Introduction
The Village Briefing ‘Marketing Brief Guide’ is a template for collecting the information necessary to develop a small business marketing strategy.
A good marketing brief is specific to your business, your customer base, and your market environment. It should be updated regularly with data that is actionable.
This guide will be updated regularly because the internet changes constantly, and what was valid yesterday, may be obsolete tomorrow.
This guide is the result of analyzing more than 4,000 articles on Village Briefing and developing a process for identifying information that is current, accurate, actionable, and most importantly, easy to understand for small business owners who don’t have marketing departments.
If you’re unsure why you need a marketing brief, check out my article below on the subject:
Why You Need A Marketing Brief
Table of Contents
Getting Started
Years ago I switched from using Google Maps to Waze. That was because Waze alerted me to accidents ahead and gave alternative routes. It told me when I was coming up on a police vehicle so I could slow down to the speed limit. It gives me real-time info that helps get me to my destination faster.
I wish there was a Waze for small business marketing that would tell me in real-time the best way of increasing my customer/client base on a limited budget. Of course, there is no such device so we’re all forced into other solutions. Some will answer SEO emails guaranteeing front page on Google for $99. Others will opt for cheap websites, Facebook and Google Ads, or (budget permitting), hire freelancers, or marketing agencies.
By going through the process of putting together a marketing brief, you will position yourself for making good marketing decisions no matter what strategies or solutions you adopt.
Goals & Objectives
For goals and objectives to work within the context of a marketing brief, they should be specific, time-sensitive, and adhere to a budget. For example; Setting aside $10,000 for a marketing campaign to book 80 new customers over the next 6 months, is easier to game plan than the goal of ‘increasing new business’.
Specific goals and objectives also limit the scope of information needed. This avoids wasting time gathering information you’ll never put to use. For example; If you’re only targeting retired seniors in Florida, you may not need data on TikTok, Account Based Marketing, or Snapchat.
Customers
Your Marketing Brief will contain customer personas. These are sample profiles of your typical customers including :
What social media platforms are they most likely to use?
Where do they look for the products and services you provide?
Do they buy on the first contact or do they research first?
How much would you spend to acquire them?
What questions need answering before making a buy decision?
What influencers do your customers follow?
The more info you have on your customer base, the targeted your marketing campaigns can be.
Unique Selling Proposition
Your unique selling proposition is the reason customers should buy from you instead of your competitors. It’s your best pitch. It can be as simple as ‘Guaranteed Lowest Price’, as authoritative as ‘4 Out of 5 Dentists Recommend It’, or as shameless as ‘Don’t You Want the Best for your Family?’.
The only thing you’re trying to do with your unique selling proposition is to make people feel comfortable in saying yes to your offer.
Competition
One of the great things about the internet is how easy it is to track what your competitors are up to. You can see how much they’re spending on Google Ads, what keywords bring visitors to their site, what their Facebook Ads look like, what other sites are linking to them etc….
You can see what your competitors are doing right (copy it), and what they’re doing wrong (avoid it). But your competitors are not just those businesses that provide the same products and services that you do. They’re also any business that takes up space above you in search results.
Present Status
Your present status is a snapshot of everything you are presently doing related to marketing, including assets and resources that you have available but that may be idle at this time.
There may also need to be priority adjustments to accommodate a new or expanded marketing strategy. So taking a look at your present situation is as much about understanding the level of disruption to your present culture, habits, beliefs, and assumptions, as it is to figure out how to tack on a new activity to your present workload.
Marketing Information
In business, you never want to be so vulnerable as to make decisions based on inaccurate, outdated or misinterpreted information. Unfortunately, the speed of change has accelerated to the point that if you don’t have a system in place for keeping up, you will make bad decisions.
Example; No one saw it coming. Cabs never saw Uber; Retail never saw Amazon; Real Estate never saw Zillow; Newspapers never saw the Internet; Hotels never saw Airbnb etc…
Your sources of marketing information must be so rock-solid as to alert you to threats and opportunities that can affect the success or failure of your business. Your decision making is only as good as the information it’s based on.
Local
In the local section of your Marketing Brief, you would include all information that is local marketing specific including but not limited to Google My Business listing, Citations, Review platforms, community partners, etc…
In this section, you would investigate services such as BrightLocal and Whitespark. You would list Local Marketing groups such as Local Marketing Institute, and follow local marketing gurus such as Joy Hawkins and Mike Blumenthal.
This section would also include resources related to your niche, such as associations, conferences Facebook groups, etc..
eCommerce
In 2019, 47% of all eCommerce sales in the US happened on Amazon. Is that one of your distribution platforms? Are you using Shopify, WooCommerce, eBay or Walmart? Is two day shipping important to your customer base? Will you list your products on Google Shopping?
