Why you need a clear campaign brief

08 Mar 2019

Ultimately, your teams cannot start work on a campaign without this, as well as an idea of who the message should reach and what you’d like to happen as a result. It’s also a useful opportunity to remind everyone of the brand values in which your operations orbit, ensuring your message is in line no matter where it is seen.

Campaign brief template

Whether you’re briefing an email, telemarketing or social media campaign, the campaign brief will generally follow a structure along these lines:

Background
Even if you are briefing an internal colleague or team, it’s important to include a company profile, with a brief company history, overview of products and/or services, and reminder of the core brand values and USPs that set the business apart from its competitors. Within this, it’s also a good idea to outline the brand tone – you might find it useful to include examples of messaging across different channels to help illustrate this.

You should also provide a summary of your target audience as background: what do you know about your audience, what drives them and what do they need? Alongside this information, consider including a short section on your main competitors and how they compare.

Campaign objectives
What is the overall objective of your marketing campaign? Remember to follow the SMART process when setting an objective, ensuring it is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

For example:

- Achieve 50 new subscribers to the brand email newsletter in January with a promotion via social media advertising.
- Attract 5 new clients from the leisure sector by the end of April.

Channels and communication
Will this be a single or multi-channel campaign? Is the campaign running nationally, regionally or locally? Specify the channels to be utilised for your campaign and the data required to communicate with your target audience.

For example:

- A telemarketing campaign will be carried out to an existing database of potential leads within the leisure sector.
- Facebook advertising will be utilised to communicate to women aged 25-34 years, with an interest in sustainable living, within 50km of London, UK.

It’s a good idea to include a reminder of the tone here, to ensure any messaging across channels is consistent and reflects the tone and values of the brand as a whole.

Key messages and outcomes
What are the key messages or phrases your campaign needs to reflect? Is there any information your team need to be aware of that may inform your messaging? Take note of current events within your sector that might influence the way you communicate with your audience and highlight where messages need a call to action – what do you want your audience to do?

Break down your message to highlight a problem that your target audience faces and how your product or service solves this problem. Highlight any supporting information to win your audience over, making use of reviews and testimonials, visuals or graphics or consumer research to illustrate your point.

Limitations and contingency plan
Finally, as with any project or campaign, it’s important to be realistic and look ahead to any constraints that may affect your campaign, such as budget limitations, timescales, input required from other contacts or parties or issues as a result of the wider business environment.

By outlining your budget, campaign timescales and key contacts and responsibilities in the campaign brief, you can manage expectations and maintain a good level of control from the beginning, helping to alleviate unforeseen challenges.

We would always recommend talking your team through a campaign brief face to face before kicking off any work to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that no potentially crucial information has been missed. If you need more guidane, download our How to Guide and Word Template.

If you are considering undertaking a telemarketing campaign to boost business but don’t feel confident or don’t have the resources to do so, get in touch with a member of our team to discuss how we might help. Alternatively, visit our online library of testimonials to see how we’ve helped businesses like Kwik Fit and Allianz increase their sales through expert outsourced telemarketing.