How to write a brief for marketing that sells

“If you don’t say what you want, you won’t want what you get”.

There’s a skill to writing a marketing brief. If you get it right your supplier will deliver first time – no surprises. If you get it wrong (or worse still don’t provide one at all), it costs time and money to put it right.

At Clear Thought we love writing briefs. It’s an integral part of our service. And we take extra care to make them engaging, relevant and factual, because a boring brief makes for an unmotivated supplier. And, ultimately a disappointing end result.

Even when a customer provides us with a good brief, we talk it through with them and make sure we all agree with the requirements. And if we disagree with an objective or output, we don’t mind adding our penneth and making specific recommendations to help get it spot-on. We can also work with you to re-write it if necessary.

TOP TIPS: When preparing a brief avoid jargon, lingo and acronyms. Include facts (no assumptions or embellishments). Use plain speaking English and include as much detail as possible. It’s easier and quicker for your supplier to cut out the superfluous rather than have to fill in some gaps. Whether you need a creative brief, web brief, copy brief or even an event brief – here’s a useful checklist to help make sure nothing gets missed:

1. YOUR PRODUCT/BACKGROUND: Include a brief summary about your company, its products and its services. Set the scene a little and try and include something about your brand, its personality and philosophy. Pricing and sales processes should also be mentioned. Will there need to be any initial research, or do you already have some research that findings that will help?

2. COMPETITION: Talk about competitor products and services. What marketing activity are they doing and are they doing it better? Include examples and/or weblinks.

3. WHAT: What is your required output? I.E. what type of activity are you looking for (an ad, a DM campaign a new website, a conference)? Think about how the deliverable will be used – in print, on a website, in a salesperson’s briefcase, etc.

4. WHY: Why are you doing this activity? What objectives are you trying to achieve (raise awareness, collect data, increase sales, get someone to do something…)?

5. WHO: Describe your target audience – who you want to talk to. Are they businesses or consumers? Describe why you think they need your product or service, and why you think they might not be buying (barriers). Try and describe the role of this person in their organisation, or what type of consumer they are. What do they read? What do they listen to?

6. WHEN: Is there as seasonal reason for undertaking this piece of activity? Are there any key milestones or deadlines that need to be met?

7. HOW: How are you going to measure the effectiveness of this activity? What will success look like? Can it be piloted or tested first?

8. LIKES & DISLIKES: It’s always useful to list some activities or brands that you have already seen and liked. Even if just website (competitor or otherwise).

9. MANDATORIES: It’s essential to provide a ‘call to action’ plus any brand/tone of voice guidelines, or list any assets that must be used or avoided. Ts & Cs or legal requirements too.

10. BUDGET: It’s much easier for a supplier to respond to a brief if they know how much you would like to spend.

There are some simple equations you can use to work out how much you should invest, but saying there is ‘no budget’ either means you expect it for free, or the sky’s the limit! Wouldn’t that be great?

If you are not 100% comfortable in briefing marketing suppliers, we can help. Clear Thought has hands-on experience both sides of the desk and can help both parties work together for a great result. We’re experienced in talking their language, and we have a number of briefing templates that mean you’re never starting from a blank sheet of paper.

Alternatively, if you already have a brief you would like us to look at, we’d be happy to come along and talk to you face-to-face. A bit of clear thinking usually improves the results you get.

There’s nothing worse than paying for a piece of work that just doesn’t do the trick. Agencies want to meet the brief… so if you get the brief right there should never be a wasted penny spent with marketing suppliers. And, in small business marketing, every penny counts.

By Cheryl Crichton | Associate Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

So, if you’re not an agency… what are you?

We’ve been getting a few puzzled looks when we say that Clear Thought Consulting isn’t a marketing agency, so we thought we’d clarify the business model a little for those who might be interested.

So, we work with smaller businesses, from about 12 employees to about 200. If the company is still small enough to feasibly remember everyone’s names, then so much the better. So, big corporates are out. Within this, we work with businesses whose products or services are bought through a process of careful consideration – so, impulse buying isn’t our thing. Complicated, expensive or high-risk purchases are.

