7 creative brief templates you can use right now
Creative brief templates can bring structure to your marketing campaign ideas — while saving you time in the process. Use one of the creative brief templates in this guide for your next project to fully harness your creativity and channel ideas that will help you reach your goals.
If you are ready to level up with interactive creative briefs, try Aha! software — purpose-built for product and marketing teams. You can document goals, create briefs, build calendars, and coordinate go-to-market plans — all in one place.
Get started using our creative brief whiteboard template — with a free trial.
Creative briefs align creative work with business strategy — keeping everyone on-brand, on-message, and on-track so you can successfully deliver against your marketing goals. Jump ahead to any section:
What is a creative brief?
A creative brief captures the creative essence of marketing and advertising campaigns. It is a foundational document that establishes important details about your approach and deliverables — such as your objectives, launch date, budget, audience, and key messages. Creative briefs help internal teams, third-party consultants, or advertising agencies understand the brand voice and message you want to deliver.
Creative briefs are particularly useful for communicating with external creative or advertising agencies, but they are helpful for internal teams too.
Writing a creative brief is a great way to kick off your next marketing campaign. In this guide, we will go over how to write your own, what to include, and provide free creative brief templates to help you get started.
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How to write a creative brief
Writing a creative brief requires a deep understanding of your strategic goals, where your product or service fits in the market, customer needs, as well as the resources available to your team. With that in mind, here is how to write a creative brief:
Name your project
Choose a descriptive but concise title for your marketing campaign to include in your brief. As you share your plans with stakeholders, this will serve as a shorthand for the project's focus.
2. Refer to your marketing strategy
Writing creative briefs is part of the strategic planning process. Consult overall business goals and marketing objectives first to ensure your creative brief will support them.
3. Gather the details
Project owners, budget, and timelines are all details to consider before writing your creative brief. You may need to consult leadership to collect this information.
4. Write your creative brief
Your creative brief should include components like customer truths, key messages, brand voice, and deliverables. Use a creative brief template to capture these important elements.
5. Review with the team
Once your creative brief is drafted, solicit feedback from other members of the marketing team. Collaborating on a creative brief helps to ensure you have included all the right details — and builds excitement for new campaigns.
6. Share with stakeholders
Whether you have prepared it for internal teams or an external agency, present your creative brief to communicate what you want to achieve. Treat your creative brief as a touchstone that everyone can refer back to as your campaign gets underway.
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Creative brief components and examples
As the name suggests, creative briefs are not long or complex documents. In a page or two, you should be able to summarize your project parameters and distill your approach into key concepts. Here are the essential elements to include, questions to help you fill out each section, as well as creative brief examples:
Component | Questions to consider | Creative brief example |
Title | What title will summarize this project? | Fredwin Cycling: Adventure series |
Objective | What will the project work to achieve? |
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Campaign details | What is the project timeline? How much budget is allocated? | Timing: Q2 Budget: $626K |
Background | Why are we choosing to solve this problem now? | We know that cyclists are heavily influenced by their peers. Seeing how others use Fredwin Cycling to track their performance and connect with a global community of athletes is a powerful way to communicate or message. |
Audience | Who are we trying to reach with this campaign? |
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Customer truths | Beyond demographics or data, who is your customer and what do they want to achieve? |
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Key messages | What are the key ideas we want to communicate to our audience? |
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Brand voice | What characteristics define our brand? |
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Mandatory inclusions | What brand elements must be included? |
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Deliverables | What are the deliverables for this campaign? |
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7 creative brief templates
Using a creative brief template makes it easy to write a succinct and compelling overview that clearly communicates your ideas. Below you will find a whiteboard template from Aha! software as well as free Excel and Word options.
Creative brief whiteboard template
This creative brief whiteboard template in Aha! software is a great option for collaborating between marketing and creative teams. Everyone can talk through ideas in a live session, which helps to ensure you are all in sync on the creative plan.
Simple creative brief template
This is a starter creative brief — it includes all of the key components in a streamlined document. You can easily adapt this template for a wide range of marketing projects, from content marketing to social media campaigns.
Campaign creative brief template
Use this template to plan your creative approach for a marketing campaign. For example, if you are working with advertising agencies or consultants, you could outline a creative treatment for an advertisement, new logo, or tagline. For internal teams, this template can kick-off a new lead generation or email campaign. Anytime you need to create a new treatment or adaptation, write a new creative brief.
Agency creative brief template
Agency creative briefs are often used within marketing agencies. An account manager can use this template to capture what a client wants to achieve and essential details about their audience, key messages, and brand voice. This helps the agency team better understand their clients' needs so they can deliver outstanding service that fits their brand.
Content creative brief template
A content creative brief is used to provide writers and designers with the information they need to successfully produce a piece of content. This type of creative brief is typically for planning larger pieces of content like ebooks, whitepapers, or case studies — but you could use them to plan more routine content like blog posts as well. It is important to include details like research, background, and examples that can help creators understand your company's point of view on the subject.
Design creative brief
This template is helpful for working with graphic design professionals. Design creative briefs set you up for success by ensuring designers understand the brand and target customer as well as elements like tone, look and feel, and desired reaction. A detailed and thorough design creative brief will help produce high-quality design for everything from a new landing page to a billboard.
Video creative brief
Video creative briefs help production teams efficiently plan video projects. Creating new videos for a product or company is a significant investment, whether it is a short digital advertisement or a full brand video. Starting with a well-defined creative brief provides the clarity needed to produce a video that speaks to the target customer's problems in a compelling way, while staying on time and on budget.
Brilliant marketing happens when entire team is centered around a clear creative brief and well-defined plan. Get started, stay open minded, and share these templates with your teams or agencies.