These are the types of questions you address in the eCommerce section of your Marketing Brief.
While in the physical world you can see your competitors coming over the horizon, in the digital world eCommerce competitors can come out of nowhere. This is why in this section you need to identify a system that allows you to turn-on-a-dime and adapt to market changes that may not even seem related to your business at the time. Example; How will the spread of 5G affect your bottom line?
Search Engine Advertising
Social Media Advertising
Display Ads
Other Online Advertising
Offline Advertising
Offline Marketing
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is about you getting your message to people who on average see more than 5,000 ads per day. It’s extremely noisy out there and your content marketing strategy must take into account that you are fighting for the attention of people who are busy watching TV shows, listening to music, paying attention to the latest news, checking their emails, etc…
If you’re not pumping out a massive amount of quality content, you’re not going to get and hold people’s attention. This section is where you figure out what type of content you’re going to produce and how much of it.
Social Media (Organic)
In 2012 the average organic reach of a post from a Facebook business page was 16% of the page’s followers. Today it’s about 5%. That means if your Facebook page had 100 followers and you wrote a post, only about 5 of your followers would see that post. Your videos would reach about 8 followers.
With social media becoming more of a pay-to-play world, organic reach is declining across all social media platforms. This means you must be aware of how social platforms prioritize different types of content. Videos (for example) can have more than twice the reach of photos. The time of day you post also matters. LinkedIn presently has a higher reach percentage than Facebook or Instagram.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The promise of SEO is that it can help get your website listed on the front-page of Google search results for relevant keywords. The reality is you’re more likely to get scammed than land a front page slot. This is why it’s important to understand what SEO is and what it can and cannot do for your business.
A good understanding of SEO is required to separate good SEO vendors, services and technologies, from bad ones. And while optimizing your website for search engines is good practice, not all SEO activities will move the needle against your competitors. In this section, you’ll list the SEO activities, cost, possible service providers, and expected outcomes.
Website
Your website needs to be capable of supporting your marketing efforts. That could mean a re-design, a retrofit, a few new plugins, or (if you don’t have a website) starting from scratch. Your website is also the most obvious place for your potential customers to compare you with your competitors.
Much of what you do with your website will have been covered in the other sections. But this is the section you pull it all together. From making sure your blog is structured for your content marketing, to deciding what offers will be presented on your popup screen. Here you’ll build a road-map for future upgrades to handle voice, mobile, augmented reality, Messenger chat-bots, etc…
Email Marketing
Email marketing continues to be one of the best returns on investment, but it’s constantly changing. This is the section where you’ll explore best practices to stay out of the spam folder and increase open rates.
You’ll compare tools and services like Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Sendinblue, ConvertKit, Drip, Mailjet, etc… Even if you’re already running email marketing campaigns, you’ll always want to know what’s out there and what customers are more likely to respond to.
This is where you’ll list what email functionalities are important, such as, welcome new subscribers, order notifications, recover abandoned carts, newsletters, birthdays, re-engage with inactive customers, etc…
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
ABM (Account Based Marketing)
Marketing Tools
The right set of marketing tools can help you create an accurate marketing brief and execute your marketing strategies. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help with keyword research, competitor analysis, and technical SEO. A service like Callrail can help with tracking Ad campaigns and attribution. Google Search Console gives you details on the traffic to your website while SpyFu can identify your competitors’ most profitable keywords.
In this section, you’ll list the marketing tools that you will use for your marketing campaign.
Labor Costs
In this section, you’ll weigh your marketing labor options. Be it in-house, freelancers, consultants, agencies, or a combination thereof, the cost can quickly add up. And simple adjustments in marketing goals or strategies can have not-so-simple associated labor costs.
Knowing the labor cost of everything from Web Designers on Fivver, to a freelance SEO specialist, to all-in-one agencies, will help run the numbers on the marketing budget while still putting together the marketing brief.
Conclusion
Putting together your own Marketing Brief can not only save you money, it can also empower you with a level of expertise needed for dealing with marketing vendors, suppliers, and consultants going forward. When we build Marketing Briefs for customers, it takes about 40 hours over a one month period at a cost thousands of dollars. For many businesses, that money can better be spent (more directly) on acquiring customers.
Your Marketing Brief is critical to the development of strategies that deploy the tactics you’ll use to achieve your marketing goals and objectives. Missed or inaccurate information can lead to bad strategies and impotent tactics. Be it a belief, an opinion from a friend or something you read, a Marketing Brief by any other name is simply data you base your decisions on. Your outcome is only as good as that data.
I will update this guide often. If you have specific questions or requests, you can drop me an email by filling out the form below. And don’t forget to check out Village Briefing for the latest curated articles on small business marketing. I add to it the best articles I find on a daily basis.
Gordon Lake
Executive Producer
Village Briefing
