The Importance of the Marketing Brief
The interesting thing about The marketing brief is very few Garage Businesses use one when they plan their marketing, and for that reason their marketing is often ad-hock.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Brief?
It provides the focus for your marketing activities.
The marketing brief sets out the aims and objectives of your marketing campaign.
The reason for the marketing brief in a micro business, (a business with 1-9 employees, few independent garages scale beyond that size, some do become SME’s with 10-250 employees), but most people reading this will be in a micro business.
Is to get focused, to make sure the message and the language you use reflect your business, your values and your beliefs.
How Do You Do It?
You need a document, a template to lay out what you are trying to achieve with your marketing.
What Goes into Your Marketing Brief?
We’re going to go through it in this training but not in any real detail.
Using some examples from the marketing brief that I used for the Atomic Success Program.
What Is in the Document?
Company Overview
It all starts with your why, your vision, your values, and your purpose.
It is never a bad idea to reiterate what it is that your company is all about.
Your marketing should be a representation of your company, your marketing should represent the same experience a customer will have when they come to your business.
Therefore, writing down the company mission never does any harm.
What are the organizational values?
What is your vision?
Project Purpose
The purpose of this project, write it down, it helps you get in the mood if you are creating the marketing content. Or it helps explain to somebody else if you are outsourcing this project exactly what you are hoping to achieve. (And if they can deliver)
Project Summary
The project Summary is the executive summary of what you want to achieve from the campaign.
Anyone picking up the document should be able to recognise the company from the overview, and the purpose of the campaign from the project purpose.
The summary should outline what you are trying to achieve and how you aim to achieve it without having to read the whole document.
The introduction helps if you are doing the marketing yourself, to get your brain back in the right space to use the language of your business, the language of your vision, the language that suits your values and your purpose.
But, if you are outsourcing your marketing, which you might be doing as you start to, grow your business, this allows the people that are doing your marketing for you to get a feel for what your company’s like.
This allows that person to be aligned with your business right from the beginning.
Goals & Objectives
What are the goals and objectives for this marketing campaign?
What do we want to achieve?
These must be measurable goals and they must be SMART.
Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound.
Your goals and objectives must be quantifiable in some way.
Data is what we measure.
A Metric is the data are we are comparing it to.
A simple metric for example is the number of customers in quarter three compared to quarter one.
This is a metric because we are comparing internal data.
Target Audience or Market.
Once you know what you are trying to achieve, the next thing you want to identify is the target audience.
Who is this marketing campaign aimed at?
Is it business-to-business B2B or business-to-customer B2C?
Either way, we need to know who the ideal customer is.
If we have already developed the avatars of your ideal customers, you can use the existing information.
However, if you are targeting a new customer or a new market segment, you need to know all about that segment.
This could be research that you need to do.
The whole point of the brief is if you collect the required information.
don’t know who the message is for, how can you construct the message?
It’s elementary stuff when you sit down and think about it.
But if you just sit in front of your keyboard and say, oh, I’m going to do a Facebook post, what’s the chances of you hitting your target audience, if you don’t know who that audience is?
Too many garages believe everyone on Facebook is their target customer.
Then the message becomes incredibly woolly instead of laser-focused.
Remember, the point of the marketing brief is to focus, to bring your crosshairs right on the target of your ideal customer with the ideal message for the objective you are trying to achieve.
Design and Strategy
You need to outline the strategy you’re going to use, the media, the content, the timeline, and the budget.
This is all obvious stuff, and if you’re doing the marketing yourself, you probably don’t need to put too much detail into the template.
However, if you are outsourcing this, this is where this document becomes incredibly powerful because this is how you tell them the exact strategy you want to employ.
The type of Media, are you going to use for example audio, visual or a mixture of both?
Text only, or text and images?
Is it a local campaign?
Are you going to be using a celebrity or an influencer?
There are so many different variables to any marketing strategy, that you must put quite some detail into your marketing strategy if you are outsourcing it to ensure both parties are clear about what is expected.
Example of the marketing strategy for atomic success.
The marketing strategy includes Facebook posts, featuring high-impact direct marketing posts and content videos, adding Facebook friends, and posting in other FB groups to raise awareness of the group.
We plan to secure relationships with four leading influencers to help promote the group.
(I’ve listed the influencers) over the next six months.
We will do this by delivering content, seminars and training courses for them.
Always pointing back towards the group.
Our brand is going to be disruptive and differs from other coaches by promising to give away the training.
We will use images, videos, and copy that should reflect the tone and speak to businesses in need of help.
It’s quite detailed, and I have thought about what I’m going to do and how am I going to do it.
Deliverables.
Here, you will outline how you’re going to do it.
In the example above I have identified Facebook posts.
What you must do is outline the frequency and positioning of the content.
For Atomic Success, this is one to three unique Facebook text and image posts per week on my personal profile.
Plus two unique video clips of three minutes or less per week.
In the Garage Owners Network Group, I must publish one video, 15 minutes in length every week on a training topic within one of the five pillars of business success.
These are the deliverables that I need to work on to achieve my, goals, in terms of the atomic success program.
Mandatory content.
Every single piece of marketing material has what I call mandatory content.
This is where you outline what all the content in this campaign must include.
For example
A call to action.
What must the people do once they’ve consumed the material?
What is the next step? A call to action. Click here to join as an example.
They must all have the logo and must also contain content that has some value to the audience.
Project Timeline
The timeline should be agreed upon, it can be broken down into phases, which is what I’ve done in my example,
There are three phases.
- target deadline is the end of March.
- target timeline is the end of October.
- target timeline is the end of December.
For the goals and objectives, I’ve given each of those phases a separate goal and objective.
This allows me to revaluate those goals and up the ante or drop the expectation slightly as I find out what is or isn’t working, this ensures I going to get close to the overall goals for this campaign.
For example, one of my goals for this year was to have 500 members in the group by December 31st.
There are already more than 500 members, so I have readjusted that goal to 600 members by the end of the year.
Breaking the campaign into phases,
- makes the goals more manageable, realistic, and achievable for SMART goal setting,
- allows the goals to be revised if we are overachieving or underachieving to ensure that we don’t get demotivated or think this marketing is a waste of time.
Having a timeline to adhere to, and knowing what you want to deliver by when provides deadlines which are essential if you are outsourcing, but also useful if you are doing the marketing yourself.
Project Budget.
Set a Financial budget for the entire project.
Then break the budget down into the various aspects of the campaign.
The budget for my project was £2,400
- £1,000 for Digital Resources
- £1000 for Paid Advertising
- £400 for Travel.
Remember even if you’re not doing paid advertising if your marketing is free at the point of delivery. (Facebook videos like this are free to deliver) it actually takes time, and that time isn’t free.
You must account for your time.
While it is obvious you need a financial budget, you also need to budget for the time.
If you have time constraints. How are you going to deliver?
You can also measure the time taken to do the campaign and calculate the cost of doing the marketing and have a budget based on that.
Project Contacts
Finally, if the marketing brief is for an outsourcer, make sure they know who the contact person is within the company they’re doing the work.
Who they will be reporting to within your company.
Include the contact details and preferred method of contact.