Are you struggling to create a clear and concise content brief for your team or clients? A well-crafted content brief is essential for ensuring that your content effectively achieves its goals and resonates with your target audience.
In this blog post, I’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to create the perfect content brief. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur or part of a larger team, this post will provide valuable insights and tips on how to effectively plan and organize your content strategy.
Let’s take a look…
What is a content brief?
A content brief is a document that outlines the goals and objectives for a piece of content. It typically includes information about the target audience, the desired tone and style, and any specific guidelines or requirements for the content.
The purpose of a content brief is to provide clear direction and focus for the person or team creating the content, helping to ensure that the final product aligns with the desired goals and objectives.
Sometimes, the content brief can also be called an SEO Content Brief.
Moreover, note that the content brief is NOT the content outline.
Why do I need a content brief?
You require a content brief if you want to make sure that the final draft meets all the goals and objectives properly. It also helps ensure that everyone involved in creating the content has the same vision for what that should look like
Followings are the benefits of having a solid content brief for the content you’re planning to create:
- Provides clear instructions to the writers on how to approach and what to include
- Helps writers create a copy that fits the brand’s voice
- Clears any confusion about what you are creating, why you are creating, and how it fits into the overall strategy
- Helps writers finish the piece faster and more efficiently
- Makes sure that the writers don’t miss anything important while writing
- Helps you create a more cohesive, engaging piece of content
- Make sure that the content you create is useful, relevant, and valuable to your readers, etc.
What to include in a content brief
It depends on the understanding level of writers and what they prefer in the content brief provided to them. But generally, here are the elements that can be included in your SEO content brief:
- Content title — The topic on which the content is to be created.
- Content summary — A short description of the content that makes it further easier to understand the topic.
- Primary keyword — The primary keyword that the writer should be targeting.
- Target audience — A line describing the target audience – include things like who they are, from where they belong, and what they are interested in, etc.
- Goal — Your goal from the article – do you just want to educate the readers or also want to casually promote your product to them?
- Writing instructions — Detailed instructions for the writer about how to approach the piece. It can also include information about the style, tone, and format of the article.
- Major points to cover — Major points to cover are nothing but a rough outline of the content, it helps writers understand the overall format of the article.
- Meta title and description — The meta title and meta description of the article that is useful while publishing. It’s not necessary for the writer, but can be included.
- Internal links suggestions — List of existing content to which the current piece of content can be linked out.
- Estimated word count — How long the content should be.
- Competing or similar content — Links to other similar or competing content to take inspiration from and make your content better than the competition.
- Graphics instructions — What kind of graphics and illustrations can be created for the content.
- Deadlines — When the last date of completing the draft is.
Here, I have added numerous elements, but adding more information doesn’t necessarily make the content brief of high quality. Add only the elements that are absolutely necessary for the writers to understand; otherwise, it will confuse them.
When we create content briefs for Fluxette clients, we only include the information that you see in the above screenshot. If you like, you can take a detailed look at the content brief that we share.
Tools for creating content briefs
No tool can create complete content briefs better than a human. Apart from a simple keyword research tool, I don’t recommend using a tool for creating content briefs; because no tool can create content briefs better than you do.
But there are tools that can help you with specific parts of the content brief. Let’s take a look…
1. Surfer
Surfer is an SEO tool that can help you with what subtopics can be included under a topic and also tells you how long your article should be.
It works by analyzing the top 10 ranking posts and what they are covering. Surfer works well for most topics, but doesn’t provide good suggestions if the topic you’re writing about does not have good results in Google searches.
2. Frase
Frase is another tool that helps you create automatic content briefs for any topic. It generates a full-length content brief within seconds.
Frase uses AI for creating briefs.
3. SEMrush
The SEO Content Template feature in SEMrush might also be helpful for creating your content briefs. It shows you the semantically related words, text length, and a few other basic elements for the topic.
Wrapping it up
Earlier I was the one writing content for all my blogs, but now that I have a team, I can’t imagine going any posts on my blog without a content brief.
If you create the perfect content brief, it helps you create better content, and that too in less time.
If you’re looking for templates, check the content brief templates that I have provided in another post.
If you have a related query, feel free to let me know in the comments below.