We work directly with clients to get them up and running on the marketing front. Typically, a business may have dabbled in marketing or have a reception-come-marketing approach. The point of pain that we’re there to address, is the company that knows they want to grow, but that doesn’t have the skills to get the message out (if indeed they know what the message is). In this situation, going straight to an agency or recruiting can be extremely frustrating. Without the basics in place, it is unlikely that a business will know exactly what to brief, or what to look for in a marketing employee. So, we work with companies in this situation, over six to twelve months to lay the foundations of a marketing operation, and to make sure that the business leaders know the purpose and function of marketing for their business.

A three phase Clear Thought project will position, enable and then act to allow clients to grow their businesses

Our approach is firmly centred on configuring free-flowing sales funnels for our clients – to generate both new business and new-from-existing business. Often, people think that what they need from marketing is to turn the tap on – i.e. get more leads in. This is sometimes true. But, more often than not, the tap is flowing into a leaky bucket. We first fix the bucket (sort out brand, messaging, websites, sales tools, databases, etc) and then help them to work with various marketing suppliers to turn the tap on. But only when their marketing operation is configured to make the most of it. In set-up phases, we spot gaps and problems and hook the client up with the right experts to resolve these issues. Once the funnel is fixed, we set them sail with a decent set of marketing providers, and we might also assist with recruiting a marketing team.

So, you work on commission..

No. Clear Thought is paid by the client for a programme over six months to a year. Introductions to third party suppliers is totally focused on what is best for the client, so we never take kick-backs from suppliers. This ensures that our judgement is never clouded by potential remuneration. Where an agency account director might want to tie a client in to a semi-dependent relationship to ensure an ongoing income, we want to get the client to a point of independence where they can run their marketing without us – hopefully recommending us to others along the way.

So, Clear Thought competes with agency planners…

There’s a little bit of overlap with planners, but not much. The clients we work with probably wouldn’t have the budget to get where they needed to get through using an agency planning team. Because we work over a longer term and from within a client’s business, we can get them to the stage where they can brief an agency properly without wasting time, money and goodwill on mis-briefing. In fact, we can work with agency to help them with problematic clients – by skilling-up the client in how to get the most from marketing suppliers and undertaking infrastructure projects (like CRM set-up) – so that the relationship is more fruitful all round.

Do you just do the thinking?

We believe that action creates clarity. So, although smart thinking is our key differentiator – thought without elbow grease is pretty useless. Our programmes are highly active and involve lots of input and energy from clients in putting plans into action to see if they work, learn from doing them and refine for future improvements. The key thing here is that we never just ‘do’ – we will always find out why something needs doing, and if its being done in the best possible way.

Hope that answers a few questions. If you want to know more, please do drop us a line.

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

What shape is your marketing budget?

The questions I most often get asked about marketing budgets are:

• How much should I spend as a percentage of turnover?
• Should I benchmark against competitors?
• How much shall I spend on each discipline (PR, DM, Events, Ads, etc.)?

All totally reasonable questions… but what you should be asking is: what shape should my marketing budget be? Seriously, it is the most important question there is on the budgeting front. So, let me tell you what I mean.

A decent marketing programme is centred on a sales funnel, onto which you’ve mapped the decision making process for your target audience. (see previous posts Making Marketing Pay, and What to Say When).

FIGURE 1: Chart to show the influence of marketing spend across the sales funnel

From this you can put together a programme of activity that moves a person from awareness to a sale. Each marketing technique has a different level of influence at each stage of this process. You need to determine the level of influence at each stage, then apportion this across the funnel.

There are a few ways to decide the amount of influence each technique has:

• Workshop with the sales and marketing team to agree the apportionment
• Surveys or focus groups amongst new customers to get them to assess what they saw at each stage (this can be tricky, as people often post-rationalise decision-making, meaning that emotional triggers are downplayed)
• A best guess (hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere)
• A combination of all of the above

From this exercise you now have a powerful tool for designing programmes and allocating budget. Now analyse your budget in the same way:

• Split your spend into each technique
• Apportion this spend as per the influence amount you’ve worked out for that technique (for example, if you worked out that PR has 40% influence at awareness, 10% at interest, etc. your spend on PR should be tabulated to reflect that)
• You now have an actual shape for your budget

Compare your actual budget shape to the ideal budget shape you’ve established to maintain a free-flowing sales funnel. This allows you assess where you’re spending too much or too little, and to adjust your spend according to the funnel requirements.

