How To Brief A Freelance Marketer

In my previous blog outlining what I’ve learned in my marketing career, I mentioned the importance of the brief and  I wanted to take a minute to expand on that.

In my career I’ve dealt with a lot of messy briefs…let me re-phrase that (ahem)…Over the past twenty-odd years working in marketing comms, I’ve had my fair share of confusing, contradictory and vague briefs from clients and employers. 

“We need something to tell our customers we’re offering this new service – can you work something up for tomorrow?”

Don’t get me wrong, this is a two-way street. Any marketer worth their salt will know how to interrogate a marketing brief and pull out the information they need to do a decent job. But sometimes those questions come back with a resounding “you tell me” instead of a proper answer. 

This answer is hands-down the most infuriating thing you can say to a freelance marketer (well, this freelance marketer). I appreciate that you’re “putting the ball back in my court.” I can tell you what my immediate impressions are of the best way forward for a marketing strategy, a particular tactic or a specific piece of content – but as a new external marketing freelancer, I’m just guessing based on my previous experience. You are the expert on your company, not me. 

If you want to get the most value from a freelance marketer – be open with them. Give them all of the information, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, what you think went wrong. Be open to ideas and feedback when they come and don’t shut anything down until you’ve had a chance to hear your freelancer out. 

That being said, here are five specific things you MUST do when briefing a freelance marketer:

1. Let’s Start With You

It’s essential when briefing anyone external to your organisation that you share more about yourself. 

Who are you? What’s your role in the company? What exactly does the company do? What is the company history? How does the company make money / meet its objectives? What’s the background to this current strategy? Who else is involved in the marketing of your products and services? Are there any current programs of change or upcoming changes you’re aware of in the near future?

I can’t emphasise enough how important all of this is. There are so many assumptions we can make based on an external (and potentially uninformed) view of a company. Getting a thorough idea of the company, its history and how it sees itself is vital if you’re asking for strategic help. But even if you just want a quick blog post, it’s helpful to understand some of this wider framework – a good copywriter can help distil this into the text of a social media post or a blog.

2. Share Your Objectives

As a supplier to your marketing department, it’s important I know the objectives we’re trying to reach together. I understand that sometimes those objectives can be commercially sensitive but you should only work with marketing freelancers with a level of senior experience. This means you can trust they understand the importance of client confidentiality.

If working on a specific piece of content, I don’t necessarily need to know your KPIs or revenue targets but it is valuable to know what you’re hoping to achieve with the overall strategy and with this particular output.

3. Set The Parameters

As a fairly experienced marketer, I’ve worked with lots of different organisations in different sectors; from agri-food to legal services and community events to fashion brands. I have a ton of ideas based on previous experience and can advise on what has worked and not worked in my experience. 

If you’re happy to hear those experiences, let me know and I’ll happily share them for free. I want to do the best job possible for you and if I can help you avoid a mistake I’ve made in the past, I’m happy to do so. Just simply giving me the brief and adding ‘we’re open to ideas around this’ or ‘we’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this in a quick chat’ is enough for me. I know this isn’t carte blanche to go off and create an alternative strategy but it’s good to know I’m not going to offend if I spot a different angle or have tried a similar strategy in the past. 

It’s one of the benefits of working with a freelancer with broader experience and it comes free of charge. But if you don’t tell me that you’re open to ideas, I won’t risk offending you and create specifically to your brief. 

4. Tell Me What You Want. Exactly.

This relates more specifically to content creation briefs but is still relevant to anyone looking for overall strategic support. 

This might seem obvious but you’d be surprised how often the brief is ‘we need something that XYZ.’ It’s great that you’re thinking in terms of objectives first but “something,” eh? Something could be anything – is it a blog post, an email, an email campaign, a price promotion, an ad campaign, a PR campaign, a tactical plan incorporating all of this? 

My marketing toolkit is massive and I’m lucky enough to have experience in multiple areas, so you’re going to have to be a bit more precise (or pay me for a little extra time to do some research and come back with an actual plan). To help you get specific, think: 

Distribution – where will your audience encounter this content? 

Format – what’s the best way to get this information across?

Style – what tone are you hoping to strike?

Timeline – when does this need to happen, is it a one-off or part of a longer campaign?

5. How Will You Know It’s Good?

Again, I don’t need to know your KPIs necessarily (although this can help to align expectations and flesh out other elements of your plan which are important for me to understand). But if those KPIs are commercially sensitive, just let me know what metrics you’re going to judge the efficacy of this content by. Is it clickthroughs from social? -OK, I’ll work on a really killer headline and introduction. Is it clicks from organic search? There are a few tricks I know on formatting an article for Google which we can try. Is it time on page or scroll depth? I have some ideas on how to structure this piece to improve those stats too. 

Knowing how you’re judging success means I can create work that is more likely to succeed by those same metrics. 

6. Introduce Me To Your Audience

I’d love it if every brand had detailed consumer personas based on in-depth customer research, the reality is very different. 

That being said, I still need to know your impressions of your audience and who this piece of work is being written for. Geography and demographic info will have an impact on the language I’ll choose for a specific piece of content. If you’re targeting a specific professional niche tell me who they are and where I can learn more about them and how they talk. I’m adept at adapting your company language to the language of your audience (it’s why I’ve called this business ‘Pidgin’), so tell me who they are and I’ll take it from there. 

7. Supply All Of The Information Immediately

I’m not a researcher and I’m guessing you don’t want me to spend hours reading through old news articles I’ve found online about your company to discover something you have in the footer of a press release you wrote last week. 

Just give me all of the data about your company upfront. Send me five or ten articles, blogs or press releases, brochures about this product or links to specific pages on your site which will give me the in-depth facts. I need the information to do a good job for you. 

8. Make A Mood Board

Particularly if you’re briefing me on any sort of visual content, creating a mood board can be valuable. Pinterest is a great tool for doing this and has helped me breakthrough some creative deadlock in the past. 

If you’re asking me to create imagery for your social feed, show me some specific examples of work you’ve liked and note down some thoughts on what you’ve liked about these images or this video. I’ll likely have further questions to try to separate various elements of your taste but having this conversation with visual references will help me brief stylists, videographers and models to achieve the look and feel you want. 

This can also apply to written content and social media outputs too. Send me ten pieces of content or brand social feeds that hooked you in and made you read the full article, sign-up for a newsletter or buy a product. 

I never want this blog to come across as a place for rants or for me to moan about clients. I love marketing, I love working with a wide variety of clients and I am always grateful that anyone entrusts even a small part of their marketing strategy with me. 

But to summarise, everything we do would be made so much better if we communicated openly, collaboratively and without ego. Part of what I love about this job is that I am always learning, so let’s learn from each other. 

Drop me an email if you’d like to work with me at martin@pidginmarketing.com