What Is a Content Brief?

Businesses are often faced with the difficult task of balancing profitability with growth. Marketing budgets, being a significant expenditure, are frequently scrutinized for potential cost-cutting measures. However, forward-thinking marketers understand that investing in content can be a strategic asset, offering long-term benefits.

While the value of content is recognized, the reality is that many organizations are operating with lean marketing teams, relying heavily on contract writers to produce a steady stream of content. This approach can lead to challenges, as freelance writers may not fully grasp the nuances of a company’s brand, value proposition, and unique selling points. This can result in generic, unengaging content that fails to resonate with both target audiences and search engines.

The Power of a Content Brief

To address these challenges and ensure the production of high-quality, effective content, a structured approach is required. One effective strategy is to create detailed content briefs that incorporate SEO elements. By providing clear guidelines and expectations, these briefs can help to guide writers and ensure that the content produced aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives.

What Is a Content Brief

A content brief is a document that creates an outline of the key topics (and subtopics) you want covered – and that a content creator needs in order to produce quality content. Think of content briefs as a way to help your content team scale content while maintaining a focus on your target audience. 

 The best content briefs seamlessly combine editorial direction and content strategy to ensure every piece of content is both well-written and primed to drive SEO results. 

You know it’s time to start using content briefs when:

• Your team is getting bogged down in processing too many rewrites.
• Producing quality content consistently is a major challenge.
• You’re having trouble scaling content production.

Challenges of Building Content Briefs

Building an effective content brief can be challenging. It has historically been a manual process for the content strategist. Even with a content brief template, however, content briefs can take anywhere from 1-4 hours to complete properly. 

The process generally involves using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find “focus” keywords and secondary keywords to be incorporated in some form in the piece of content. From there, the content marketer needs to determine the audience or buyer personas, the objectives of the content, the style guide, the desired content length, external and internal links, and anything else pertinent for successful deliverables. 

Focusing solely on keywords is now considered passe. MarketMuse stresses topic modeling over just keywords, because it allows a writer to discover abstract topics that occur in a collection of documents (corpus) using a probabilistic model. It’s frequently used as a text mining tool to reveal semantic structures within a body of text. That’s one part of what makes it an AI content brief.

The Benefits of Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a helpful tool for content marketers. First of all, it helps figure out what your audience prefers by analyzing content and finding relevant topics. Next, it helps make your content even better by spotting holes in your content strategy and creating more relevant material. Plus, topic modeling can boost your SEO by optimizing your content with the right keywords and phrases. It also lets you tailor your content to different audiences based on their interests. And finally, topic modeling helps you make decisions based on data instead of just guessing.

One last benefit that I should point out — which I have found to be really enlightening, is that topic modeling provides access to a semantic corpus that we (as marketers) had not considered. The corpus is the sum of what your audience is learning about. As marketers we tend to get stuck on our own messaging. This widens our understanding of what the market knows. By the way, this is ideal for product marketers too. They need to know the outside-in messaging – in order to better deliver the inside-out messaging. 

Content Brief vs Creative Brief

It’s important to note that a content brief has some notable similarities – and difference from what is known as a “creative brief.” Creative briefs have many of the same content goals as content briefs, but the former is much broader in its application than the latter. A creative brief does not apply to one specific deliverable. It can lay out the creative and brand requirements for anything from landing page copy and social media posts to video production and graphics and beyond, including colors, fonts, and specific messaging. 

A content brief can certainly include some of those elements. Still, in most cases, it is specific to written content that typically takes the form of a blog post, long-form article, product/category page, product review, and so on.

Feature	Content Brief	Creative Brief
Purpose	To provide guidelines for creating written content, such as blog posts, articles, or social media posts.	To outline the creative direction for a project, such as a campaign, advertisement, or design.
Focus	Textual content	Visual and conceptual elements
Key Elements	Target audience, topic, goals, messaging, style, tone, keywords, deadlines	Target audience, brand identity, campaign objectives, key messages, visual style, tone, budget, timeline
Example Use Cases	Blog post, social media post, email newsletter, website copy	Advertisement, logo design, website design, video production, social media campaign

What Is an SEO Content Brief

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating an SEO content brief.