Now, if you have a budget cut, or find a pot of cash, you again have a powerful tool to decide how to adjust your spending. The crucial factor here is to maintain the shape. So, rather than cutting a project that happens to be the right level of spend, you can cut evenly across the funnel ensuring that you’re not leaving any gaps.

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

Capitalising on marketing moments

This is what those in the PR trade call an ‘issues jump’. And, with support from a nimble marketing communications team, this is an activity that can be hugely fruitful. You won’t know what they are until they happen, but there are things you can prepare to be ready for when they do.

How to spot a marketing moment

You’re looking for a moment of heightened attention, when something in your space becomes the subject of attention. This happens when PESTLE (political, economic, societal, technological, legal, environmental) matters change and impact your market or when a major paper or programme picks up on an issue.

If you’ve established your market messaging up front, this gets a whole lot easier. With a message matrix in hand (i.e. each audience, the functional layers within that audience, and what you want them to think about your organisation) you can be pretty disciplined about this by dividing up the task. If you’ve established your audience, you can allocate one or more to each of your team for them to scout.

This can be done by:

• Subscribing to the relevant magazines, ebulletins, etc.
• Watching the identified competitors in that space
• Setting up relevant Google alerts (for the messages you’re after and things that audience would be interested in)
• Joining LinkedIn groups, Blog feeds, Forums in that space
• Keeping an ear an eye out

If you’re not that organised, you can of course just keep your ear to the ground. When something comes up that is in your space, a pre-planned process should kick into action.

Planning for an event you’re unaware of

Your annual budget should make some contingency for these un-expected marketing moments – and have a back-up plan for spending that money wisely if none crop up (unspent contingency can always be put towards creative and engaging Christmas campaigns, which really can be more than a card! And can be worth doing).

The first thing to say is that PR needs a net – that is, generating interest when there is no pre-defined funnel to capture that interest is a complete waste of time, energy and cash. A decent website should have a data capture facility, and ideally a campaign hub (somewhere to post downloadable material, in return for marketing permission). If your site doesn’t have this built in, you should either invest in it, or find an agency who can build you campaign microsites quickly… by which I mean 48 hours.

So, assuming you’ve snaffled away a little pot of cash, or for the less organised… convinced someone at short notice to find some money or cut it from somewhere else, then these are the key building block of an action plan:

• Brainstorm session, to include the key decision maker
• A piece of collateral that can be downloaded (discusion paper, briefing note, etc.)
• Loaded to your campaign hub or microsite
• Plan a sales response for downloaders – an offer of some kind
• Draw up a press list and prepare a tailored press release for each one
• Select one key press player to whom you’ll offer an exclusive
• Let your exclusive have the story for a few days
• Then distribute the press release more widely
• Post questions/discussions in LinkedIn Groups and other online forums
• Hand the leads onto sales as they come in to follow-up as planned
• Track through the sales funnel to measure effectiveness and ROI

Writing a report at short notice can be made easier with some preparation too. So, if the press has suddenly become interested in something in your space, you can create high quality material quickly. Again, if you’ve worked out your message matrix up front, it is a fairly simple process to run a 2-hour brainstorm on each one and write up talking points – these are then available to use in forward features and in proactive and reactive campaigns.

You need to talk your decision maker through this process before it happens. So, that when you pick up the phone to tell them you are doing an issue jump – they know what is needed of them and will be able to respond quickly.

Action plan

Are you ready to capitalise on a marketing moment in your space? If not, here’s a to-do list:

• Prepare a microsite or area on main website that can be easily amended, where people can download material in return for data capture
• Prepare a message matrix and brain-storm talking points, identify target titles, groups, blogs and forums
• Set-up a media monitoring system – press scanning, competitor watching, Google alerts, groups, forums, etc.
• Prepare a vanilla execution plan for a responsive campaign
• Walk your decision-makers, execution team and sales team through the plan so they know how it will work when it happens

By doing some pre-planning, you will be able to respond to a changing market at speed. This sets you apart as an organisation with its finger on the pulse, and ahead of its competition.