Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You alrighty. Here we go. Here we go, yo. Here we go, yo. Okay.
[00:00:08] In a digital landscape where every detail counts, the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a missed opportunity can often be traced back to your original brief. Today we're going to dive into how to craft a digital marketing brief that not only communicates your vision, but does so in a way that maximizes results. From pinpointing your primary objectives to avoiding common pitfalls, we're covering the essential steps to ensure that your digital marketing partner can bring your vision to life. Whether you're aiming to boost online sales, increase engagement, or capture a larger audience, the journey to impactful results begins with a clear, concise and effective brief. Let's get into it. Hi and welcome. Or welcome back to head training, the series where digital marketing meets the wonderful world of wine. I'm Polly Hemmond, founder of Fiveforest, and today we are diving into the art of crafting a digital marketing brief that commands results. Stay with me and you'll uncover how to communicate your vision, objectives and expectations in a way that empowers your digital marketing partner to deliver not just what you ask for, but something that exceeds your expectations. Get ready for a session filled with insider tips. That's us. And actionable advice that will elevate your digital marketing strategies to new heights. At Fiveforest, we see dozens of rfps client briefs. We sit through meetings, we go through the proposal process, and today I want to talk about what makes a difference in getting the right partner, getting the best out of them, getting the right proposal, getting a budget that meets what you really want, how to ensure that there are no gaps between what you think you want and what you can actually manage, what you can afford, what your capabilities in house are. We deal with this all the time, and these are my insider tips. So let's talk through it. The first thing that a team like five four needs to know is, what is the business overview? So understanding the heart of your business is crucial for any digital marketing strategy to succeed. Start with a sharp, engaging introduction to your business that includes your industry, your target market and what truly sets you apart. What is your unfair advantage? Let us know so that we can make the best use of it. Paint a picture of your brand's unique position in the marketplace. If you can't tell me what it is, I can't tell them what it is. For example, highlight not just the products you offer, but the ethos behind them. How are you making a difference? This gives your digital marketing partner the context that we need to tailor our approach specifically to your brand, ensuring that our strategies resonate with your core audience and reflect your unique values. Next, define your objectives. It is essential that you are clear and specific, whether it's increasing online sales by 20% within the next six months, or expanding your market reach into three new countries, or enhancing customer engagement on all of your social media platforms, avoid the common trap of prescribing how those goals should be achieved. Instead, focus on what you want to accomplish, what the end goal needs to be, and why it will matter to your business. This approach gives us, as a digital marketing partner, the freedom to innovate and propose solutions that are creative, effective and rely on our expertise in your platforms, with your audience in your markets to come up with something new that perhaps your team wouldn't even know to consider. For instance, rather than insisting on specific campaigns, outline your goal of, say, enhancing brand awareness and let the experts suggest the most effective way to get there. Tell us who your target audience is knowing your audience inside and out is the cornerstone of any successful digital marketing strategy. It's one of the main reasons that we go in and do discovery with brands. Provide your agency or your partner with detailed insights into your target audience's psychographics, demographics, behaviors, preferences. For example, if your primary audience is ecoconscious, millennials help us understand their preference for sustainable brands, their typical online behavior and the platforms they frequent. The more you can tell us, the lower our research budget can be. Quite honestly, also, the better your in house marketing will be. This precision allows your digital marketing partner to create campaigns, websites, advertising, marketing, collateral that resonate on a personal level, increasing engagement and conversion rates. So this is not just about reaching people, the throw a wide net approach, it's about reaching the right people in the right way, or what we've always said, it's about sharing the right message to the right people at the right time. Another one that seems so obvious, but actually comes up quite often in work that we do is make certain that you have documented brand guidelines to share with your marketing partner. So your brand's identity needs to shine through every aspect of your digital presence when you share your brand. Guidelines with a digital marketing partner include logos, brand stamps, color schemes include tone of voice and even messaging pillars if you have them. But please frame them as a canvas rather than constraints. There are times when what you have actually won't work for what we need. So, for example, if your brand's tone is friendly and approachable, provide examples of this voice in action. This guidance encourages consistency, but allows the creative team the freedom to explore and innovate. This is about ensuring brand recognition across all platforms, enabling your audience to feel a consistent connection with your brand, regardless of the digital touch point. Again, I cannot stress how important having consistent brand guidelines that are known across your team but shared with all of your digital marketing partners will be. I've actually just spent this past week having to recreate brand guidelines for a client because a disgruntled employee left with all of their vector files. We often will have to adapt brand guidelines to match accessibility requirements or because we don't have fonts that are appropriate for an aging audience. There are so many ways that good digital marketing teams who know what they're doing will want to be able to work with you to retain your brand identity, but also make it applied to what you need. And good digital marketing partners will actually act like the guardians of your brand when perhaps even sometimes in house marketers won't.
