Putting together a creative brief

If you've decided to manage your own content creation projects, chances are you'll be bringing together skilled partners such as copywriters, web designers and SEO firms.

You'll need to brief all these suppliers on what your project is about, and a great place to start is with a creative brief. This is a document that tells your suppliers essentially what they need to know to get started on your project. It helps to ensure that everyone is working to the same guidelines. And because you have to create the document in the first place, it helps to clarify within your business exactly what you want to achieve.

Here are the basic questions that you should ask yourselves and document into a creative brief for the copywriting agency, designers and other suppliers that you are going to employ.

• Why are we doing this? What are we trying to sell and why now?
• Who is our target audience?
• What is the goal of the project?
  
• What is the key message we want to get across?
• Why should the target audience believe this? (Supporting evidence/messages)
• What tone of voice should we adopt?
• Which media and channels are we going to use?
• What do we want our audience to do as a result of seeing this?
• Any corporate branding/style issues?
• Deadline?