What Is a Content Brief?

A content brief is a document prepared by content team managers, content strategists or content editorialists for writers. It contains every information that the content writer should know in order to create content that meets the goal of the content strategy. A good content brief will not only help you create better content but also optimize your content for search engines.

Why Is It Important to Use a Content Brief?

Content briefs give important guidelines for your content creators to understand the purpose of the content and make sure they are aware of your expectations. Let’s take an analogy. If you hire a designer to create a logo for your company, you’d need to tell that designer some background about your company, what products or services you sell, who your target audience is, what style you like, some information about your competitors and how much time they have to create the logo. Well, it’s the same approach for content creation. Your content creators need to understand what your company and its clients do and know what goals you’re trying to achieve. This is particularly important if you’re hiring new freelance writers for your content projects.

What Should Be Included in a Content Brief?

A content brief should contain the following information:

• your brand or the brand of your client in case you’re an agency
• the purpose of the content and the role it plays in your content marketing funnel
• your target audience and persona: who is this content written for?
• topics and sub-topics that should be discussed
• minimum word count and word count for each section
• keywords to include for SEO purposes, ideally with frequency ranges showing primary keywords
• a content outline which shows the various titles and sections of your article; you may also include guidelines for the meta description
• your audience’s search intent and questions that should be answered
• content type: this includes blog posts, white-paper, newsletter, etc
• internal linking opportunities and anchor texts to be used
• external links to include
• deadlines: how much time they have to deliver the first draft or to complete the project
• content style: brand’s tone and voice
• sources or topics to research
• editorial guidelines: for example whether to capitalize titles, which citation style to use (APA, MLA, Harvard, etc)

Check our blog post to understand how to build detailed content briefs, or download the above content brief template in PDF format. If you prefer to use doc files, check out our content brief template in Word.

How Much Time Does It Take to Build Content Briefs?

Building detailed content briefs can be a lot of work. Once you’ve prepared your first content briefs, there is some information that you may copy-paste, such as your company’s background, your content marketing goals, or your tone of voice. But because each piece of content is different, you’d still need to conduct an in-depth SEO keywords research, perform a competitor’s analysis, and understand how to best fulfil your audience’s search intent for the topics you’re targeting. This is why we’ve built Zenbrief. Its content brief generator allows you to create effective content briefs in just a few minutes, easily share them with your content team and facilitate the content production process.

Should You Build Your Own Content Brief Templates?

Creating your own content brief templates can help you save a lot of time. For example, for a given blog, you may download our free content brief template, pre-fill several sections of the content briefs such as your company’s or your client’s background, its brand, the tone of voice, the content marketing strategy and the target audience. This will speed up your content production process as you will only need to update the content brief templates with details that are specific to each piece of content such as word count, semantically-related keywords to be used, SEO content outline, links to include and questions to answer.

Is There a Difference Between Content Briefs and Creative Briefs?

Content briefs are sometimes called creative briefs, but in reality, there’s a slight difference between the two. Content briefs usually apply to a single piece of written content (ex: a blog post, a whitepaper, etc), while a creative brief is used for a broader set of content. Creative briefs can be used not just for written content, but also for video content, podcasts, design work, etc. Therefore, for the purpose of written content, it’s better to look for content brief templates, rather than creative brief templates.

What Makes a Content Brief Effective?

An effective content brief should provide clear instructions to your writers. It should minimize back-and-forth discussions. Most likely your very first attempt may not be your best content brief. But after a while, you’ll become more skilled at it.

Using an AI-powered Content Brief Software to Generate Your Content Briefs

Sure, you can save time by using a content brief template such as the one you can download on this page. But for SEO purposes, you’d still need to conduct an extensive keywords analysis which itself could take hours. You would also need to explore what type of content resonates the most with your audience, and how to build a content outline that hooks your audience. We built Zenbrief to facilitate the research work. This content intelligence software uses AI to gather your SEO requirements automatically such as optimal content length and content score, keywords to be used, and links to include. It also automatically extracts essential information from your competitors’ content outline and retrieves the most frequently asked questions on Google. What could take hours now takes minutes. After a content brief has been automatically generated, you can tailor it by adding custom information to ensure the content meets your content marketing goals.

Once you have completed a brief, you can easily share it with your writers. They can use it to create SEO-friendly content using our AI-powered content editor. With Zenbrief, they won’t need to be SEO experts to create high-quality content that both your audience and search engines will love.