[00:07:26] Okay, so this is an interesting one. Identifying key features. I think this is important, but I also want to give you some warnings, a little bit of caution. So identifying key features for a website or campaign is critical. Clearly list your must haves.
[00:07:46] So funny. Most of the ones that we get are just table stakes these days. Of course you need a user friendly interface. Of course you need mobile compatibility. Do you need though a blog? Do you need recipe integrations? Do you need events? So tell us what you have, what you need. What strategy has dictated that you will want to grow?
[00:08:09] Don't tell us how to do it. Don't tell your marketing partner how to get there or how to implement it. For instance, stating the need for an intuitive navigation structure that enhances user experience means absolutely nothing to us because we already know how to do that. Saying that we have a robust food program that supports significant advertising across our geotargeted area tells us that we know we need to go in and build all of the information architecture, all of the internal structures that can support that food program in a resilient, ongoing way. This method focuses on the outcomes and it gives your digital marketing partners the freedom again, to innovate solutions that meet your requirements and exceed your expectations. Next up, what we really need to know is your market context.
[00:09:04] Understanding the landscape in which your business operates can significantly enhance your digital marketing structure, duh. But it can also help us work so much faster, stay on budget, make the process easier, less stressful, happier for your team. So when you're discussing market context in your brief, please mention key competitors. Mention industry benchmarks, mention what you like and what you don't like from those competitors, highlight what you admire about them. For instance, let's say that a competitor excels in customer engagement through social media. Acknowledge this as a benchmark for your own strategy. This does not mean copying what they do. It means letting your digital partner know that you are striving for the same kind of excellence by understanding the market standards. I also want to give a little warning about this. Sometimes things that look pretty on your competitors surface result in very few wins. Providing this context helps your digital marketing partner craft strategies that are competitive, aligned with industry best practices, and differentiated from how your competitors are getting there.
[00:10:26] The biggie budget and timeline this is where I think there is a profound gap between what people want, what they think they want and what they say they want. So when a digital marketing agency asks you about your budget and timeline, they're not trying to screw you out of extra money. They're trying to propose what they can offer best for the budget that you have. Clear communication about your budget and timeline is pivotal for setting realistic expectations. Be upfront about your financial constraints and desired completion date.
[00:11:08] This allows us or any digital marketing partner to tailor our proposals to what is achievable, ensuring a smooth workflow and preventing future misunderstanding. This is very much about finding the sweet spot between your aspirations and what is practical. All right, success metrics the question I know this is always such a silly question, we ask it as well, is what does success for this project look like? But sometimes, if you're a marketer, if you're a marketing stakeholder, if you're not the ultimate decision maker or the brand owner, understanding what the real goals of a project may be is not always the same as articulating what we believe to be what someone believes to be the goal of the project. So define the success metrics upfront in your brief to ensure that both you and your digital marketing partner have a clear understanding of where this is going. So examples are it could be an increase in website traffic by 30%, it could be a 20% growth in online sales, it could be boosting social media engagement, it could be driving email marketing, it could be quadrupling the number of club members that you have.
[00:12:28] I would also say, although fiforist works specifically in wine, so technical jargon is totally fine with us. If you're in the wine industry and you're going out with a broad request for proposal, you're sending your brief across to industries partners who don't work in the wine industry. You need to either define or avoid technical jargon and focus on measurable outcomes.
