The importance of a clear and concise brief

Marketing is most successful when there is a clearly established client brief. Starting out on a vaguely defined project such as "we need a web site", or "we need a new brochure" is to court disappointment. It is the planning and research that goes into developing a brief that helps ensure that the resulting collateral is on target. That is why starting with a Marketing Plan is such a good idea, because individual projects will themselves be components within an agreed framework. Of course this takes work and effort in the first place, but the value of a marketing plan that can be shared with the rest of the company is realised during the year as individual campaigns, projects and material is rolled out. The rationale for that new web site or brochure will have been determined, objectives set, target audiences and target markets known and budget allocated. But it is still important to have a clear, concise brief that a designer can work to. Each element in a campaign that itself is part of an overall plan needs to be detailed and the usual format for this is a Design Brief.

The Design Brief should allow the designer to be creative, but focussed into delivering a piece of work that positively promotes and communicates your marketing message. Without a brief there is the risk the designer will allow creative imagination to dominate and run riot rather than deliver a message that hits the target. And it is important to use a professionally trained creative rather than having assembled all the information be tempted to carry on and do the brochure yourself. The reason is your time does actually cost money and however pleased you are with achieving the task, your customers will notice the difference between professional work and sub consciously this will be a judgement on your company, your products and services. 

Personalised automated messages

An e-mail report arrived purporting to show how our agency profile "is doing" on an advertising industry database and went on to explain that we were currently recipients of their " Enhanced Agency Service" free of charge and not only did this afford the greatest exposure but they were proactively engaged in marketing our services using both online and offline channels. With great anticipation I scanned the report of visits to our page and click thrus to our site only to discover that despite all the great efforts apparently freely undertaken on our behalf, all figures were a big round zero. Ah! This eventuality was apparently anticipated and a zero return may be explained and rectified by updating our profile page. But guess what - there was no profile page or any mention at all of our agency on the site! This communication was presumably the output of some automated device and suggests that nobody had checked either the results which would hardly persuade us to actually pay for this service, or indeed if we were actually listed in the first case. This type of communication whilst posing as a personalised e-mail is actually less effective than a clearly widely broadcast message about a product or service. The main proposition that the owners of the database were selling was their enhanced listing so surely the first step is to provide some evidence that this has worked better than the basic free listing. This of course will take some time and human intervention, but should result in not only a genuine list of prospects but some understanding of how the 'trial' has performed. The new list will probably be shorter - if the rest are like ours a zero return it might instead prompt a review of the service itself - and better targeted. Relying on an automated system to generate sales misses the whole point of actually knowing who your customers and prospects are.