Articles and guides are excellent ways to increase organic traffic and establish topic authority.
Whether you’re creating a new post or updating an existing one, having a strategy in place ensures that your content is optimized for search engines and useful to your target audience.
This is where having a good content brief template can help. In this post, I’ll explain what a content brief is, why it’s important, and how to create a brief that produces successful content.
What Is a Content Brief, and How Do You Use One?
A content brief, also known as a copy brief or copywriting brief, is a document that contains all of the information required by a writer to create any given article or piece of content. The brief is essentially the strategy for the creation and success of the article.
A good content brief includes a detailed description of the article’s strategy and goals, as well as guidelines for what the article should include, such as SEO requirements, questions to answer, internal links, and imagery.
In other words, if you gave a content brief to any writer, regardless of their familiarity with the brand or subject matter, the writer should have everything they need within the brief to create an article that is ready for search engines and users alike.
So, what exactly is in a copy brief? Continue reading to find out more.
Project Synopsis
First, provide a high-level summary of the project to the writer. A high-level summary ensures that the writer understands the purpose and goals of the article, as well as how this article fits into your larger content strategy and business goals.
This is especially important when multiple writers are working on different pieces of content for the same campaign or strategy. Here’s what you should put in your project summary.
What Is Your Objective?
This is the place to show off your content objectives. Are you attempting to rank in the SERPs in order to raise brand awareness? Or perhaps you’d like to answer frequently asked questions in order to reduce customer service calls.
Knowing what your objectives are will help your content succeed. Furthermore, having clear content goals aids in the establishment of content KPIs and the tracking of performance.
For Whom Are You Writing This?
The more information you can provide about who the content is intended for, the easier it will be for the writer to tailor the messaging directly to the needs of your target audience. This is an excellent place to include any persona or user archetype data that highlights your users’ pain points, motivations, demographics, and any insights you have into their online behavior.
Consider how you would respond to the following questions:
- Where is the reader in the customer journey?
- What would entice someone to read this article?
- Based on search trends, what do you know about this audience?
Example:
This is the audience description for this post, based on search trends and questions from our clients:
The target audience consists of entry-level marketers and content managers who want to learn how to improve the content strategy of their blog. They want specifics on what to include in a content brief, as well as best practices and pointers for creating their own content brief template.
