Do you ever get started on a project or assignment and feel like SpongeBob when he had to write an essay on what he learned in boating school? Yeah? Me too. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please take 30 seconds out of your day to watch this).
It's hard to be put on the spot, I get it, but it's also important not to lack productivity. That's the beauty of a content brief. It keeps you focused and on track when, otherwise, your mind would probably run around aimlessly. If you have a set template ready to go when you're developing a project/blog post/piece of content/initiative/contest/promotion outline, half of your work is already done. That's my other point: briefs are for everything. They help you expand on your ideas and develop executions that you probably never would have thought of if you didn't sit down and force yourself to write about every detail.
The other day at work, I sat down to create a content brief to send to my boss. It was mostly so that they could understand why I was doing what I was doing, but then it became a way for me to elaborate on my ideas, let my creative juices run, you know? What was originally going to be a simple Instagram Story voting contest turned into a blog post, a short video, and the story contest. You're probably thinking, OK, I could have told you to do more than just an Instagram Story. That doesn't seem very difficult to come up with, but when you know you've wanted to do something for a while, it's hard to see anything but that one thing unless you force yourself to.
If you've ever taken any college writing class ever, you know the importance of re-writing and how hard it is to re-write what seems to be the best version it can be already. It's the same concept here. So you came up with a fairly good idea for a blog post, and you think it's perfect just the way it is. Without the content brief, it's pretty hard to keep thinking about. If you do decide to use it, however, it serves as an outline for your thoughts to flow more easily.
So, to make things easier I created a pretty basic content brief. Feel free to download it, use it and let me know if it was helpful! You can also email me for a Word version of the document.
