How do I write a marketing brief?

A good marketing brief is a clear, concise document that gives anyone working on your marketing – a consultant, an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house team member – everything they need to understand your business, your goals, and the specific task at hand before they start work.

A useful marketing brief covers the following: a short description of the business and what it does; the specific objective of the project or campaign – what does success look like and how will it be measured; the target audience – who are you trying to reach and what do you know about them; the key message – what is the one thing you want the audience to think, feel, or do as a result of this activity; the channels or formats involved – is this a social media campaign, a website page, an email sequence, a paid advertising campaign; the timeline and any fixed deadlines; and the budget available, even if it is a range rather than a specific figure.

The most common briefing mistakes are being too vague about the objective – “increase awareness” is not a brief, “generate fifty email sign-ups from Instagram in the next month” is – and omitting the audience definition, which forces whoever is doing the work to make assumptions that may not match your actual customers.

A well-written brief does not need to be long. One page is often sufficient for a focused project. What matters is specificity – the more clearly you can articulate what you are trying to achieve and for whom, the better the work you will receive in return.

If you are working with FreshPour, the discovery process at the start of The Session is designed to surface all of this information collaboratively, so you do not need to arrive with a brief already written. But developing the habit of briefing clearly will serve you well in every marketing relationship you build.