How to Brief Your Creators

The Most Important Step in Content Creation

Define the Audience

Being clear about who you want to read your content is vital. You'd create very different content for a CFO than for a deeply technical engineer. Identifying the audience and aiming the content to fit their needs and preferences is vital if the content is going to perform well.

Personas are a great way of defining your audience. You should have a set of defined personas to inform your marketing activities and it's unlikely that you will want to target content at anyone who is not one of your personas, although you may want to be a little more specific if your content is targeting a specific market.

Setting Goals

The most important question is always “Why?”.

Why are you creating this content? What should it achieve? What will it change?

If you can determine why, then you can set a clear goal. A good example might be: “Create an eBook explaining to junior engineers how our new product, Widget 1000, saves time.”

It's also good to set metrics for the content performance. For example “achieve 1000 downloads” or “have 400 engineers read 75% or more of the content". Obviously these goals will be impacted by the quality of the content and the promotional campaign.

Key Takeaways

A great way to define what the content should achieve is by determining how the content will change the behaviour of your audience. Some great questions to consider include:

What will the reader say to their boss?
How will the reader approach their job differently?
What will be the one thing the reader remembers most strongly?
What three ideas will the reader take from the content?

How to Run a Great Sourcing Call

One of the best ways to ensure the quality of your content is to run a sourcing call with a subject matter expert (SME). However, SMEs can be difficult to manage: they can get absorbed in the technicalities and forget the goal of the content.

Try these tips to get more from your sourcing calls:

Brief the SME prior to the call and reiterate the goals and audience at the start of the call
Prepare the questions you need answered in the content
Set a clear agenda and time for the call
Don't let the SME wander too far from the topic
Ask about the language of the audience: it might be different from that of the SME
Video the briefing (you can also use the video to promote the content when it's finished)
Make sure the SME reviews your notes or briefing sheet after the call to ensure everything was fully understood