Every excellent marketing campaign begins with a good briefing. This document is an essential communication tool so that the agency and the client are aligned, and the actions achieve the desired results.
For the marketing briefing to do its job, it must contain a series of fundamental elements, start from a thorough investigation and present the information clearly and concisely. We tell you its keys.
Table of Contents
What is a marketing briefing?
The briefing is a document that serves as a communication tool between companies and marketing agencies. It is a kind of summary in which the company explains what it wants to achieve with a specific campaign, what purpose, what time frame, and what means.
There are different briefing; Specifically, the marketing briefing aims to summarize the information about a specific marketing action that you want to start.
Sometimes, the client himself is the one who prepares the briefing from start to finish, either for his usual agency or to receive proposals from potential suppliers. In others, the marketing agency is in charge of advising the client by sending him a template to fill out or even take care of most of the document’s preparation. In that case, there must be a reasonable investigation of the client’s needs by the agency.
In any case, a good briefing must respond to the following characteristics :
- Be concise (let’s not forget that “briefing” comes from “brief,” short in English) but include all the necessary information so that the marketing agency can correctly target the campaign.
- Follow a logical order, from the most general to the most particular.
- Be understandable to all the client team and the company, avoiding excessive technicalities from both the marketing world and the client sector.
- Make it very clear what you want to achieve and what the expectations are for the agency.
The critical points of a marketing briefing
There is no universal template for a marketing briefing, and there may be slight differences in structure and content depending on the agency’s style. To guide you in its preparation, below, we include the sections that should not be missing.
Company situation and background
To do its job well, the agency must have a deep understanding of the client’s business. Therefore, every briefing should have at least a short introduction that explains what you do, what your values are, and what tone of communication you are looking for.
Likewise, it is also necessary to understand the current market situation and its evolution in recent months or years, with data such as brand positioning, sales figures, and the latest marketing campaigns. Nor can we forget an analysis of the main competitors.
Needs and objectives
Usually, what the client looks for from the marketing agency is to help him solve a problem or need related to his brand’s communication. Therefore, the briefing should stop to explain what this problem is and what type of solution is being sought.
A series of objectives should also be raised from the analysis of the problem, both qualitative and quantitative. These objectives must be clearly defined, present a real challenge, and explain how we will measure whether they are being achieved or not.
Buyer person
Every marketing campaign is directed to a specific target or audience that is potentially interested in the brand.
A handy tool to clarify who this target is and explain it to the marketing agency is the buyer persona, a kind of “robot portrait” or semi-fictional representation of our ideal client. This is the critical information you should include:
- Who is our buyer persona? General profile, demographic data, and identifiers.
- What motivates you? Your goals and challenges, both primary and secondary. What can our company bring you?
- Why do you need us? What are your most common goals, complaints, and problems?
- How can we help? The main marketing messages (description of our solution) and sales (purchase arguments) aimed at this person.
- What are your pain points? We need to identify the reason that drives the user to seek a solution to their problem actively.
Actions
In this section, we will go into describing in a more specific way what is being sought from the marketing agency, for example, an influencers campaign on social networks, a spot for Internet television, SEO, and SEM actions …
Within this section, several different aspects should be made clear:
- The media and channels to use (digital, online, massive, ultra-personalized …).
- Creativity: do we already have a creative concept, a slogan, or a specific image to communicate? How does this campaign fit into the company’s corporate style manual?
- Available graphic resources: usually, the client will already have a series of visual aids for the marketing agency to use in their creatives, for example, colors, logos, formats, fonts, etc.
- Limitations: for example, not to use words related to the competition, avoid misleading or comparative advertising, etc.
[Also Read: How does Facebook Ads use Machine Learning to deliver the ads]
Budget and timing
The briefing is a working document, and as such, it is subject to certain limits that make its execution possible.
Specifically, it is essential to make these two very clear:
- The budget is available for the campaign. Sometimes, it may happen that the budget proposed by the client is not enough to achieve the objectives or to carry out the type of actions indicated. In that case, it is the marketing agency’s responsibility to clarify the situation and set more realistic objectives.
- The timing: launch of the campaign and deadlines for the different executions. Once again, the agency must manage client expectations to create an achievable time horizon and avoid last-minute delays.