A creative brief is an absolutely essential component of any project. It acts as a project's blueprint or roadmap, established from the very beginning and answering big questions like the whats and the hows.
What are the benefits of a creative brief?
You should make a creative brief for your next project if you want to...
- Keep the project manager, the team members, the client, and any other stakeholders on the same page right off the bat.
- Make project management a breeze.
- Define project essentials such as key messages, project timeline, and deliverables so there isn't any room for confusion, disorganization, or scope creep later on.
- Have one comprehensive source outlining all the key aspects of your creative project for your team to refer back to regularly.
- Easily refer back to your project's visual guidelines, including everything from graphic design and style guides to content marketing and branding.
- Foster accountability from all parties working on your particular project.
- Optimize collaboration between different teams! Creative work is best done together. It's easy for the marketing team to collaborate with the social media and design teams if the comprehensive project strategy can all be found in one place.
- Establish criteria for assessment and metrics for success, so everyone will know when your creative team kills it!
The key elements of creative briefs
Naturally, the contents of creative briefs vary depending on the project. Nevertheless, there are some elements that appear consistently across different creative brief examples. These are the essentials, so make sure that you include them when you're creating or customizing your creative brief template.
Basic information
Most creative briefs start off by outlining a project's basic information. That means noting down things like project name, project manager, project stakeholders, project team, client information, client's company, and current date.
Executive summary
Write a short and sweet project summary. Don't waste time and only include essential information. Your summary should tell the reader everything they need to know about your project in just a minute or two. They can be as short as one or two sentences.
Problem statement
Identify what problem your project will set out to solve, how it will solve that problem, and why that solution will be the best one out there. Basically, your problem statement determines your project's reason for being and justifies why it should be worked on.
Target audience
Identify and determine the target audience or ideal customer that you're tailoring your project to. This helps give projects direction and establish exactly what creative direction it will be going in.
If you're working on an advertising campaign or marketing project, this is even more essential. You might even decide to dive deeper into customer research.
Project objectives
Identify your project objectives here. Make sure they're specific, measurable, and agreed upon by all parties involved. Some creative teams find it useful to note down objectives in a list format.
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators are tools that teams use to measure their project's progress and ultimately determine its success. They're measurable values that are best determined early on in the project development process.
Some examples of KPIs include new revenue, new leads, and website/social media page engagement.
Project timeline
All projects need some kind of structure. Project teams need to assess how long it'll take to carry out their work and clients need to know when they can expect their final deliverables.
Effective creative briefs often establish a rough project timeline and lay out when key milestones and deliverables will be due.
Project budget
A good creative brief will cover the project budget. That means determining how much the whole thing will cost from beginning to end. Make sure your project budget is within your client's budget and will earn your team members fair compensation for their work.
