A creative brief is a document that summarizes all the strategies that the creative team will adopt to develop a creative project. This document should capture the essence of the creative plan by paying particular attention to details.

A creative brief also describe the main steps of the process. This way, the charged team can create related products, and even items for marketing and advertising campaigns.

In the creative brief, the creative team should be able to convey a clear and concise message. In other words, it's a first approach and a foundational file that expresses the bases of your campaign. 

This brief is an interpretation of the ideas of the client, which are channeled throught the vision of the creative team.

Still, a creative brief should contain minimal information about several project and creative work aspects.

Now, we’re giving you some outline to build an accurate creative brief document to summarize your marketing project.

The title is an essential part of any project description since it summarizes the essence of a good creative brief.  

So, it would help if you asked yourself the following question:

What title will describe the marketing or advertising campaign entirely?

From the very beginning, it is fundamental to be clear about the general scope of the project. There is nothing better than using a simple creative title to express the campaign's central idea.

The creative teams of your organization should be capable of describing the main project goals of the marketing project in a few sentences.

To be clear with the campaign goals, they must ask themselves the following:

What will the project seek to achieve?

A great creative brief must clearly describe the final goals of the marketing campaign. These goals must be straightforward and direct and explain the project scope in short sentences.

In this section, you share important details, such as the project timeline, how many graphic design professionals will work, and the project budget of a particular project.

So, relevant questions would be the following:

How much will the project cost?

What is the project timeline?

In this part of an effective creative brief, you attempt to describe why your organization is presenting a solution for a specific problem.

A logical question at this point would be the following:

Why are our marketing teams trying to solve this problem at this specific moment?

This section will give the internal team and stakeholders background info on why it's necessary to address this question first.

A target audience is specific people for whom the product is intended. Here, it would help if you described the target audience as deeply as possible, clarifying age, demographics, marital status, what they seek in a product, etcetera. 

Effective creative briefs give a short description of this group, pointing out why the members of this group will prefer the product over others. This way, all the stakeholders know the aspects of the general design of the campaign.

What type of company are we trying to show to customers with this campaign creative?

With the answer in its hands, the whole team can design an aimed campaign that contains all the elements of a creative response to problems.

This point is strongly related to the previous one. Here you go deeper into the customer's desires and what they want to achieve. When we talk about customer details, we mean all the critical elements and key details of why the customer dreams of a product like ours. 

Great creative briefs pay special attention to this section. They ask:

Who is the customer, and what are their needs?

To convince the customer and the target audience, you'll need to communicate the key idea behind the product. Key messages refer to the specific features of the product and how they can make the lids easier for the customer. 

An excellent creative brief example of key messages would ask something like this:

What are the key elements and messages we want the audience to know?

What are the feelings we want to communicate to the user?

Here the internal team describes the essential elements that are relevant for the customer in one or two sentences.

Beyond all the description of the customer and why the product is the right article for them, you should clarify the features and characteristics that define your brand. Most creative briefs focus on this section, trying to describe their brands with solid adjectives that motivate customers. 

Besides, with these concepts, the graphic design professional can create a campaign according to the message.   

A reasonable question should be the following:

What features and characteristics define our brand?

What makes our brand so special over other brands on the market?

The project manager or account manager has to decide which brand elements are mandatory to include in the simple creative brief template. The team can also be part of this decision.

Here it is imperative to highlight that you should include all indispensable elements and features that make your brand unique.

At this point, a good question to respond to would be this one:

What brand guidelines, features, and elements should the brand mandatorily include in the graphic design creative brief?

Some creative brief examples in this regard are the following:

• The brand logo;
• The brand colors;
• Tagline;
• Product placement.

This section refers to the most difficult challenges you expect of the project as a brand. Writing a creative brief involves being aware of the possible difficulties the marketing project will face during its development.

Marketing guidelines should consider responses to possible contests that can appear throughout the project. To do this, it's important to view past projects to avoid making the same mistakes in the next creative project.

In this regard, a reasonable question to build creative briefs is the following:

How can my product reach a certain number of customers?

The budget may not be enough. How can my brand get enough money for the project?

Deliverables are the items the project management plans to deliver to the client or the stakeholders involved. These creative deliverables have the critical mission of expressing the project's ideas through independent items.

In this sense, graphic designers must create interesting and exciting pieces of art or items from marketing materials. Professional designers must consider the brand voice, the mandatory inclusions, and other essential details, such as the palette of colors, the brand images, and more.  

Your expert designers in social media campaigns would ask themselves:

What is the best media to express the main idea of the project?

What final deliverables better communicate the team work and the final product?

Some good pieces of creative deliverables you should consider are the following:

• Video projects;
• Advertisements;
• Email marketing campaign.

Although it looks like a lot of information, you should keep your creative briefs short. Refer to the essential. Your document should be at most two pages, with all the data being on the same page.

Choose a concise and robust project name that describes your marketing campaign briefly. Besides, a good project name should provide context, at least a quick gaze at it. 

Of course, your content marketing team can think of several names in the project kickoff and then decide which one fits better with your project. 

It should be easy to insert the project name in the upper part of this short document in a simple template with a fixed format.

Creating creative briefs is the starting point of a strategic planning process. You must check the detailed information on the planning, the ultimate business goals, and the objective of other departments. This way, you ensure that your creative brief fits with those mentioned above.

Pick up all the relevant details—for instance, the budget specifications, the project owners, other stakeholders, timelines, etcetera. Immediately afterward, gather all the essential information and insert it into the document.

Now you have all the information, you can start to write this project summary. At this point, writing a creative brief involves including all the items we mentioned in the previous section, i.e., the target audience section, the key information about the customers, brand voice, deliverables, and more.

Once your sample creative brief is ready, you should share it for feedback with different teams within your company. Using a creative brief means considering all the right details of the clients and project, then discussing it with internal teams is preponderant.

Whether you or an advertising agency created the creative brief document, you must present it to the stakeholders, who can be small business owners, clients, and other organization members.

In this section, we’re giving you some free templates you can use to build a complete creative brief template.

Every great project starts with a significant first step on the right foot, and a creative brief template can kickoff a new lead generation for your email marketing or social media campaigns. Besides, this document can be part of a media strategy to convince the stakeholders that it's mandatory for the future of the brand to develop the project. 

For these reasons, we've provided free creative brief templates that can be very useful for your purposes. We hope they are a great tool and resource to help you to save time on your next project.

Finally, here at RoyalCDKeys, we're willing to help with all you need by answering questions and providing you with exciting templates to accomplish our business goals. Please browse our website and correct the pain points with the tools we have for you.