What Is a Creative Brief? The Key to Marketing Success

When starting a new project, you need to get everyone on the same page.

Project management takes a lot of collaboration and communication. Whether between individuals in a team, departments, or different companies, there needs to be a method to organize the communication. Expectations, feedback, and edits can all be tracked with a creative brief. It’s the simplest way to facilitate communication and collaboration between several parties. 

By allowing your entire team to communicate and collaborate on the current project, you ensure a quality deliverable. Creative briefs are also essential when it comes to project or campaign development. 

Writing a creative brief allows you to have thorough communication throughout the project development stage and facilitates creating the ideal end product. The creative brief should be passed on to all necessary stakeholders to communicate the vision for the project and gather changes that need to be made. Such collaboration will prevent miscommunication and ensure that everyone is satisfied with the completed project. 

Creative briefs can have many sections with detailed information; however, it’s important to keep them brief. Only include the necessary details to keep the project focused. 

When to use a creative brief

Creative briefs are used for various projects, big or small, from creating one image to developing an entire campaign with several deliverables. 

The creative brief is a part of the project planning process, so it should be completed before you start creating deliverables. The brief should be exchanged between several relevant parties so that it can be commented on and changed as needed before it enters the execution phase. 

However, the use of the creative brief doesn’t stop once the planning phase is completed. During the development of the deliverables, the brief will still act as a guide for project requirements and due dates. It can be used as a reference throughout this project phase and tweaked to reflect edits in the project’s direction based on appropriate feedback. 

Who uses a creative brief?

Creative briefs can be used for both internal and external projects that impact the people who use them. 

If the project is internal, you’ll route the brief between members of your team and departments directly involved in the project. For example, if you need your in-house design team to create a featured image for the article you just wrote, you’d share the creative brief between you, your editor, and the design team. 

If you’re working on an external project that serves a client, you’ll share it between the members of your team working on the project and the appropriate members of the client’s team. 

Let’s say you own a marketing agency that plans social media campaigns for your clients. Among your team, you’ll share the brief between the project manager, the design team, and the social media trends research team. On the client’s side, you would want the point of contact, the social media manager, and the band director to see the brief and give you feedback before completing the project. 

Who uses the creative brief depends on what kind of project you’re creating. What’s important to remember is that anyone relevant to the project should see the brief and provide feedback. By maintaining constant communication between all parties involved, you’ll minimize the number of edits needed and ensure a quality final product. 

How to write a creative brief

Creative briefs are just that, brief. However, in that brief one to two pages, a lot of information is packed in. Think about what’s valuable and necessary to complete the project. A typical creative brief template would include the following:

• The context for the project
• Possible challenges
• Main objective
• Target audience
• Messaging
• Deliverable description
• Technical requirements

However, a creative brief format can be flexible. Since the brief should be concise, it’s okay to cut out what you don’t need to include. By only providing relevant information, you’ll keep the project focused on what’s important. Take a look at a few sample creative briefs to gain a better understanding.

Provide context 

The first step in any creative brief is to provide the context for the project. This can mean a variety of things depending on what the project is about. You want all of the information in the brief to be essential, so keep that in mind when giving the background information.

If you’re working with an external party, such as an advertising agency, unfamiliar with your company or the project, the context should include who your company is, what you do, and what the project is about. These details would be necessary in this case to ensure that the project reflects the company brand. If you feel that adding all of this information would make the creative brief too long, you can also refer the collaborators to further resources in this section, such as by hyperlinking to the about page on your website. 

The more familiar the collaborators are with the company, the less information you need to include in this section. So, if you’re working with an internal team, context will likely just include background information for the project. You wouldn’t want to get into the company details unless you feel it is absolutely necessary as a reminder. An example of a time when including extra details might be a good idea is when you’re a new company and want to ensure you’re conveying a consistent brand identity. Besides times like these, you most likely will not need to provide excessive content to your internal teams. 

