What’s in a marketing brief?
At it’s core, a marketing brief needs to describe what you want done and any constraints like timing and budget
But there’s more, right?
In the very least, some helpful context like a description of your target market and the products / services you offer. And maybe why buyers even need a product like yours so the tactic can speak to this motivation.
We’d argue that the context of the tactics also matters. What’s happening before and after this tactic, and long side it. Also which stage of the buyer’s journey this tactic is trying to help buyers navigate through.
You probably also want to include whatever you already know (believe) about best practice for this tactic
What if this marketing brief could be done for you in 5 minutes?
Funnel Plan can: click one button, and within 5 minutes you’ve got an email with all of that context and the best practice already done. You might still want to tweak the brief with timing and budget, and make a few changes, but the brief is already 80% done when you get it.
What’s this Funnel Plan thing?
First, where does it sit? There’s a hierarchy of activities and thinking for most businesses. You need to form the best answer to these items:
- Company strategy like what you want to be when you grow up (or just grow);
- Go-to-market strategy where you make decisions about market, product, channel and competition;
- Sales and marketing process including what you are going to do with buyers to find them, position, shape their thinking and earn the right to serve them;
- Execution – actually doing the steps in your sales and marketing process; and
- Measurement so you know what’s working and what’s not.
Funnel Plan is a tool to help you build and communicate your optimal sales and marketing process, or for a trained consultant to help you to do that. That’s the 3rd step above, but it also helps with the steps either side: step 2 and step 4. It also helps you to shape your go-t0 market strategy, and helps you to choose the right tactics.
What can you do now?
We’ve always had a 1-page plan as a primary output of the Funnel Plan software. Not so long ago, we added the ability to produce a presentation in PowerPoint so you could bring others into the tent on your shiny new sales and marketing process. We wrote about that in another blog about how you can communicate your sales and marketing process.
Now, drum-roll please, you can also produce a comprehensive marketing brief for every tactic in your process.
Like we did with the PPT output, we turned to Aspose for a bit of help with the XML integration. Their Aspose.Words tool shortened our development cycle massively, and wound our developers into a community of developers also building Word and PPT outputs from their cloud applications. Thanks guys.
The brief is typically around 6 pages, and includes:
- The strategy;
- Where the tactic sits in the process;
- Some gold like how many buyers need to move through this stage every month, and with what success rate; and
- Best practice tips on how we want the tactic implemented.
How now?
If you’ve already got Funnel Plan, just navigate to the tactic you want to edit, click it, and select the ‘Brief’ button. You’ll get the detailed brief in your inbox within 5 minutes.
If you don’t have Funnel Plan, you can have a closer look at the Funnel Plan software that helps Sales and Marketing professionals to build and communicate their plans and the Aspose.Words software that we use as our preferred method of outputting to Word documents here.
