Free Customizable Creative Brief Templates

What is a creative brief?

A creative brief is a document that serves as a guide for marketing and advertising campaigns, it acts as a project's blueprint or roadmap for creative teams.

Creative briefs vary from project to project, but often include features like background information, project summaries, target audiences, project objectives, anticipated challenges, processes, deliverables, KPIs, timelines, budgets, team members, and even design and style guides.

This might sound like a lot of information, but it's also important to keep creative briefs... Well, brief.

A great creative brief shouldn't be more than a couple of pages long so that it can be referred back to with ease. Words like comprehensive and concise are your best friends here.

Creative briefs are especially important in advertising and marketing campaigns, but are immensely useful to any creative team that wants to make open collaboration their starting point and consistently exceed their project benchmarks and goals.

What are the benefits of a creative brief?

You should make a creative brief for your next project if you want to...

• Keep the project manager, the team members, the client, and any other stakeholders on the same page right off the bat.
• Make project management a breeze.
• Define project essentials such as key messages, timelines, and deliverables so there isn't any room for confusion, disorganization, or scope-creep later on.
• Have one comprehensive source outlining all the key aspects of your creative project for your team to refer back to regularly.
• Easily refer back to your project's visual guidelines, including everything from graphic design and style guides to content marketing and branding.
• Foster accountability from all parties working on your particular project.
• Optimize collaboration between different teams! Creative work is best done together. It's easy for the marketing team to collaborate with the social media and design teams if the comprehensive project strategy can all be found in one place.
• Establish criteria for assessment and metrics for success, so everyone will know when your creative team kills it!

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Getting started with your creative brief

Get started customizing your creative brief template by:

Find inspiration

Don't be tempted to rush the beginning of a project and prioritize starting things off with the right frame of mind. Envision a finished project that will wow all parties involved and get excited about it!

Identify key details about your project

This includes the project manager, key team members, budget specifications, contact information, company name(s), and the most important dates on your prospective timeline.

Provide context

To start things off, you'll need to provide your team with some background information. Talk about the client or company's profile and branding as well as the specifics of the product or service you'll be marketing for them. Keep this short and sweet, but illustrative.

Define your objectives

This is arguably the most essential part of your creative brief, so give it a good amount of thought. Outline the ultimate objective of your project, how it'll be achieved, and why it's important.

Hint: Make sure that all parties agree on this!

Establish your target audience

In order to market effectively, you need to define who exactly who you're trying to reach. Really dive into the identity of your target audience. Ask yourself questions like "What are their needs and wants?" and "How can we get their attention?"

There you have it! Your creative project will be off the ground and well on its way to success in no time.

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Slite's free creative brief templates

Many companies make the mistake of putting together creative briefs by copy and pasting different components from previous campaigns. Don't be that person! That's absolutely no way to put together an effective creative brief.

When it comes to your next creative project, take the time to start your creative brief from scratch and really get started on the right foot.

Putting together great creative briefs doesn't have to take forever, mind you. We've got your covered with our creative brief templates. They look great, are 100% customizable, and did we mention that they're free?

At Slite, our mission is to help teams work better together, asychronously and collaboratively. Our free templates allow you and your project team to do just that. Forget about searching through different tabs, e-mails, and links trying to find the right project details. Once you fill in our creative brief template, you'll have all your project's vital details in one place to refer back to at any time.

Agency Creative Brief Template

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Graphic Design  Brief Template

Video Production Brief Template