How To Write A Creative Brief? – 11 Steps Quickly Tell You

Creative Brief

What Is A Creative Brief?

A creative brief is a concise document that summarizes the mission, goals, challenges, demographics, messaging, and other important information for marketing, advertising, or design project. It is frequently developed by a consultant or an imaginative project manager. Prior to the start of a project, stakeholder alignment is the objective of a brief.

If you’re a consultant presenting a creative brief to a client or a project manager presenting a brief to your team, start by speaking with the project stakeholders. You will gain a better understanding of the company’s mission, the project goals, and the difficulties your team faces thanks to these discussions. After that, you’ll have enough details to create an engaging brief that concentrates on the issues that matter most to your business or client.

Despite how straightforward the concept of a creative brief may seem, it can be challenging to condense numerous crucial details into a limited number of pages. A creative brief is therefore typically composed of eight sections that can each take up one to two pages.

Within almost every marketing, advertising, or design team, creative briefs are pretty standard documents. However, each company’s creative brief may take a slightly different format depending on the requirements of the client or project. Your creative brief will be built on the straightforward outline that is provided below. It contains details about the project’s stakeholders and the crucial steps in the creative process.

Creative Brief Outline

  1. Project Name
  2. Company Background
  3. Project Objective
  4. Target Audience
  5. Competitors
  6. Key Message
  7. Key Consumer Benefit
  8. Attitude
  9. Call to Action
  10. Distribution

Why Develop a Creative Brief?

A creative brief is a guidepost for creative deliverables: it guides in-house experts, an advertising agency, or a creative consultant in the development of messages and materials that fit within the campaign’s overall strategic approach.

A creative brief outlines the most important elements of the SBCC campaign

  • the most important social or health issue to be addressed.
  • the campaign’s target audiences in terms of importance and sway.
  • the significance of interacting with those groups.
  • the essential conduct to encourage.
  • the justification for why the audience(s) should behave a certain way.
  • the advantages of doing that.

Who Should Create A Creative Brief?

A small, focused team should develop the creative brief. Staff from the communication, health, and social services sectors, as well as research staff, should be included.

When Should a Creative Brief be Developed?

The team should conduct a situation analysis and audience analysis before creating a creative brief. The analysis-generated data is used to guide the process of developing new ideas. The development of the message and materials will be governed by the creative brief.

How To Write A Creative Brief?

1. Choose A Name For Your Project

Choosing a project name is the first step in creating a creative brief. Although it may seem straightforward, this is one of the most important aspects of a creative brief. Many members of your team will learn about a new product or service for the first time through the campaign name if you’re developing a campaign around it. The telephone game is avoided when the campaign (and consequently the good or service) are referred to by their correct names. Without a clear and specific campaign name, people will coin their own terms, which may change the campaign’s goals.

Keep it creative and succinct when coming up with a name for your project or campaign in your creative brief. It should be fine to use a few words or a brief sentence. If you’re launching a product, decide what the target audience’s call to action will be before basing the name on it. Here are a few examples of fictional campaign names:

2. Write About The Company Briefly

The history of the company is a further straightforward but crucial section. This is unavoidable if you work for an agency because your staff is probably managing multiple client campaigns concurrently. In any case, you should still include this section if you’re creating a creative brief for a project that will be done internally. The background that your internal team is already aware of will be valued by new team members, independent contractors, and vendors.

The company history shouldn’t be a summary of the company’s history or a paragraph that has been pasted directly from the about page. Make this more suited to the current project. Give a brief summary of the brand’s mission in one or two sentences to set the stage. The brand’s history and the circumstances that led to the project’s development are briefly discussed in a few sentences after this.

While some creatives have put this information all together in a quick paragraph, others separate it with headers like “Brand Statement” and “Background.”

3. The Project’s Goal Should Be Highlighted

The creative brief narrows down from here. Briefly describe the project’s goals, schedule, and intended audience should all be included in the project objective. This can be said succinctly in one or two sentences, but you can get creative and style it in chunks.

By highlighting the importance of the project, this section of the creative brief will be beneficial. The goal-related elements will assist you and your team in setting expectations for the project. Goals and objectives can be the main focus of this section if the company or client hasn’t identified any significant obstacles. A successful project should be described along with how it will help the business.

Pro tip: For more information on how to write goals and project objectives, check out this blog post.

