The creative brief lays the foundation for your marketing campaign or one-off production. When you take the time to create one, you'll find it's a treasure trove of great ideas for your creative team, and they'll thank you for it. Not to mention, your audience will likely become far more engaged and that much more likely to hop on board.
So, what's this first step in the project planning process mean for your campaign as a whole, and what does a great creative brief look like?
I'll show you below, and share with you the 12 question creative brief I turn to anytime I'm tasked with scripting and planning a voiceover or video shoot.
Whether you're cranking out a video, blog article, script, product or About Us page, or you're planning a marketing campaign, start with a questionnaire that answers some seemingly basic (but super insightful) questions like, "Who is your audience?" and "What's your elevator pitch?" When you've got a series of questions like this addressed and documented in a sensible fashion, that's your creative brief.
It's a simple part of the planning process, and because of that it's often all-too-easily overlooked. It'll add clarity to the direction of your project and maybe even bring attention to previously overlooked issues and benefits of your product.
Once finished, a thorough creative brief gets shared with the project's creative team and helps ensure consistency, clarity, and efficiency at all points throughout the production process.
Here's an anecdote---I'll try and highlight some of the obstacles a creative brief can help you avoid.
Recently, I got an order for a voiceover on Fiverr. Great experience, great client! Really. I'll just get to the point---the script was way too long. It was disorganized, redundant, and lacked awareness of who exactly the video was meant for. Really cool product, but I knew immediately this would be one of those videos that doesn't hold your attention and takes way too long to address the information relevant to your concerns. It was too long because it was trying to be an explainer video and a tutorial video at the same time. A creative brief could have helped my client see that these are two entirely different videos, for two entirely different goals. It also could have saved him a bit of money and given him 2-3 shorter, punchier, and more inspiring videos to hold the audiences' attention and inspire richer engagement.
If only someone had told him all this can be yours for the low, low price of creative brief. To sum it all up nice like, while you'll probably still be able to scrape by and produce a fully engaging, on-point video without one, I'm telling you to get into the habit of wielding a creative brief in order to improve clarity and the focus of your content, and save time and money doing it.
In case you missed it the first two times, click the link below to snag a copy of the 12 question creative brief.