Typically, every individual or organization has a special and unique way of developing briefs. However, some create briefs that fall short of striking the ideal balance between offering sound editorial direction and the appropriate SEO criteria.
The content briefs may provide crucial editing recommendations but little seo insights. Others offer content writers Meta descriptions and keyword suggestions, but ultimately, they must deliver more helpful editorial guidance.
Briefs are ineffective for some individuals or organizations mainly because they need to gain knowledge of the content brief. Therefore, let’s dive into the fundamentals of briefs as we scale up to comprehensive discussions.
What Is a Content Brief?
In simple terms, a content brief is a list of specifications and recommendations that acts as a manual when a person is creating a piece of content. Typically, it includes basic specifications such as recommended primary and secondary keywords, title, and an average word count.
One of the essential components of a brief is that it needs to be documented. Documentation creates its distinction with meeting notes or reports. What is anticipated from the main document is outlined in a content brief.
Most individuals use briefs for content, from case studies and product pages to eBooks and articles. However, the main objective of the content brief is to ensure that a project has a good search volume.
What Is the Significance of Using a Content Brief?
Typically, if a content creator begins a project immediately without creating the brief, it is similar to constructing a building without using and accessing a blueprint. Even though the building will be present, the client may want a different design.
Therefore, just as a blueprint is significant to building construction, a brief is also substantial to constructing a particular content. Here are some of the significance of using a content brief:
It Reduces Revision and Prevents Rewrites
Using a brief helps the content team of writers to align their goals. Since a content team consists of individuals with different specializations, a content brief enables them to find answers quickly and communicate more.
The content team can discuss topics such as the target audience, the depth of the content, and the brand’s position concerning the topic, among other elements. The team members can also correct certain visual elements before the writer begins to write the main project.
Everyone will have a clear idea of the content the writer wishes to create when they use a brief. Therefore, detailed content briefs are essential for avoiding project rewrites and numerous rounds of revisions.
It Provides a Clear Direction and Approval
Nothing is more frustrating than coming up with excellent and effective content writing ideas, researching, and spending hours writing a project only for your employer to say it won’t work for the company.
Therefore, implementing a brief provides content writers with a clear direction and approval of what they should include in the content. It also keeps the entire team of members on the same page.
Most writers can recall an employee who decided to change their mind about the direction of a project. Even though a brief can’t prevent them from changing their mind, it can offer a benchmark for checking in and ensuring the writer follows the right direction.
It Helps Content Writers Not Miss Any Crucial Information and Keywords
Writing a content project without a brief is like attempting grocery shopping without a list. There are high chances of forgetting some of the essential elements to be bought. Therefore, a brief serves as a content checklist.
A client or any related professional can help their authors create well-researched and SEO-friendly content by outlining the subtopics they wish to get, questions, and facts to address in the project.
It Helps to Provide a Single Source of Truth for Team Communications
Finding a single piece of information might be difficult, especially when there are various means to share information, including Trello, email, meetings, word documents, and google docs, among other means.
However, using a brief eliminates this scavenger hunt by gathering everything specified in the content brief. Therefore, everyone engaging with the content will know where to obtain information since they trust a single source of truth.
What Information Can I Put for a Perfect Content Brief?
Since telepathy is an option in briefs, the ideal choice is for a writer to get all the information needed to create a content brief. So, what information should they put in the brief?
Here are some of them:
Target Audience
Clarifying the target audience is one of the most necessary steps in creating a brief. Knowing who will read this content and why you are creating it for them is crucial. Understanding their needs, interests, and pain points is essential to create content that resonates with them.
Your writer should know who they are talking with and why they are reading this content. Make sure to add your target audience in your brief.
The Contents Length
One of the crucial pieces of information to be clear about when drafting a brief is the length of the content. Typically, most research concurs that the quality and relevancy of the content matter more to organic traffic than its length.
According to an analysis done by SEMrush, the first page of the Google result often has 810 words or less long material. According to the same study, if the project has a length or a target word count of 1137 words, it will improve to be among the top-ranking articles or blogs. Therefore, it is crucial to input the length of the content in the brief to clearly outline the number of headings and subheadings that will fit. Additionally, the content’s length helps the writers to work within the given limited time to finish the main project.
Topic Ideas and Suggestions
Writers will also be required to list topic ideas in their brief. One of the ways writers can find topic ideas is by looking at platforms such as Google’s most frequently asked questions and Quora using the general topic.
Writers can conduct audience research to identify the major questions or concerns of the audience. Additionally, they can survey social media to find out what topics the audience is most interested in reading.
Another way is to look at the material of the competitors. Perform an analysis to identify the primary keywords for which the competitors are ranked. With these methods, writers will discover and put SEO titles in their content outline.
