Watch and learn what a campaign brief is, and how to create a strategic one for your next campaign.
A campaign brief is a short document where you can clearly outline your strategic approach. This document brings value in three big ways. First, it will serve as a guide for your team to achieve campaign objectives. Secondly, it will provide a rock-solid framework to achieve stakeholder alignment on a project before it even begins. And finally, you’ll use the brief to refer back to while the project is in motion to make sure everything is staying on track.
Without such a plan in place, you’re leaving room for mistakes, miscommunication between workers, and ultimately wasted money. But don’t stress. Developing a strategic brief doesn’t have to be complex or time consuming for it to provide a massive value to your efforts.
Wanna know how? Watch the video below for our take on 7 steps toward creating a successful campaign brief, courtesy of our own in-house experts.
That’s not so bad is it? Put these 7 steps together and you’re on your way to building your most successful campaign yet.
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Get the video transcription (basically) below.
A campaign brief is a short document where you can clearly outline your strategic approach. This document brings value in three big ways. First, it will serve as a guide for your team to achieve campaign objectives. Secondly, it will provide a rock-solid framework to achieve stakeholder alignment on a project before it even begins. And finally, you’ll use the brief to refer back to while the project is in motion to make sure everything is staying on track.
Without such a plan in place, you’re leaving room for mistakes, miscommunication between workers, and ultimately wasted money. But don’t stress. Developing a strategic brief doesn’t have to be complex or time consuming for it to provide a massive value to your efforts.
Wanna know how? Here’s our take on 7 steps toward creating a successful campaign brief, courtesy of our own in-house experts.
Step 1: Scenario
The scenario is where you describe the situation that really led you to start this campaign. You’ll consider things like: What problem or opportunity have you identified? What’s happening in your market? What’s happening in your own business? You’re really working to define the reason for and the purpose of your campaign here.
Step 2: Objectives
Ok, you’ve outlined your scenario, now it’s time to define your campaign objectives. Do you want to expand your business? Add a new customer segment? Launch a new product? Increase sales/leads/followers? Attract new employees? We like to use the SMART acronym as a framework to develop better objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based.
Step 1, be specific about what you want to accomplish. Step 2, your goal should be measurable, so what metrics are you going to use to determine success? Third, your goal should be achievable, and inspire motivation… not discouragingly lofty, but not too easy either. Fourth, your goal should be relevant and make sense within your overall business goals. And lastly, your goal should be time-based to provide accountability in terms of progress.
Step 3: Audience
Alright, you’ve got your scenario and objectives outlined… let’s figure out WHO we need to reach to be able to achieve those goals. As the old saying goes… appeal to everybody and you appeal to nobody. A huge part of running a successful marketing campaign is determining WHO makes up your audience.
So here is where you’ll identify your target audience, or audiences, so you can create strategies and initiatives that will resonate with them. You might need to do some market research or surveys here to narrow down your audience by characteristics such as: Age, Gender, Income, location, interests, and most importantly their pain points, and motivators that you’ll be helping solve with your product or service.
Step 4: Messaging
OK, now that you know who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to speak to your audience.
Developing succinct and compelling messaging for your target audience is critical to the success of your marketing efforts. It’s estimated that you only have about three to five seconds to grab someone’s attention, so you need to be able to quickly make a strong, and positive impression on your target audience.
One surefire thing you can do to improve your messaging is to consider that people don’t care so much about what your product does, they care about what it does for them. Instead of telling them about features and technical aspects, focus on the benefits your product or service will provide. Tell them how it will make their job easier, or their family happier, or their life better.
Step 5: Tactics
Alright, step 5 is selecting the tactics you’ll use to reach your defined audience. Think of this as the tools and channels you’ll actually use to achieve your goals. This could be things like specific social media channels, maybe your audience is always on Tik Tok… that probably means a good tactic would be using Tik Tok. And then, what happens when you actually reach them on that platform? Are you sending them to a landing page to capture their emails so you can market special offers to them down the road?
Oftentimes marketers want to jump to tactics first and that’s a huge mistake. If you just hop straight into facebook and start building a campaign, you’re missing a lot of the strategic planning that will make your campaign effective. This means you’ll be wasting time, and money. Ultimately, that’s why tactics is step 5, and not step 1 of the strategic brief.
Step 6: Timeline & Budget
You’ve reached the second last step of your strategic brief. It’s time to create a timeline for achieving your goals, and deciding what you’ll need to invest to get there. It’s obviously important not to spend more than necessary, but it’s equally as important not to short-change yourself from getting the results you wanted just to save a few bucks.
Take a look back at your historical results and see what it’s cost you in the past to achieve similar results. Don’t have any past results and just getting started? That’s totally fine, do some research into the platforms you’re using and learn what’s realistic to expect. Once your budget is set, regularly monitor your metrics and actual spending and make any needed adjustments based on what’s working or not. The more you do this, the more results you’ll have to look back on when setting budgets in the future.
As for timelines, you need to have a start and end date to your campaigns so you can understand whether you’ve had success or not. Without a start and end date, it’s really difficult to measure our success, and THAT leads us to step 7…
Step 7: Measurement
The final step of your strategic brief is measurement. To be blunt, marketing without tracking the right metrics is guesswork. If you don’t have accurate data, how do you know what worked?
This step can feel technical and overwhelming, but it really doesn’t have to be. All you need are your goals, some framework to understand if you’ve reached them, and what components of your campaign contributed to its success.
The simplest way to do this is to define metrics and key performance indicators (or KPIs). Not only will this provide you with an outline of expected results, but it also serves as a reference point on how to gauge how well your efforts have worked. You can then compare these KPIs to other campaigns to determine how well your marketing is doing and what techniques seem to work best for your leads. The more campaigns you run, the more data you’ll have, and the more efficient you’ll get at creating great campaigns.
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