Step 1: Define Your Target Personas

• Identify your ideal customer: Who are they? What are their demographics, interests, and behaviors?
• Understand their needs and pain points: What challenges do they face? What are their goals?

Step 2: Conduct Intent Analysis

• Analyze SERP Intent: What type of content are search engines returning for your target keywords? Is it informational, transactional, or navigational?
• Understand User Intent: What are users searching for when they enter your target keywords? What information are they looking for?

Step 3: Create a Content Profile

• Analyze your existing content: What topics have you covered? What is your current ranking for relevant keywords?
• Perform a cluster analysis: Group your content into clusters based on related topics.
• Identify gaps and opportunities: Where can you improve your content? What new topics should you cover?

Step 4: Keyword and Topic Research

• Generate a list of relevant keywords: Use keyword research tools to identify terms that your target audience is searching for.
• Create a topic model: Organize your keywords into a hierarchical structure to represent the relationships between different topics.
• Identify the most important topics: Determine which topics are most relevant to your target audience and business goals.
• Identify differentiating topics: What topics can you cover that your competitors are not?

Step 5: Conduct Competitive Analysis

• Analyze your competitors’ content: What are they doing well? What are their weaknesses?
• Evaluate their market share: How much of the market do they control?
• Perform a SERP analysis: Analyze the top-ranking pages for your target keywords.

Step 6: Develop Recommended Questions

• Consider your target audience’s needs: What questions do they likely have?
• Align with search intent: Ensure your questions align with the intent behind the search query.
• Provide value: Your content should answer the questions in a way that provides value to the reader.

Step 7: Create Custom Brief Guidelines

• Define the content’s purpose: What is the goal of the content?
• Outline the desired tone and style: How should the content be written?
• Set specific requirements: Are there any formatting or length requirements?
• Provide a deadline: When should the content be completed?

Step 8: Develop a Content Outline

• Structure the content: Create a logical flow for the content.
• Include key points: Outline the main ideas that will be covered.
• Consider SEO elements: Include relevant keywords and headings.

Combining the SEO Brief With Your Content Brief

A genuinely great content brief will seamlessly combine editorial/brand guidelines, your vision for a specific piece of content, and a roadmap for the comprehensive topical coverage that search engines are looking for in the world of semantic search.

Every company has its own way of creating content briefs, and there are many valid approaches. However, we’ve noticed that many content briefs fail to hit the sweet spot between providing solid editorial guidance and correct SEO requirements. This is because you need to layer on an SEO content brief. 

Throughout the rest of this article the term “content brief” assumes the hybrid approach of combining the SEO content brief into your content brief template. 

How Content Briefs Improve Content Marketing Efforts

Most content strategists have felt the frustration of seeing a piece of writing come back from a writer or editor and finding that it doesn’t align with the big picture. From the writer’s perspective, the frustration comes when rewrites are requested due to insufficient direction from the start. 

The content brief, when done correctly, can alleviate – if not eliminate – these miscommunications and the constant back-and-forth that often comes with content creation.

Content briefs improve content marketing efforts by ensuring that whoever is executing a piece of written content is fully aligned with the goals of the specific campaign and content marketing strategy at a high level. This is crucially important if you are trying to scale up your content production and have several writers and content creators working on different projects. Briefs give content strategists and leaders a way to get quality output at scale, which is how you build a foundation for consistent results. 

Content is an investment. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your time and budget, you can’t afford to leave the entire direction of even a single piece of content to the discretion of individual content creators. They may not grasp the “why” behind what they’re doing. 

A good brief should give writers everything they need to understand the following:

• The target audience and buyer persona
• The brand messaging, tone, and voice 
• Where the content fits in the marketing funnel
• The questions the piece of content should answer
• Internal and external linking guidance
• The related topics that must be covered for comprehensiveness
• Title and subheading suggestions based on the primary keyword

By aligning these data points to your content strategy, you can confidently publish a piece of content, knowing how it maps to your goals.