[00:12:53] One reason to work with an agency, especially in the alcohol industry, that knows your industry, is there are constraints that are imposed upon your marketing because of advertising standards. So again, I would include anything relative to your industry in a brief if you are going out to agencies who don't have a demonstrated track record of working within your industry. So all of this helps set the benchmark for how your campaigns are going to roll out. What is effective, where you're going to need adjustments, where you're going to need education, where you're going to need optimization along the same lines as success metrics. Articulate your post launch expectations so a good relationship with a digital marketing partner doesn't end at a launch date. Clarify your expectations for ongoing support and maintenance. Whether you require monthly performance reports, continuous SEO optimization, regular content updates outline these needs without delving into the minutiae of how they should be carried out. This foresight will ensure a lasting partnership geared toward continuous improvement. This is also what will prevent you from having to rebuild a site, sometimes a very expensive site, every three years, or onboard a new digital marketing partner every 18 months. Make it really clear about what you would like to have from them. Can they do it? That will help you early in the process, understand if this is the right partner for you. All right, so let's just rapidly go through some common pitfalls that we see in briefs that we receive and how you can avoid these pitfalls if you are creating a brief now or in the future. One lack of clarity. Be precise in your objectives and expectations. Vague briefs can lead to misinterpretation and unsatisfactory results. I have to tell you, a client who comes to us and says, we don't know what we want, but we'll know it when we see it, is like the biggest red flag and we're just going to run in the opposite direction.
[00:15:03] At the same time. Avoid over specification yes, details are important, but too much specification on how tasks should be executed will not only stifle creativity, but will actually treat your digital agency like toolers. They're good at what they do for a reason. They know how your platforms work, they know how the market works. Let them focus on the how and you can focus on the what. Big, big one, inadequate budget or unrealistic expectations? There are all different kinds of agencies out there. There are all different kinds of providers. We all sit in different bands in the market.
[00:15:46] Ensure your budget aligns with your project goals. And sometimes this means hearing what you don't want to hear that you simply do not have the budget to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And the joke when we receive these briefs are things like, well, Amazon does it. Well, yes, and we know well, the Washington Post does it. Well, Nike does it, yes. And if you have the same budget as Amazon, the Washington Post or Nike, we can accomplish most things for you. But this is not the reality of the wine industry that we live in right now. So underestimating cost, expecting too much for too little can lead to disappointment. And these are terrible emails for us to have to receive as well because I want to accomplish good things for our clients, for potential clients, for prospects, and it's awful having to go out to them and say, I'm sorry, there's no way to make this happen within your budget. And it's awful to also receive the emails, which does happen where someone is pissed off because our fees are more than they had any idea that digital marketing should cost. So if we're talking about a website project neglecting accessibility as a requirement, you should be able to say to someone, you want a website that's built from the ground up to be accessible without the use of overlays. This is so important in the US and in Canada right now. If you want a deep dive into accessibility and overlays, we've got an article about that on the five Forest website. But the point is, this needs to be documented in your brief. Inadequate competitor analysis is a pitfall, but it's a budget pitfall. So if you can tell any agency what your competitive set looks like and what research you've done, they can get to a solution. Faster research on a project comprises a huge introductory portion of your timeline and your budget. Help your agency work smarter and faster by giving them as much as you know. And last but not least, consistent, clear communication with your digital marketing partner is essential. A good agency can overcome just about any problem if you can have clear, honest and open communication. Whether that's we're having budget issues, whether that's we've lost our photographer, whether that's we're unhappy with how something is working, be honest, non emotive and together, generally, you as the client and they as the agency can solve those problems. So as we wrap up this journey through crafting an effective digital marketing brief, remember that the power of a well constructed brief lies in its ability to bridge the gap between your vision and the creative execution that brings that to life, or the strategic execution that brings that to life. We've gone through the essentials of presenting a clear business overview defining sharp objectives, understanding your audience, adhering to brand guidelines, pinpointing key features and so on, all while steering clear of common pitfalls. The big takeaway communication is the cornerstone of any successful partnership. By providing a detailed, clear and focused brief, you will empower your digital marketing partner to deliver results that not only meet but exceed your expectations. Remember, your brief is not a list of demands. It's the roadmap that guides the entire project. It's about collaboration, it's about understanding, and it's about shared goals. And I can tell you there is nothing better than hearing from one of your clients that the work that you have done has blown them away because it's been so good, so helpful or so profitable. This is what a good agency lives for. As you embark upon whatever your next marketing project is, take these insights. I encourage you to tailor them to fit your needs and objectives. Write a well crafted brief, commission an outstanding project and lay the groundwork for a successful digital marketing strategy that resonates with your audience, that amplifies your brand, that achieves your business goals.
[00:20:17] That's a wrap for today's episode on crafting the perfect brief. Join me next time for more smart marketing for better wineries. Until then, don't forget to like and subscribe. Makes a big difference to me, doing this every week. As always, reach out to our five four s team if you have any questions about your winery marketing. See you soon.