Tone of Voice
Voice tonality will depend upon the writer’s type of content. The content type may require a technical, engaging, esoteric, or informative tone. Therefore, as a writer, take some time and consider the target personas when creating a blog or other projects.
Always keep the audience in mind and be familiar with and adaptive to the different audience niches. For instance, if the school administration writes to teachers, the writing style to the teachers will be a different tone than when writing to students.
Therefore, a writer needs to get the tone of voice correctly because it counts a lot. This is because the audience loves to read a piece of content that “speaks” to them and answers the questions they have in mind.
Statistics, Internal and External Links
If a client has a team of experienced writers that do their research, it is crucial to have a few broad topics or target keyword ideas such as “a guide to wedding planning” or selecting a wedding planner.” Therefore, the client should avoid assuming that the writers will add the topics.
The writers may not provide statistics concerning the same since they needed more information or topic ideas when drafting the brief. Additionally, the writers should know in advance if there are particular research, links, or resources to be highlighted in the brief.
With enough statistics and internal and external links, writers will be confident when doing research and assured that their client has provided enough information and guidance for the project. Use links as much as possible to increase the authenticity of the project.
Competitors
If a client is hiring a freelance writer or an agency, they may have several customers in the field and are trying to keep up with other writers. Therefore, they need help understanding who the competitors are and might unintentionally link to them.
Therefore, clients should consider disseminating a list of the most active competitors and then share that information with their writers, not to link their sites or with them. This increases and stabilizes your ranks in search engines and other related places.
Who Uses a Content Brief?
Typically, briefs are helpful for anybody who creates or works with content projects. However, two specific positions are responsible for their content creation process:
Market Strategists
Typically, marketing and SEO strategies are experts at content activities such as content marketing strategy, using keyword research tools, and planning. Beyond the most fundamental criteria, well-outlined and researched briefs provide them with a guide to express their thoughts to authors.
Knowing how their articles fit into the more extensive strategy is one of the most challenging tasks for writers when creating high-quality content. If they don’t use a brief as a guide, they will likely have issues with the employer.
Therefore, creating a content outline that complies with the needed market strategy necessitates less revision using editorial teams and provides writers with a high-quality brief to accomplish an SEO-friendly project.
Writers
When a marketing strategist is not committed to a content project, the writer usually allocates and makes most of the briefs. The writers can gain an audience search intent and approval for the material by sharing the rough outline of the brief.
An excellent brief enables the writer to validate that their strategy aligns with the clients because it is rare for clients to supply high-level instructions merely. All the client wants is for the writer to meet their content expectations.
Therefore, since neither party is entirely aware of the expectations of the other, using the brief as a benchmark for client evaluation is especially helpful for freelance writers working with new clients.
Can a Writer Use Templates When Writing Content Briefs?
Without a doubt, templates are one of the fastest and easiest ways to create an SEO content brief. The use of templates is favorable for writers with fixed deadlines. Since a good brief can take time, creating one manually can be a waste of time.
Another advantage writers get when using a template is that they can recall everything they create. Without a template, it can be simple to overlook the background information that is the framework of the content.
Some background information is customer profile, sales funnel stage, or necessary internal links. Templates stop that from happening by providing the project with a structure to make it concise, orderly, and simple to follow.
Manual and Ai-Generated Content Briefs/ Templates: How Do They Differ?
In the past, creating briefs was a labor-intensive procedure for content strategists. However, creating a brief might take 1 to 4 hours through a template.
For the manual template, finding the “focus” and secondary keywords in the project entails using software such as AHrefs or SEMrush. Other factors to be determined include the content goals, the style guides, and internal and external links.
When it comes to ai generated briefs, the system automatically gathers and arranges all relevant data in a repeatable and dependable manner. Ai-generated briefs give the writer the information they want faster than manual briefs.
Use Content Briefs for Better Content Production
It’s time to incorporate briefs into the content development process. Briefs will assist you in getting accurate and comprehensive content, thus reducing the frustrations of getting customer dissatisfaction and repeated revisions and rewrites.
Since the digital era is still advancing, writers or strategies must employ digital tools such as ContentGo to save time and energy when creating effective, orderly, and accurate briefs.
Wrapping Up
Are you looking for an effective platform that will help in content creation? Do you wish to get professionals to do a project for you? Look no more for ContentGo is the perfect platform to use.
We firmly believe in the influence of expertly crafted and superior content. Additionally, we stand out from the competition thanks to our vibrant freelancing community, ideal technologies, and the ability to produce content projects in different languages.
Create a publisher account today to immediately access the enormous online community of skilled producers at ContentGo. If you wish to learn more about content, you can also request a demo.
