What is a content brief?
A content brief is a guide you create for your freelance team to ensure that your outsourced content is on-brand and resonates with your target audience, just like you’d created it yourself in-house. Not only does it lay out the specific requirements for the content (content type, topic, word count, etc.). It also provides key information about your brand, like brand voice, target audience demographics, and your goals for the content itself.
Why is a content brief important?
Producing high-quality content consistently and at scale means that, at some point or another, you’ll be expanding your team. And especially if you’re outsourcing content to freelancers – an excellent option, in our opinion – your content brief will be the lifeline that your distributed team can utilize to retain brand integrity.
Why else is a content brief important? A well-crafted assignment brief:
- Ensures understanding. Your freelance team will feel less like contractors and more like active collaborators who participate in delivering your whole vision.
- Streamlines the writing process. Eliminate frustrating communication misfires between you and your freelance team when you communicate the expectations at the front end. You’ll save time (and money) when you’re not constantly going back and forth on revisions.
- Nurtures a productive relationship. The combination of these factors will ensure a strong, long-lasting work relationship with your freelancers, which in turn ensures that you can expect quality content delivered consistently.
How do you write a content brief?
A good content brief lays out the guidelines for your freelancers in terms of the logistics of the content, but it also provides important insight and information to help them meet and exceed your expectations upon delivery.
Your content brief must include details about your brand’s voice and style, as well as the overall objectives for the content. You’ll also need to provide information about your target audience – including demographic information – like their unique pain points, what resonates with them, and what their specific needs are. Then, of course, you’ll include the content-specific instructions like your topic, any SEO keywords to include, and reference material.
Throughout it, you want to stay detailed but concise and clear but comprehensive. Mastering the content brief can be an art in and of itself!
Content Brief Breakdown
Here at ClearVoice, we like to think we know a thing or two about creating effective content briefs (it is our business, after all). And over the years we’ve identified some must-have components to your content brief. Lucky you, we’ve put them all right here for you:
- Objective or Overview — Premise for what the campaign needs to achieve
- What — Information about your product or service
- Why — Why your product or service is important
- Who — The audience you are targeting
- Key takeaways — Key points you want the audience to remember
- Metrics — The metric goals that determine success
- Brand Voice and Tone — The way you communicate your message
- Thought starters — Ideas to kick off brainstorming
- Budget — The scope of investment, whether time or money
- Timeline — The calendar of deliverables and action items
Content Brief Examples
Sure! Some examples of an objective or overview might look like:
- “Develop an integrated, multi-platform campaign and unforgettable content experience”
- “Create a ‘must-see’ level of anticipation across all consumer touch points”
This brilliant excerpt from a content brief for Avión Tequila illustrates exactly why their brand is different from the other tequila brands on the market:
Meticulously Inefficient: The process of creating Avión is one of painstaking passion and dedication to tradition – which elevates Avión to an art. It is inefficient in every aspect of the process: Agave from only the highest elevation is used, the Agave is allowed 7-10 years for maturation before harvesting, it is hand-made and hand-processed rather than mass-produced or outsourced, and it is slow-roasted for 3 days allowing for ultra slow filtration and aging. An almost forgotten path of craftsmanship and love – that’s the meticulous part. Where the art form of tequila takes precedence over time and money. When you are elevating Tequila to an art, efficiency becomes meaningless.
One high-end luxury audio manufacturer used this in its brief to describe exactly who they’re marketing to:
I want to hear music as the artist intended, and I search for equipment that offers the absolute best listening and quality construction. I don’t buy that often, so I want something that will last and provide me with a warm, intimate listening experience with my music; whether it’s on vinyl, SACD, or wide-bandwidth, online listening.
And if you’re someone who likes working with a template, we’ve got one put together for you over here.
Take the Guesswork Out of Creating Content Briefs
We’re here for you. When you work with ClearVoice as your managed content solution, we establish your target audience, ideate content, and create stellar content briefs for you so all you have to do is sit back and wait for your high-quality, on-brand content to come in. Speak with a content strategist today and start scaling your content production!
