Why Client Briefs are Scantily Clad & What to Do About It

Client briefs are among the most revealing internal business documents you’ll ever encounter. They dazzle your copywriter with tempting details about the object of your desire. You’ve decided what client groups to pursue. It’s your quest. Take the initiative!

What to do about brief client briefs is one of the most common questions – particularly from experienced copywriters. New writers know only that the client asks for multiple rounds of amends – that the inexperienced copywriter is loathe to repeat until they go mad.

In this blog post, I explain what a client brief is, why brief briefs are undesirable, what happens when your copywriter is forced to write without them, and how to create a brief that will make your target audience think they are the single object of your attention.

What is a Client Brief in the First Place?

A client brief is a written document that outlines the direction for a single website page, landing page, blog post, or other piece of marketing collateral. It should include:

• A description of the company (if the writer is completely new)
• A description of the audience – or a link out to the much more detailed Buyer Persona (which in turn lists salient points about the audience’s job role, day, challenges, fears, and aspirations, etc)
• A template of what the output should look like (if you care about structure, layout and order)

What is the Purpose of a Client Brief?

These essential, written guidelines – combined with the Buyer Persona – enable copywriters to:

• Demonstrate empathy with the reader and their concerns, therefore creating a strong connection
• Illustrate the company’s deep knowledge of the industry, context and its unique challenges
• Present a pertinent solution (when it comes to product and service landing pages, use cases, keyword landing pages, or case studies, for examples)
• Demonstrate expertise (when it comes to landing pages and blog posts)

Why Brief Client Briefs are Not Desirable

Client briefs are either non-existent or scandalously short – uncovering a lack of experience in working with copywriters:

• “Here’s a topic. Can you have a first draft in by the end of the month?”
• “Here’s a topic. Just write what you think.”
• “Here’s a topic and a few blog posts we like.”
• “Here’s a topic and a few angles you could take.”

Let me take an experienced guess as to why you don’t provide your copywriter with briefs for their work. You really do sometimes think we can parachute in from Copywriter Land armed with nothing but a heading and a few pointers and deliver a perfectly relevant piece, eh? ; ) This is even though you’ve:

• Told us (next to) nothing about your audience
• Kept your company direction and marketing strategy more secret than the location of the Lost Ark
• Failed to share your content pillars, plans, and keywords
• Refused to share already existing Branding and Tone of Voice Guides (because Marketing won’t let you)

You’re enamoured with other legitimate temptations: chiefly, designing that next feature or fulfilling clients needs this week. I get it.

Why Brief Client Briefs Lead to Madness

You must invest the time into building a relationship with your copywriter – telling her all about:

• Your business
• Your clients
• Their wants and needs
• Their fears, their goals and challenges

Do you realise that this intimate knowledge of your customer is something that only you can provide?

Keep it to yourself and your copywriter will assume based on their experience and background, doing only as much research as they can given the fee they’re charging you.

Let’s Get Deep and Meaningful

1. Do you want to rely on the knowledge of the copywriter alone?
2. Do you not want to share every last detail of what you know about your customers? Why?
3. Do you want the considerable investment you’ve put into commissioning that series of new landing pages to be put to good use – the first time around?
4. Do you want a piece that merely fills a slot on your publication calendar or something that will compel readers to take action?

How will your copywriter wield this knowledge? One word: Relevance.

Copywriters can write all day long about your managed IT services. But, without a brief, it is likely that the blog post they write could fit on almost any similar business’ website. This does not help you set yourself apart from the competition. In fact, it does the opposite. It means you’ll get left on the shelf, just like every other similar provider.

What Happens If Your Copywriter is Forced to Write Without a Brief?

Copywriters write without briefs all the time. Yes, we can do it. Yes, we know how to conduct our own research.

But, this is what is actually happening if we are forced to work without any direction or input from the commissioning company.

• The copywriter is writing entirely blindly (and, quite honestly, it can often feel that we care more about your content than you do – a terrible state of affairs!)
• The copywriter must spend some of the time they have allocated in coming up with a brief of their own which may or may not be what you wanted (more guesswork!)
• The SEO Title grabs no-one’s attention in the SERPs (because the direction may not be what people are searching for, nor what the company really needs)
• The sub-sections and headings may not make your target audience get to know you better (they are simply there to fulfil the copywriters’ best guess on the topics to include)
• The content will face rejection from the target of your desire (because you’ve not taken the time to figure out what your angle should be on this topic and what people are searching for)
• The language and language level is complete guesswork (is the writer writing at a level of university students, career newbies or seasoned professionals?)
• The stories and examples will not press the empathy buttons of the reader (and inappropriate examples may inadvertently damage your reputation)
• Multiple reviewers have nothing to compare the written piece against (meaning arguments have no umpire and the piece will lose direction by the time everyone and his cat has contributed)
• The document review process can drag on (as the brief is slowly and painfully revealed at the end, comment by soul-sapping comment as you react to what has been written, while you compare it to the brief in your head that you failed to share with the copywriter) resulting in a piecemeal output that has lost all life and impact
• The CTA will fall flat on its face (because the entire point of the piece was not clearly defined at the start)
• The outcome you expected (more visitors to your website, shares, emails or calls) may not happen, because the piece is not presented in a way that persuades or compels

However, all is not lost.

What To Do About It

Write a client brief for your copywriter for every single piece of content you commission. I guarantee, you won’t be able to do this all in one hour. For comparison, the most comprehensive briefs we’ve ever received were from a fellow marketer and lasted 4-5 pages for each landing page they commissioned.

However, once you write the first one, subsequent ones should take 20-30 minutes (because some of the common groundwork is already done).

The best briefs we’ve received and written included information on:

• The company (reusable)
• The audience (reusable)
• Key marketing messages (reusable)
• SEO
• Emphasis and direction for the individual piece
• CTA

If you invest the time now, you will find that you save time later in endless, amateur review cycles.

Who Writes the Client Brief?

I teach a Compelling Copywriting for Marketers webinar series for Oxford School of Marketing. It is attended by both internal copywriters or embedded freelancers who often work alone and by those who run their own copywriting agencies.

One of the things I emphasize most during this course is that the client must write the brief, or contribute heavily to it.

Here is a simple way of looking at who should write the client brief:

• You – the client
• You – guided by the copywriter through a series of questions
• Never the copywriter alone (remember they may initially know little about your industry, your target audience, or even the topic)

How to Write a Client Brief

Include the following items in your Client Brief and your copywriter will love you forever.

• Contact details – share the name and contact details of the person who will make themselves available during the writing of the draft and for reviews
• Deadlines – share your Draft 1 and Publication deadlines
• Project details – describe how the item fits into an overall project, where it’ll be published, and what results you expect (if relevant)
• Audience – describe your current or ideal audience or share a link to your Buyer Persona
• SEO – share any SEO research you’ve already done around the planned page or post
• Content – list a few bullet points showing what the content should contain, including any key marketing messages and unique selling point
• Tone of Voice – describe your TOV or share a link to a TOV document
• Guides – share links to any Branding/Style Guides or Marketing Strategy documents
• Rewrite – state whether this content is a rewrite of something you already have and share the link(s)
• Examples – include links to examples of content you like or don’t like
• Anything else – list any other information

Client Briefs

If you’ve been asked by your marketer or copywriter to provide them with a Client Brief, take a shortcut and download our Client Brief Template that will prompt you to get started.

And, if you’ve a project for us, go ahead and complete our online Client Brief form or book a Discovery Call.

Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash