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Creative Brief

A creative brief provides a chance to think through your project, clarify the work, and organize the team who will bring it to life.

Good creative briefs can reduce roadblocks and bottlenecks, align your the team and make for clear communication with contractors and/or agency partners.

There are many approaches to construct your creative brief. Here are a few elements to include and questions to answer so that everyone can work seamlessly to achieve your goal.

Identify your project
  1. Project name and summary
  2. Project Background
    What historical details relating to the project will your team need to know?
  3. Which channel(s) will you use? 
    Will it be a single landing page, a microsite, an email, a social post, a campaign using several channels, etc?
  4. What messaging is key to this project?
    Your messaging lays the foundation for your project.
  5. What is the timeline? 
    Identify important milestones and deadlines, including the review process.
  6. What will you achieve with this project?
    If successful, what will this project achieve? Will it increase engagement, conversions, brand awareness, etc?
  7. What deliverables will be created? 
    List everything you'll need to develop including their format, dimension and technical specifications. Is this a single social media post or a campaign employing multiple channels? What will be required? (Graphics and photos - what size and how many; are there constraints for the copy (like length), will there be any Call to Action buttons, etc. Is the final deliverable a website banner, a landing page, a social media campaign, etc.)
  8. Who will do the work?
    Do you have the expertise in-house or will you work with vendors or contractors? What is each person's role and responsibility? Which stakeholders will need to be kept informed and on what schedule? Who will review and approve moving to the next step of the project.
  9. What is your budget?
    Outline your financial needs, time constraints, and any resource confines. 
Identify your audience
  1. Who is the audience(s) for this project? 
    If targeting multiple audiences, identify top priority, secondary priority, etc.
  2. What pain point does the project solve for your audience?
    Do you have, or plan to develop, personas for this project? Personas help you understand your project from the audience's perspective and will help identify whether you are solving a problem they need solved.
  3. Why should the audiences trust us? 
    Answering this before launching a project can identify future issues before they become problems.
How will you measure success?
  1. What is your goal for this project?
    This is different than their pain point. If your audience's pain point is, for example, difficulty registering for an event, your goal may be a 25% increase in registrations the next time you host that event.
  2. What and how will you track your success?
    Which Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or metric(s) will indicate you've successfully reached or are on track to reaching the goal identified above? In the example above, you may want to track visits to the registration page, completion rate for your registration and total attendance at the event.
  3. How it will be measured?
    If your above answer doesn't already indicate what you want to measure and how, now is the time to consider what will give you that information. Does engagement on social platforms, or something else entirely?
  4. How frequently will you measure? 
    Is this a longstanding project that spans multiple years, and if so will you compare year-to-year data? Or is it a discrete campaign or event which will end on a particular date? Do you need to watch your metrics and be prepared to pivot before a certain date in order to reach your goal?

Plan to keep your content fresh
Although it's not traditionally part of a creative brief, it's wise to make plans to maintain your online content when you begin a project. Consider whether a page needs to be unpublished or otherwise edited after a certain date as well as whether that content could grow stale as in the case of a list of personnel, some of whom may leave your department or the university. Events often need special consideration. If an annual event remains published after it is over, it often shows in search results and can cause confusion over dates and times if the year is not clearly stated on the page.