Describe possible challenges

You’ll want to describe any possible challenges the project could face. This will ensure the success of your project. 

Being mindful of challenges will determine what the final deliverables are. Imagine that your company is experiencing social media troubles in the form of low engagement, and you’re planning a social media campaign in your brief. Your team would realize from this challenge that your campaign needs to include interactive and eye-catching content. The team may even add a social ad specialist to the project and promote your content via Instagram or Facebook ads. 

If you hadn’t mentioned that your company was struggling in the social media realm, your project might have resulted in some nice posts, but nothing that was aimed to solve the issues you were facing. 

The key to describing challenges is to remember that you want to keep these issues from affecting the project. By mentioning them in the brief, you’re proactive in the crafting of the project. The collaborators on the project will be able to shape the final deliverables around the challenges to avoid them in the future. 

State the main objective

The main objective is the central message and purpose of the project. This section can be as short as one sentence or as long as a paragraph. It’s especially important to be clear and concise in this section as it sets the stage for the entire project. You don’t want the ideas to get muddled and confusing, so make sure you have determined the main objective. 

Don’t feel pressured to have the slogan or any key copywriting done. Someone else on the team can take care of that. Here, the message is more important than delivery. You’ll want to describe how you want the project or campaign to impact the target audience. 

The main objective of your marketing campaign will lead the direction of the creative team in their completion of the project. Keep your marketing strategy and project goals in mind when explaining the main objective to prepare an effective creative brief outline.

Define the target audience

Looking at your demographics and defining your target audience in your creative brief will set your campaign up for success. Consider demographics like age, gender, or geographic location when deciding which audience to address. Marketers need to take the target audience into consideration when deciding on the key messages of the project. The target audience determines how you will say what you want to say for it to be best received. 

Target audience and main objective are two parts of the creative brief that heavily rely on each other. It's important to set a clear objective relevant to the audience you address. Once you know the purpose of your project, you'll need to pick the audience that is most relevant to those campaign goals. 

Explain the messaging

Once you know what you're saying and who you're saying it to, it's important to explain how you want it said. When you explain the campaign messaging, you'll want to include information about the brand voice and the tone to create a style guide for the creative team.

Consider your target audience and the main objective. If you're making a statement about a social issue to a Gen Z target audience,, you'll want to have a grave but inspirational tone. However, you'll want this tone to be consistent with your brand, which is why you would explain your brand voice. 

The brand voice should be at the core of any creative project. However, it's important to adapt your tone to the message, which is why this section of the creative brief is crucial in explaining how your team will do so. Messaging will determine how your campaign is received, so it's important to be clear about the nuances of communication in your style guide.

Give a deliverable description

In this section of the creative brief, you'll give a design brief for the creative work you expect to receive for the project or campaign. You need to outline exactly what you expect from the creative team. 

For example, if you're planning a social media campaign, in this section, you would state how many feed graphics and story graphics you need. 

You can detail what you want to see in each post or leave the deliverable details to the creative team. The most important thing in this section is to state what you want to receive from the team for this creative brief.

Include technical requirements 

Technical requirements are the details that lay behind the creative work process. This can include due dates, how the editing process will work, or measurable metrics you need to build into the deliverables. You can also include any links to additional useful information that wouldn't fit into the one to two-page brief and contact information for relevant parties if in case the creative team has questions. 

Technical requirements allow you to communicate your expectations to the team outside of the creative work. This facilitates communication on both ends involving the project as a whole. You'll be more likely to get a better end product if you're clear about the processes and expectations of delivery beforehand. 

Time to brief the creatives

Creative briefs streamline the campaign or project creation process. You'll address all team needs in advance, allowing for a better end product. Communication is key when it comes to the success of a marketing team, and that's exactly why you would want to use a creative brief. Keep it short but dense with information, and watch your creative creation process improve significantly. 

Need help deciding which project management software to use to keep all of your creative briefs on track? Here are the best free project management software according to users.