Guiding vendors and agencies

Your strategy may include the creation of marketing materials, like advertising, promotions, websites, and sales literature. If so, you'll probably use some type of external agency or an internal team to help you. To do a great job for you, they need your guidance and you do that with what's called a creative brief. A creative brief is a short overview of a creative assignment. A good creative brief sets expectations for the project.

It answers key questions like, what needs to be created? How will it be used? What are the deliverables for the project? And when are the deadlines? It's like a contract. You can find many templates online for creative briefs, and in the exercise files, I've included a sample that you can follow. Whatever format you use, it should include the following. First, give an overview of your marketing situation. What's the big picture? What's going on in the market? What's the competition doing? Are there any opportunities or problems in the market? Next, describe the objective of the creative piece.

Is it a commercial? A sales brochure? A website? And so on. Give a concise statement of the effect that it should have on consumers. Then, describe the target audience. Who are we talking to? The more precise and detailed you can be, the better. Explain how the audience currently thinks, feels, and behaves in relation to the product category, your brand, and your specific product or service. Next, outline the most important thing to say. That, of course, is in your value proposition. It's the single most persuasive statement we can make to achieve the objective. You should also include the reasons to believe. What are the supporting rationale and emotional reasons to believe and buy? The agency may use these points in the creative piece. Then, describe how you'll measure success. What specific metrics will you look at to see if the creative piece is working? Is it website visits? Is it units of products sold? Or it could be something you measure later with marketing research like top-of-mind awareness.

Complete your creative brief with a schedule and a budget for the project. Notice that every bit of the information that goes into the creative brief can be found in your marketing plan. Segmentation, targeting, positioning, consumer analysis, communications objectives, and so on. It's all there. But keep in mind that the creative brief should be, well, brief. Don't just hand the agency your marketing plan and expect them to sort through it.

A creative brief is much more detailed than your plan, but very focused on just one specific marketing program in that plan. With the proper guidance from a well-written creative brief, your support teams will create amazing and effective marketing materials.