How to get the most out of your marketing brief
17th October 2012
If you’re a regular reader of our blogs (or even if you’re not) you’ll know we think marketing is important, so we love it when people come to us and say ‘we want to do some marketing’. We say ‘that’s great’. But then we say ‘what do you want to do? What are your goals? What are you hoping to achieve from your marketing?’
If you haven’t thought this far and so don’t know the answers to these questions then we have a problem. So much comes under ‘marketing’; you could give us free rein and we build you a beautiful new website, but if what you were actually thinking was more along the lines of some direct mail then you’re not going to be happy, and if you’re not happy, we’re not happy. So how do we solve this?
The Marketing Brief
Having a brief to give to your marketing agency means:
- You get your thoughts down on paper – you might have more ideas than you realise and this way you can have a collection of them all in one place
- Nothing will get missed – if everything is written down everyone knows what is expected
- More accurate quotes – we will know exactly what you want and can quote accordingly
- Avoiding assumptions – again by letting us know what you want from the off we won’t make decisions for you
Some ‘brief’ thoughts:
- Give some background detail – who you are, what you do, who are your competitors?
- Explain what your goals are – for example; to get more sales, increase brand awareness
- State what you want doing – are you rebranding, do you want a new website or are you behind with social media?
- Be specific – use plain English and give as much detail about what you’re after as possible. If you know what marketing channels you want say so, if you know you want 20 new customers a month again say
- Have a timescale in mind – if you need it done this week and it can’t be done until next week you will again encounter problems
- If you have a budget let us know it – a reputable agency won’t just quote your maximum budget if that’s not what’s needed, but by giving a budget you can at least all be on the same page when it comes to what’s expected
The bottom line is; if you don’t know what you want or what you want to achieve then neither do we. Get this right from the start and everyone’s happy.
If you want to send us a marketing brief we’d love to hear from you.