Read: 5 Elements of a Highly Successful Content Brief

How Content Briefs Fit Into Content Marketing Workflows

We see the content marketing workflow as cyclical:

Content marketers and SEO experts conduct research to determine the content strategy and how editorial content fits into that big picture. Following the research phase, specific content items are mapped out into content plans and scheduled out on a content calendar. From there, writers can start executing on the content. This is where briefing comes in. 

Each content item on your content calendar should have a brief associated with it to ensure that it is executed in accordance with your strategy and is primed to drive results – organic traffic, social reach, and better performance throughout the content funnel.

In short, the content brief is the critical link between your research and planning and the actual content creation. This holds true whether or content is created in-house or with the help of a freelance writer.

Getting the content briefs right will make everything that comes after much easier and more impactful. Better briefs give writers everything they need to knock a piece of content out of the park while spending less time doing supplemental research. That means less time spent editing and optimizing copy. It results in higher quality content that can fuel promotion and grow your reach. 

Briefing is arguably the most critical step in the workflow, and the briefs are a vital tool that gives SEO, content strategy, and creative teams a way to work together effectively and efficiently.

Manual vs. AI-Generated Content Brief Templates

We noted above that a single brief can take one to four hours to create one piece of content. 

As you might imagine, this does not scale very well when you try to ramp up content production. Even if you outsource this process to an SEO or content marketing agency, you’re still on the hook for ensuring that all of your content briefs are up to the standard you’ve set.

Contrast this approach with what you would get with AI-generated content briefs. With an AI-generated content brief, all of the pertinent information is automatically gathered and organized in a repeatable, reliable way. Rather than spending hours each week building briefs by hand, you can spend more time on research that drives the strategy, finding optimization opportunities, and reporting on growth. 

AI tool can help you create an outline on any subject to meet the needs of any persona. You can then tailor the outline to tackle key problem areas that your offering addresses. Consider adding reference materials that cite internal thought leaders, analysts, or customers that a writer can source to add color to the creative work.

AI-generated content briefs, like those provided by MarketMuse, provide everything a writer needs in a fraction of the time it takes to prepare a brief by hand. More importantly, they take the guesswork and human judgment out of the essential parts of a brief.

Here are some of the pros and cons of both methods.

Manual Briefs

Pros

• Customization: Can be tailored to specific needs and goals.
• In-depth understanding: Can reflect a deep understanding of the brand and target audience.
• Creativity: Can foster creative and innovative ideas.

Cons

• Time-consuming: Can be labor-intensive to create.
• Subjectivity: May be influenced by personal biases.
• Consistency: Can be difficult to maintain consistency across multiple briefs.

AI-Generated Briefs

Pros

• Efficiency: Can be generated quickly and easily.
• Objectivity: Can be based on data and analytics.
• Consistency: Can ensure consistency across multiple briefs.

Cons

• Lack of creativity: May not generate highly creative or innovative ideas.
• Limited understanding: May not fully understand the nuances of the brand or target audience.
• Dependence on data: Relies on the quality and accuracy of the data used.

Note: A hybrid approach, combining manual and AI-generated elements, can often be the most effective. For example, an AI could generate a basic brief, which can then be customized and refined by a human. We call that human-in-the-loop.

Read: What is a MarketMuse Content Brief

Takeaway

Some content briefs are full of important editorial guidelines, with little in the way of SEO insights. Others give the content writer title tags and meta descriptions, linking recommendations and anchor text, and of course, the dreaded keyword list, but fail to provide useful editorial direction. 

Going too far in either direction will hamper your content marketing efforts. Well-written content is crucial, but without an eye on how it fits into the wider SEO and content marketing strategy, it will not drive the results your stakeholders need to see. Go too heavy on the SEO, and you have content that reads like “SEO content,” which will not serve your user experience or, increasingly, the search engines themselves. 

Understanding the importance of content briefs is the first step to using them effectively in your content marketing efforts. If you’re looking to ramp up production without sacrificing quality or gambling on the ability of your content to rank well and gain traffic, AI-generated content briefs are an indispensable asset.