Here’s an example of a sample creative brief for PayPal that offers separate sections for “The Problem” and “The Goal”:

4. Indicate Who The Target Market Is

The target audience for the project needs to be determined next. This market segment will directly profit from the new product or service that is being introduced. Identifying a primary and secondary audience allows you to take audience segmentation a step further. Your team will have more freedom to explore original concepts that might appeal to one group over the other if you do this.

When crafting the target audience section, be sure to include the following:

  • Demographics – Your team can better understand the audience by using simple demographic data. This includes details like age, income, education, ethnicity, and occupation.
  • Psychographics – This is the general perception of your brand and the good or service you offer to the audience.
  • Geographics – Geographics should be explicitly stated in the creative brief for digital, physical, and hybrid campaigns so that media buyers can determine how much each market will cost for advertising space.
  • Behaviors – The target audience’s behaviors include purchasing patterns, fads, and other aspects of customer history. These explain the customer’s position in the buying process and provide crucial context for the creative brief.

5. Analyze The Market Environment For Competitors

It benefits everyone on the team to be aware of what your rivals are doing. You can use competitive data to generate novel ideas, learn from their failed initiatives, or develop a project that enhances a past tactic they have employed.

A brief list of rival companies offering comparable goods or services should be included. List a few similarities your company has with them, some ways your brand has already set itself apart from the competition, and a few ways this project can help you advance.

6. Prepare Your Main Point

Because almost every stakeholder will have a different idea of what it should be, developing the key message can be the most challenging part of the creative brief. Try this easy trick if you want to buy in sooner. Ask yourself “What does it matter that we are starting this project?” Your main argument is the so what? It explains the benefits of having your target audience pause what they’re doing and focus on your campaign.

The key message outlines the audience’s pain point, what their experience might be like without it, and the benefit they will derive from your company’s solution. The customer is the campaign’s main focus thanks to this framework. It positions them as the main character in the journey from problem to the solution rather than telling them what this good or service could do for them.

7. Select The Main Consumer Benefit

When you introduce a new product, the intended market is probably going to experience a number of features and advantages. Building a campaign around a variety of features is extremely challenging, though. Because of this, marketers and creatives include something in the creative brief known as a key consumer benefit (KCB) to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding the main benefit being communicated. You should consult the project’s stakeholders for their opinions and rely on consumer data to help you make the best KCB choice.

Pro tip: Your KCB won’t always be your product’s most expensive feature. It’s a good idea to choose the KCB benefit that helps your audience the most.

8. Select An Attitude

Your campaign’s tone and voice establish its overall attitude, which should be maintained throughout the development of all its creative components. Copywriters can create copy that conveys the desired message in the appropriate setting by selecting a few adjectives that best describe the campaign’s attitude. To portray the tone and voice, graphic designers can also use colors and techniques.

You should also indicate the appropriate voice for your audience in this section of the brief. Others may respond better to a casual, relatable tone while some audiences, such as those in the business world, prefer more formal language. To substantiate your decision to choose a particular brand voice and tone, you could write something like, “Because it targets younger Gen-Z audiences, our brand voice has a relaxed and carefree tone.”

Use a thesaurus to identify specific words that elicit complex feelings and attitudes for a hyper-targeted campaign.

9. The Best Call To Action Should Be Determined

Last but not least, after viewing your campaign, your audience needs something to do. CTAs have the advantage of not having to be physical actions. A CTA may aim to alter audience opinions and perceptions of your brand without asking them to take any action.

If you have a primary and secondary target audience, your creative brief may contain several different CTAs. However, it’s a good idea to have one main CTA that supports the project objective we discussed earlier.

10. Make A Distribution Schedule.

When the project is finished, you must ensure that the intended audience actually sees it. Include any promotional content you’ll be producing, along with a few channels or platforms where you plan to announce the launch.

Consider your intended audience as you write this section. Spend no time on a promotion that they won’t notice. For instance, if you’re promoting a project to Gen-Z, you should invest in social media rather than using billboards or newspaper ads.

11. Share the creative brief with stakeholders

Share your creative brief with the team you’ll be working with after you’ve completed it. Additionally, you should distribute it within the organization using Slack, emails, or presentations. If you’re a consultant doing work for a client outside of that client’s organization, encourage them to circulate the brief internally.

You should be available to take questions from coworkers or receive feedback if they have any innovative ideas as you or your clients raise awareness. This tactic will increase project support, ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page, and improve team alignment.

You have a creative starting point for your subsequent project now that your brief is finished. At each stage of the project, don’t forget to review your brief. It’s an excellent way to confirm that you’re still moving in the right direction.