In the business and creative world, a briefing is an essential tool that ensures the effective development of advertising campaigns, the creation of new products, or even the execution of more complex projects.
In this article, we will explain in detail what a briefing is, the importance of having a well-structured template, how to create one, and what are the main elements that cannot be missing from this document for your projects to be a success.
What is a briefing?
A briefing is a document whose main function is to gather all the necessary information and guidelines for the execution of a specific task or project, such as a marketing campaign, a website, an advertising campaign, among others.
Furthermore, this document ensures that all parties involved are aligned on the objectives, expectations, and guidelines of a project, considerably reducing communication and direction problems.
Why is it important to have a briefing?
Having a well-structured briefing is vital to the success of any project. Below are some of the main reasons why you should use this tool:
Alignment of Expectations
As mentioned earlier, a comprehensive document allows all teams involved in the project to clearly understand the objectives, goals, and expectations that need to be achieved.
By outlining clear objectives and goals, teams can work in a focused and directed manner, which helps increase the productivity and efficiency of each sector, while eliminating ambiguities.
Efficiency, Organization and Planning
Based on a briefing, it’s possible to create a detailed plan with all the stages of a project, allocate resources appropriately, save resources, and define realistic deadlines for delivering demands.
However, this requires building a very well-structured document that clearly presents the most important information.
Quality control
This type of tool allows us to establish strict evaluation criteria and mechanisms to track progress and control the quality of each stage, ensuring that the results meet customer expectations.
Evaluation mechanisms also serve as a continuous feedback tool so that your team can make adjustments and improvements in different aspects whenever necessary.
Risk Reduction and Control
The briefing helps identify and anticipate potential problems and challenges, allowing your team to always be prepared and have time to develop mitigation strategies to overcome any adversities.
This is also a great way to increase project efficiency, reduce production costs, and avoid unnecessary waste during the production phase.
Reference Point
Last but not least, a detailed briefing serves as a point of reference throughout the entire project development, as well as for planning similar future projects.
This way, your team can refer to the document whenever necessary, which helps maintain consistency and coherence from the beginning to the end of production.
How to create a briefing?
Now that you know what this type of document is and what it’s for, we’ve prepared a detailed step-by-step guide to help you create a briefing that aligns expectations, guides your team, and ensures satisfactory results. Check it out:
1. Define the Objectives
First and foremost, it will be necessary to determine what you and your team want to achieve with this project or marketing campaign. To do this, it’s important to define clear, specific, and measurable objectives.
A project without objectives and goals will not be able to reach its potential and expected results, regardless of its scope, because your team will know where to focus the necessary resources.
2. Identify the target audience.
Conduct a thorough analysis of your target audience to uncover relevant information such as age, gender, location, socioeconomic level, and any other relevant demographic factors.
This information and data are fundamental and will help your marketing team develop a more assertive communication strategy, allowing your company or brand to connect with the right audience.
3. Context
It is essential that, during the briefing process, you provide more context for the company or department that requested the project. A brief history with information on previous results and initiatives needs to be included in the document.
Furthermore, conducting a detailed market and competitor analysis allows your team to better understand the environment in which the project will be developed and what strategies to adopt along the way.
4. Deadlines and Materials
Make a list of everything that will need to be delivered during the project’s production. This includes things like: graphic materials, videos, reports, schedules, and any other files or documents.
Don’t forget to establish a calendar or schedule with all the stages of this project, including deadlines for smaller tasks and the final date by which everything needs to be delivered to the client.
5. Budget
Before starting production, it is essential that you inform the team of the budget available for that specific project, including a complete and detailed report of how and where the money will be invested.
6. Delegate Tasks
Create a list with the names of everyone who will be involved in the production and their respective roles within that project, as this keeps the team organized and makes it easier to find who is responsible for each step.
7. Define the KPIs for your briefing.
To measure project success at different stages of production, it is essential to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) early on. The indicators vary according to the objective of each project.
8. Approval Workflow
An excellent strategy to increase team efficiency is to create a very detailed approval process for each step, naming the individuals responsible for approving requests and setting a deadline for approval.
How to structure your briefing
Below, we’ve prepared an example to help you structure your first briefing. Check it out:
- Project Title and Identification: Here you will put the project name and the date the briefing was created;
- Introduction: This section describes the overall vision of the project, why it is being created, and its context;
- Objectives: State the general objectives and the results you expect to achieve with this project;
- Target Audience: Include all relevant information about the target audience you intend to reach;
- Project Scope: Here you need to detail everything that will be necessary to execute the work, including schedule, deadlines, materials, etc.
- Message: Clearly and objectively state the message this project should communicate to the audience. It is important to define the tone and voice of the persona;
- Budget: Define the budget, team composition, and necessary tools;
- Limitations: Understand the budgetary limitations and possible legal restrictions;
- KPIs: Define quantitative goals and the performance indicators that will be tracked;
- Approval Plan: Define how approvals, reviews, and possible adjustments will be made.
It’s important to note that there’s no single formula for structuring a briefing; this is just one of the many models available online. The format and information can vary depending on the specifics of each project, company, or campaign.
Many digital marketing agencies have qualified professionals who can create a briefing tailored to your business needs.
Have you learned what a briefing is and how to create one?
We hope our article has helped you understand what a briefing is, what it’s for, and how easy it is to create an effective document. Remember that this is a tool designed to facilitate project execution and improve collaboration between teams.