How to Build a Highly Successful Content Brief?

What is a Brief?

A brief is a short written outline of a document that needs to still be written. Very often, briefs contain information on what the goals, outlines and features should be included within the document being produced. A project briefs content is important, and many different industries rely on briefs to ensure that team members and employees are on the same page and have the same information about what needs to be written or produced. The contents of a brief are determined by who is going to create the document and what it will be created for, the different inclusions will also be determined by these factors. Many briefs have specific templates that they follow, very often a template is used across the board and only adjusted for unique cases. This ensures that all documentation within a company is streamlined and similar across an entire department, and very often even an entire company! This streamlined content ensures that a brand or business presents itself in the most professional manner possible 

What is a Content Brief?

Even looking at a brief history of content marketing, one thing that you will notice across the board is that content briefs are used to design the basis of what a piece of writing should look like. This type of document will be filled with various information about what a piece of content should include and how to make sure it is as successful as possible. This is extremely important as it ensures that a brand or business is getting everything they expect within the content they are receiving and that it will meet the expectations and the goals that have been aligned with it. A content brief is extremely important, and to avoid disappointment, every company should make sure that they take the time to design the perfect content briefing documents for their content creators. Creating a good content brief is an extremely important part of the content creation process and it should be consistent across multiple channels and types of content within your company! 

What Should Be in Your Content Brief?

Each brand or business would have a different idea of how a content brief should look and what should be included. Though there is no set idea of inclusions that need to be added to create an effective content brief, there are few general additions that can help you to create content briefs that are understood by your content creators and help them to create and design content that is in line with your ideas. By doing things like creating a content brief analysis and ensuring your goals are included within the brief, you can ensure that your content will be perfectly in line with your goals. The following are just a few of the most basic elements that are usually included in a good content brief. 

Suggested Titles and Subheadings

One of the best ways to ensure that the content that is created is in line with what you were hoping to see is to provide creators with suggested titles and subheadings. These suggested titles and heading provides brief guidelines for content and can help a writer or creator direct the content they create in a specific direction. This ensures that the structure of the content and that the content itself will be in line with what you were hoping to see. Providing this kind of information can go a long way in ensuring that the content that is created is effective and contains all that you were hoping for it too! 

Questions to Answer

By providing your content creators with certain questions that need to be answered within the content, you are ensuring that the topics discussed are directed in a particular way and are set to cover certain topics. This is extremely important as it helps to convey user intent within the content that is created, which helps to optimise the content to be displayed when certain questions or phrases are typed into search engines. These questions should be structured well and clearly defined to ensure that content creators can easily base their content around answering these different questions. 

Suggested Word Count

Whether you are designing content that is based on long or short-form writing, it is important that a content creator has a word count that they can use to estimate how lengthy and in-depth the content should be. Without this information, content creators have limited ideas around how much they need to produce, which can affect not only the content itself but the time that it takes to produce the content. Having an estimate or suggestion around the word count ensures that both you and your content creator are on the same page with how long the content should be! 

Keywords and Topics

By clearly laying out the various keywords that should be used and topics that should be covered within the content that is being created, content managers and content creators are aware of the expectations surrounding the text. By identifying and clearly defining these two elements of the content, you can be sure that everyone is on the same page with regards to what the content should be achieving and the topics that need to be discussed to fully round out the content. 

Internal Links

Internal links are important features for SEO and providing your content creator with accurate links will ensure that your content will be accurately recognised by search engine crawlers. Pages with the most internal links are seen as superior pages on your website and search engines will often rank them higher than pages that have fewer links. You should provide the links to your content creators so that they can fit them nicely into the content as opposed to links that are haphazardly and incorrectly placed through content. This bad placement can negatively affect the users’ experience with your content. 

External Links

Having a few external links to other documents that are similar to the one you are hoping for will ensure that the overall design, style and format of the content reflects what you were hoping to see. External links can be specified, and certain pages would reflect the content while others may reflect the type of style that would be best suited, though this information should be outlined and understood before handing the document over to your content creators. 

What is The Connection Between a Content Brief and SEO?

A content brief can be extremely beneficial for a brand or businesses search engine optimisation, and the ability of a content brief to clearly label and outline what should be included can also include what SEO elements the content should have. The SEO elements that need to be included within the content can help a content creator to better understand and implement these elements, ensuring that the content is capable of not only drawing in customers but being recognised as effective content by search engines like Google! The connection between these two elements is that they both contribute to helping a creator understand the goals at hand and ensure that these goals are met within the content. 

Are Content Briefs Important for SEO?

A content writing brief and a website content brief are very important for SEO and having your content creators understand things like buyer persona and providing them with key SEO elements like keywords can go a long way to ensuring that the content that is created is aligned with each brand and businesses end goals. In order to ensure that your content and goals are aligned with your SEO strategy, providing writers and creators with an SEO content brief template would be extremely beneficial. 

