Every project starts with an idea. Each idea should be documented to be clear for all involved. A creative brief is aimed to help here. A brief is a communication tool that outlines the project’s requirements, goals, expectations, and required resources.

With its help, you are can be ensured that all stakeholders in a project are on the same page from the start. It helps your projects run smoothly and stay on schedule.

Creative briefs are often used in advertising and design agencies, but it’s also a useful tool for large corporations, projects of any size and freelancers.

Just in case, let’s briefly define what a creative team is.

What is a creative team?

Typically, a creative team may include an art director, copywriter, editor, designer, and even web developers.

The members of the creative team should be confident enough to share and sell their ideas and perceptive. They also need to be strategic in their thinking, so they can organize thoughts and develop plans to suit the expectations of customers.

The creative team needs a wide range of design and creative capabilities, including the ability to produce original ideas, high-level creative thinking, strong experience in relevant fields, the confidence to share and present ideas internally and externally, excellent written and verbal communication skills, and so on.

Like every team, the creative team faces the same challenges of doing great work under deadlines, using whatever resources. To make sense of all the incoming jobs, they use the creative brief. This effective tool is like a direct indicator of whether a project will be successful.

The creative brief is a document that is usually filled out after a face-to-face discussion with customers by managers.

How to make it structured and provide everyone involved with the info to begin work? Here we describe the main elements of the effective creative brief template that you can customize to your needs.

Why is it worth to have a creative brief template?

In fact, any creative brief has the goal to inform a team about all the details of the work they’re being asked to do. That is why it should include at least three components:

• project scope
• context
• timeline

One more goal of any creative brief is to inspire the team. The well-prepared brief should combine all the data from the customer and research and distill it into an idea that creates a sense of the possibilities.

Who is responsible for creating a creative brief?

Usually, the person who is responsible for managing the customer relationship creates the creative brief. It can be the account manager or the project manager.

He/she works closely with the customer to understand the current situation, the requirements and the desired outcome.

The Elements of the Successful Creative Brief

Contacts

As any formal form, the creative brief template should contain contact details. Specify who the client is, list phone numbers, email addresses, available messengers etc. for the contact person in that company. Do the same acts for your internal team.

The Overview

This part of the creative brief template allows you to talk about the request from a high level. Describe a full picture for your team with answering the who, what, and where of the project.

Provide enough context to give your team the opportunity to realize where this job fits in the big picture.

Try to answer the most important questions, for example: What is the client’s need? What are the problems in the market that can affect this job?

Objectives

This section of your creative brief is for summarizing the goals of the job. Here you should know the exact answer to the questions:

• What does your client want to achieve?
• What action do you want the end user to take?
• What do you want them to feel? etc.

The profile of the audience

Here is the space for the target audience’s description. Your creative team will definitely do a better job of tailoring their work to the audience’s needs and concerns

if you create a complete picture of your audience.

The following questions should be also considered:

• Who are they?
• Where do they live and work?
• How will they be reached?
• What issues concern them? etc.

Specifics

There should be a special section for the execution specifics in the creative brief template where you can manifest your creativity.

Here all the execution details about the deliverable should be mentioned as well as how you communicate your message. These notes may include tone, messages, visuals and other details (timeline, schedule, budget, etc).

No matter how you structure your creative brief, the result should outline the information and campaign’s objectives.

So, now you are able to prepare a creative brief that can guide the work in a specific direction, inform your team about the details of audience and pain points, and may inspire your team to generate groundbreaking ideas. What’s next?

The next step is delving into the project’s planning and working with smart collaboration and task management tools. It’s up to you to choose the appropriate one. Do not forget to study Hygger latest updates and interesting releases to be aware of new opportunities and all the power of the platform!