loss aversion?

There is a lot of great information you can provide in a creative brief. Use these secrets to maximize results of your campaigns and projects. Check out the creative brief template that I use. It includes reminders for each these tips. Feel free to download it and use it for your next project.

What’s your secret ingredient to a great creative brief?

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best practices, content, creative, design, download, education, how-to guide, productivity, template

Free Creative Brief Template

Bob Angus — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:39:49 +0000

A creative brief (also known as a design brief) is the best way to communicate key elements and objectives of your creative project. A great brief can lead to the most imaginative and effective campaigns. Use this free creative brief template as the starting point to working with agencies, freelancers, writers, communications teams, and web design shops.

The creative brief template below is the same one that I use for all of my projects. It provides key design considerations and a list of questions that will help describe your project or campaign. As the subject matter expert for your project, you are best suited to explain relevant details about the target audience, key messages, and brand guidelines. It can take time to complete a thorough creative brief, but you will save a lot of time over the course of the project and most likely result in top quality, high impact creative work.

It is also important that you sit down and discuss your creative brief with your design or creative team. Give them inspiration and share your knowledge, but avoid prescribing the creative elements. Or as the excellent creative brief guide from AdCracker.com says,

Great advertising and design briefs have insights and anecdotes – quotes from buyers, interesting stories about the company, key research findings. Stuff like that.
Bummer briefs are incomplete, or dictate the creative, or use ambiguous language. Fluff like that.

Here is the creative brief template that I use. You may also download a MS Word or Adobe PDF version.

Download Creative Brief Template – MS Word (.docx)

Download Creative Brief Template – Adobe PDF (.pdf)

Creative Brief Template

Overview

Provide a brief description of project and the expected deliverables. Keep this overview to just one paragraph as this is the creative brief only. Additional details can be referenced in the Resources section.

Objectives

List 2-3 desired outcomes and strategies for success, including measurable results if possible.

Schedule and Budget

Identify the target due date for the finished project and any event date driving completion. Also include major milestones or checkpoint dates that occur during the creative and production process.

Provide budget information for the project as appropriate.

Target Audiences

Target audience is the most important part of the creative brief. Describe the target audience and all relevant characteristics that will help “put you in the audience’s shoes”.

Provide the following types of audience information:

Audience types – relevant industry, market segment description
Buyer types – relevant description of individuals by role business decision maker, technical buyer, marketing, sales, etc.
Key motivations – What makes them act? What emotion can we connect with?
Key issues – What are their problems that we can solve?
Characteristics – Where do they access information? What types of media do they consume?
Demographics – gender, age, etc.

Key Messages

Present information that can be used in developing the creative:

Benefits and features
Facts and proof points – rank by a credible 3rd party, major milestones
Testimonials, case study examples

Call to Action

What action do you want the audience to take? Where do they go or click?

Creative Considerations

Identify any requirements and brand considerations that impact format, copy, and visual elements, including:

Format – web, print, video, sound
Layout – considerations in accordance to brand guidelines
Tone – personality or voice that resonates with the audience or as required in accordance to brand guidelines
Visual – color palette, typography, graphics, photography, logos, icons
Localization – any language or regional considerations or requirements

Resources

Link to additional resources and reference materials that can be researched during creative development, including:

Brand guidelines
Existing source materials, including business plans, technical documentation, or websites.
Competitive analysis
Benchmarks or best of breed comparable examples
Legal considerations

You feel free to download the MS Word or Adobe PDF versions of this creative brief template.

Download Adobe PDF (.pdf)

Download MS Word (.docx)

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best practices, content, creative, design, download, education, productivity, template

Teaching My 5 Year Old the Gift of Giving

Bob Angus — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:10:43 +0000

It can be hard for children to understand the amazing importance of giving to others, especially at Christmas time. At 5 years of age, my daughter has understandably been swept away by the exciting dream of what she is going to get from Santa Claus. The consumer fever and marketing of today only adds to the frenzy.

How can parents help their child understand, enjoy and actively participate in charities? After all, charitable giving is totally different than the concept of sharing where the child understands that they will eventually get something in return. The good news is that children get the same powerful emotion of joy and inspiration that adults get when they help others. So much so, that the gift of giving can become a habit, not just a once a year activity.

For my daughter, my wife and I have focused on four key elements:

Actions speak louder than words

Children look at their parents actions more than anything to learn what to do and how to do it. If I write a check to make a donation, my daughter will not fully appreciate the act. It is the same as writing a check at the grocery store. I recommend taking action together as a family. Earlier this year, our family volunteered to help with the ice skating competition for the regional Special Olympics. My daughter helped me serve lunch for the athletes and later got to cheer on the speed skaters while my wife timed them.

Help other children

As much as they look up to you as parents, children know what it is like to be a kid. They want other kids to be happy and take a special interest when they can help a fellow kid. Donate to a toy or clothing drive that is specifically for a childrenâ€™s organization. Ask your child to choose a toy or clothes that he or she no longer uses (donâ€™t do it for them). Then, take them with you when you drop off the items. My daughter just did this with her collection of books for a program run by our public library.

Projects lead to great achievements

Children love activities and they love to work toward a goal. One of my favorites is a program at our local YMCA called the 12 Days of Fitness. Any member who swims or works out twelve times in December and brings in at least two food items for the food bank is entered into a drawing. What my daughter loves more than the chance at a prize is that she gets a sticker to track her progress on a board posted in the lobby. Everybody wins with this program.

Reinforce by having them come up with the idea

My ultimate goal is to build charitable giving as a habit, just like reading or riding a bike. The best way that I can help is by not doing it all for my daughter, even if it is tempting sometimes. To help me write this post, my family brainstormed and researched some other fun ways to give back to the community. Here is a list of additional projects and ideas that we liked:

Ask your local Humane Society or shelter if you can help walk dogs or feed smaller animals.
Pick out an extra item to donate to the local food bank every time you go grocery shopping.
Bake cookies for the homeless shelter.
Rake the leaves, pull weeds, or help plant a flower garden for elderly people in your neighborhood.
Start a charity donation jar and put in part of the weekly allowance (or paycheck for me).
Also, we just ordered The Giving Book: Open the Door to a Lifetime of Giving by Ellen Sabin. We look forward to getting more fun projects and charitable programs from reading it.

My wife and I are really just starting to teach our daughter how important it is to help others. She is doing great so far. We look forward to doing even more for charities and the community in 2008. If you have other ideas for children or stories about charitable giving that you have done, please add a comment.