The brief is the first step to communicating your brand’s vision during a partnership with your digital creative agency. Having worked with clients from different industries and company sizes, here are some of the most essential information we think are most important when it comes to briefing your advertising agency.
Background – What is the context behind the goal you are looking to achieve?
Think about how well-established your company is, whether internationally or in the region you intend to target. Have in mind your brand identity, and consider if it would be a good fit with the creative partner you wish to work with.
What’s the problem? Why are you getting on this project?
Think SMART. Objective goal-setting and briefing your creative partner can be made so much more efficient by setting these parameters on what to work on.
Specific – focus on a specific area of improvement
Measurable – set a goal that has tangible and concrete metrics: you must be able to know with full certainty when its achieved
Achievable – aim for a realistic goal, based on your brand’s current presence in the market and the amount of resources you are willing to invest
Relevant – choose goals that are in line with your final objective (e.g. raising awareness and educating versus convincing consumers to purchase a commercial product)
Time-bound – specify a benchmark by which you want the final results to be achieved by
- Business objectives, like increasing market share percentage, should be precise, measurable and concrete through the use of data analytics. This objective would concern your entire company, and set an overall metric and projected percentage for expanding your business.
- Marketing objectives are more niche and more specific towards the goal of marketing, like lowering cost per sale. Usually, it would be a subset of business objectives – for instance, to increase market share percentage (business objective), a brand would aim to increase digital brand awareness by a certain percentage (marketing objective) to work towards that goal.
- Advertising objectives – To specifically address how to increase digital brand awareness, advertising objectives come into play. With concise percentages on exactly which component of marketing to focus on growing, (for example, increasing engagement rates vs increasing purchase rates) there’s usually a final goal like building brand loyalty.
Your Target Audiences – Describe your customers and your target audience.
Gen Z with an old soul? Millennials who experienced dial-up internet? Mothers who are trying to carve out time for self-care? Make clear who exactly your target audience is so that your creative partner can fully envision what kind of audience they are designing, writing and ideating for. Copies, designs and so on and so forth can change drastically depending on the target group in mind. For instance, copies targeted at the younger generation would be peppered with trending jargon and emojis, while copies for the older generations would be more formal and measured.
Budget
Oftentimes, we get briefs where clients don’t have a budget in mind. (Or rather, not wanting to reveal it to their partner! Having a realistic budget that you can commit to is important so your creative partner knows where to focus their efforts and get the best bang for your buck – whether it is in ideations, strategy, production costs or media buys.
Having a budget also demonstrates your commitment to the project/effort, and gives your partner an opportunity to negotiate and communicate to you the results you can expect from the amount of resources invested into the project.
Key Brand Elements
It’s definitely true that a full-fledged corporate identity is great for clarity of your brand, but a simple guide in form of slides or a PDF, as well as access to your main elements, however, could work just as well.
A simple outline that communicates the essential facets of your brand identity can provide more flexibility for agencies to explore a creative identity for your brand. The balance between handing your partners the creative steering wheel and sticking to your brand’s entrenched identity all depends on the approach your company wishes to take!
Highlight the must-haves and absolute no-nos
As brand owners, you should be completely aware of the elements that are non-negotiable to your brand identity, and of the elements that definitely do not define your brand. What makes your brand unique? What’s something your brand can never evolve into? Communicate this to your creative partner.
How do you want to be remembered? What kind of response do you want to evoke from your customers?
On the flip side, think about the response from your audience. What kind of impression do you want to leave them, and as a follow-up question, what higher purpose does your brand provide? Does your brand make upskilling courses more accessible to the general public, or does it provide high-quality fashion at accessible prices?
Whatever it is, you want your customer to resonate with your brand to create perceived demand.
Keep in concise
Keeping the brief clear, short and concise, to ensure that your partner focuses on the main message. Unless necessary, sifting through multiple decks with hundreds of pages will be too much information to digest for your creative partner. Cut it down to the essentials, and possess clarity before engaging a partner. This will be an important factor to determine the success of your project, because it shows that you are familiar and confident with your brand, as well as the contents of your brief.
Get in touch with us if you are interested to get these and more facts in a template to make the process more swift for your marketing team.
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