How to Build a Highly Successful Content Brief?

Be Aware of User Intent

Not only is it important to give your content creator information about what kind of content you are hoping to see, but it is also important to relay why it is being created. By outlining user intent, authors and content creators are able to be better understand why they are creating the content and are able to relay this through how they structure and design the content. This is incredibly important as not focusing on user intent and a project briefs contents can greatly impact the SEO of the content as this is something that search engine crawlers take into account when deciding where to rank your continent. If you have not defined user intent correctly, your page will be showing up on search queries that may not be relevant to your content or business, resulting in fewer clicks and leads. 

Choose Focus Topics That Focus on User Intent

Not only is it important for you to clearly lay out what the user intent is, it is also necessary to choose topics that reflect this. A content creator is only capable of creating what you tell them to, you inspire a vision and the content creator takes this vision and uses it to sculpt and design the content. If you have chosen topics that do not necessarily reflect the correct user intent, it will not be as effective as it could be if the topics were correctly chosen. It is the job of a content manager to design the topics in such a way that they reflect a brand or businesses intention, and that these texts are then optimised to be found by searches that are relative to who the business is and what they sell. By ensuring that you choose focus topics that focus largely on user internet, you can be sure that the content that is being created will be effective in drawing customers in and convincing them to make a purchase! 

Get Stuck in The Details

Details, details and more details! If you are wanting a content brief that is good and direct, it is important to make sure that your content creator has all of the elements and information that you are hoping to be included. Things that you may think are self-explanatory are often not as obvious as you would think, and understandings getting lost in translation is an easy way to confuse a creator and derail their efforts to create good content. By preparing information that shows the vision you have for the content you are creating, you are ensuring that no inclusions you are hoping to see within the content are lost. Including details is one of the only ways that you can ensure that everything you expect to be included in the content is actually there. Leaving your author or content creator notes about specific details that you hope to see in the content will go a long way to ensure you receive only the best and most effective content from your creator.

Add Links

Adding both internal and external links can make all the difference when it comes to your SEO. Internal links tell Google which pages are your most important and those pages on your website that have far more links are actually considered to be more important than pages with fewer links. Search engines will rank these pages higher on the search engine results pages. It is important that your content creator adds these links to your content in a way that makes sense, so that the links are able to flow within the content and are not just put anywhere, disrupting the text. 

Determine the Number of Questions and Words

By clearly defining the different questions that should be asked and the word count for the content, you are able to better equip your content creator with the information that he or she needs to create the best and most effective content! Knowing the number of words that should be used within the text and clearly laying out this information will provide your content creatine with valuable information on what the final product should look like. Within this explanation, it may be beneficial to define whether or not you want the content to be long or short form as this can also affect how the content is structured and the overall look of the content. 

Always be Creative 

Getting creative with the content creation brief you provide to your content creators will ensure that the content that they create is fun and lively! A content brief is something that the amount of effort you put in, is what you will receive out of it and so it is important that you create a content brief that reflects the ideas that you hope to see within the text. By creating exciting content briefs, you are sure to receive content that is also reflective of these fun and exciting topics and ideas!  

What are The Things to Consider When Building a Content Brief?

When designing and structuring a content brief, one of the most important things to consider is what the content is going to be used for. The intent behind the content will be constructed by using the brief to clearly see the goals and content will be created based on these assumptions. When building a content brief, it is extremely important to remember to clearly lay out what these goals are, whether it is to improve the SEO of the content or draw readers in, or even a bit of both, it is important that your content creator is fully aware of what he/she needs to accomplish. One way that you can make sure that your brief and content needs are aligned is by providing a content brief example as this can ensure that both your creators and content brief designers have all the information necessary to create good and valuable content. By being as clear as possible and including as much valuable information as you can, you are on your way to ensuring that the content created is effective! 

How Can a Content Brief Improve Content Marketing Efforts?

Content can be extremely time-consuming and difficult to produce, which is why making mistakes within certain content and not aligning the content with the goals at hand can lead to disruptions in workflow and an increase in the time that it takes to produce these works. Content briefs improve the quality of content that is produced and ensure that the content that is being created meets the goals that it is intended to meet, without having to go back and make changes and adjustments! This reduces the amount of time that one spends creating the content and ensures that the quality of work that is produced exceeds what would have been created without these goals being clearly outlined in the content marketing brief. 

When it comes to improving content marketing, the devil is all in the details and making sure that your content and your content brief management are aligned with your goals and expectations will ensure that each item you produce and release to your consumer market is effective! For the best content marketing strategy and overall content that is produced from these strategies, brands and businesses should make sure that they work with specific content briefs, ones that clearly lay out what is expected from the content.