If you want your marketing strategy to be effective, your briefing must answer these essential questions that can guide your campaign to success.
The briefing is perhaps the most controversial element of any communication campaign or action, and also the most important.
It is the document on which your advertising campaign is based, and it should facilitate the marketing task.
If it is poorly focused, everything derived from it will be too.
A briefing does not have to occupy more than one or two pages of text; no need to make PowerPoint presentations or dwell on each point.
It is much more useful for a creative to have clear and concise answers to these questions than to have a lot of information. If they need it, they will ask for it.
Now, just because it’s short doesn’t mean it’s easy.
The ideal briefing is one that contains clear, concise and inspiring answers to the following questions:
Why do we want to do a communication action?
The first thing we will do is briefly describe what problem we are facing.
It can be a loss of market share, the launch of a new product, the need to build customer loyalty, an inappropriate brand positioning.
There are hundreds of reasons why a communication action should be launched.
What do we want to achieve?
Here, we will define what is the ideal solution to the problem posed in the previous question.
This will become the objective of the campaign, thus, the solution may be to increase sales by X units, encourage repeat consumption, reposition the brand.
The answer to this question is not simple, but it is essential for the campaign to really help solve the problem.
Who are you talking to?
The important thing is to avoid purely sociodemographic descriptions (age, sex, habitat and social class).
They are important, but by themselves they are not helpful.
The interesting thing is to complement them with descriptions of habits and attitudes (what they do, what they are like and what the people we are addressing think, etc.).
How do we want them to see us?
It is about offering as clear a picture as possible of how we are perceived and how we want to be perceived in the market in relation to our competitors.
For this, a positioning map is usually used.
What do we mean?
One of the keys to effective communication is to focus your message on a single idea.
For this we will focus on the benefit of our product or service that best helps us achieve the objective of the action.
Why will they believe us?
The credibility of any of our messages is essential, both for the people we are targeting and for the creatives who must work on the campaigns.
How do we want to say it?
This is the time to focus on the tone and style that we want our communication to have, and which are usually defined by the essence of the brand itself.
What we will do at this point is to describe, using adjectives, the atmosphere that we want the communication pieces to convey.
What is the budget available for this campaign / action?
This is the easiest question to answer, but by no means the least important.
It is necessary to know what means are available to be able to correctly size the actions.
