Developing Project and Content Briefs for Writing Teams

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Create project and content briefs that keep writing teams producing stellar content that’s consistent with SEO requirements and brand voice.

Table of Contents:

The Importance of Briefs
Brief Component Table
8 Common Pitfalls in Brief Creation and How to Avoid Them
8 Best Practices for Using AI for Content Brief Creation
7 Essential Tools for Content Brief Creation
12 Guidelines for Creating a Project Brief
Creating a Content Brief Template: A 10-Step Guide
Project Brief Template
Content Brief Template

The Importance of Briefs

Begin your content project by defining its goals and deliverables with clear project and content briefs. These essential documents ensure alignment across your team and equip content creators with the guidance needed to meet strategic objectives and audience expectations. This step lays the groundwork for successful content creation, providing a solid blueprint for every piece produced.

Project Briefs

Project briefs are essential tools that provide a clear direction for the entire content project, ensuring all team members are aligned with the project’s goals, scope, and specific requirements. They contain high-level information crucial for guiding all content produced within a project:

Universal Guidance: Ensures every piece of content adheres to a unified strategic vision, including SEO, brand voice, and style.
Creative Boundaries: Outlines areas for innovation and strict compliance, balancing creativity with adherence to guidelines.
Consistency Across Content: Maintains a consistent approach to voice, tone, and style, enhancing brand coherence.
SEO Alignment: Includes vital SEO strategies that ensure content is enhanced for visibility and reach.

Content Briefs

Content briefs act as the tactical tools that translate the strategic insights of project briefs into actionable instructions for creating individual content pieces. They provide detailed guidance necessary to produce focused and impactful content:

Detailed Roadmaps: Offer precise instructions for each piece of content, ensuring alignment with project objectives.
Specificity in Execution: Address the unique requirements of each content piece, from structure to differentiation points.
Direct Knowledge Transfer: Convey specific insights, expertise, and strategic direction directly to content creators.
Enhanced Engagement: Tailor content to effectively engage the target audience and achieve specific business goals.
Prevention of Misalignment: Mitigate risks of misinterpretation and ensure content meets the intended business and audience needs.

Project Brief vs. Content Brief: Key Components

Our brief component tables outline the key elements of both project and content briefs, clearly distinguishing their roles in guiding content creation. This differentiation helps ensure clarity in overarching project goals and precision in individual content pieces.

Audience and Author Details

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Audience Insights	No	Yes	Audience insights aren’t about personas. This component details common pain points, what resonates with, or could possibly disappoint, the audience as it relates to the article.
Audience Persona	Yes	No	Include demographics, sociographics, and psychographics. If the audience is segmented, identify the segment for the writer.
Author	No	Yes	Content should be published under an individual’s name, ideally a proven SME on the subject. This informs the writer on how to approach the content.

Business Objectives and CTAs

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Business Objective	If consistent	Yes	Specify desired actions like clicking links, signing up for newsletters, or building topical authority.
Call to Action (CTA)	If consistent	Yes	Provide direction on placement and frequency of CTAs. Ensure alignment with the business objective.
Contact	Yes	Yes (if specific)	Writers should know who to contact for answers. Editor and project manager emails go in the project brief; specific subject matter experts go in the content brief.

Content Details

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Content Purpose	If consistent	Yes	Inform the writer of the search intent and what the reader should gain. Including the journey or funnel stage can help.
Content Type	If consistent	Yes	Define the content type to lessen confusion, such as listicles, how-tos, white papers, etc.
Deadline	No	Yes	Communicate deadlines clearly with date, time, and time zone. Distinguish between writer and editor deadlines if appropriate.

Differentiation and Linking

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Differentiation Opportunities	If consistent	Yes	Highlight how to make content stand out from competitors, such as recent advancements, poorly covered subtopics, or a different viewpoint.
External Linking	Yes (guidelines)	Yes (specific)	Provide specific links or directions.
Internal Linking	Yes (guidelines)	Yes (specific)	Provide specific links or directions.

Legal and SEO

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Legal/Compliance Guidelines	Yes	For exceptions	Provide thorough compliance guidelines in the project brief and highlight exceptions or specific requirements in the content brief.
Meta Description	Yes (if writer creates)	Yes (if pre-written)	Provide guidelines or pre-written descriptions.
SEO Requirements	If consistent	Yes (specific)	Include keyword usage, optimization requirements, and SERP-feature targets.

Additional Components

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Notes/Special Instructions	If consistent	Yes	Use for any additional information not covered elsewhere.
Outline	No	Yes	Provide enough direction while allowing for creativity.
Point of View	Yes (broad)	Yes (specific)	Provide specific stance, opinions, and insights.
Primary Keyword	No	Yes	Include one primary keyword aligned with the subject matter and search intent.

Keywords and Analysis

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Resource & Inspiration Links	If consistent	Yes (specific)	Explain the purpose of each link.
Samples	Yes	No	Illustrate instructions and set quality expectations.
Secondary Keywords	No	Yes	Target relevant long-tail keywords and synonyms.
SERP Analysis	No	Yes	Provide links to SERP competitors and findings.

Style and Visuals

Component	Project Brief worthy?	Content Brief worthy?	Considerations
Style	Yes	No	Include guidelines on perspective, language use, and stylistic elements. Use a Stylistic Exemptions or Special Notes component in the content brief for ad hoc changes to style.
Title	No	Yes	Provide the title and direction on its usage.
Updates	Yes	No	Summarize recent updates and date entries.
Visuals	If consistent	Yes (briefly)	Inform the writer of visual elements to ensure cohesiveness between copy and visuals.
Voice/Tone	Yes	For exceptions	Cover variations thoroughly and avoid vague descriptions.
Word Count	If consistent	Yes	Provide a reasonable range and instruct on word count limits.

8 Common Pitfalls in Brief Creation and How to Avoid Them

This section highlights eight typical challenges encountered during the brief creation process and provides practical solutions to avoid them. Understanding these pitfalls will help ensure your briefs are clear, effective, and aligned with project goals.

Vagueness and Lack of Specificity
- Problem: Briefs that are too vague don’t provide enough direction, leading to misaligned content and revisions.
- Solution: Be specific with your details. Use clear, concise language and avoid open-ended instructions, especially when working with multiple writers who interpret instructions differently.
Overloading With Information
- Problem: Including too much detail can overwhelm writers, leading to key points being overlooked.
- Solution: Prioritize information based on relevance to the specific content piece. Use bullet points for clarity and to emphasize important elements.
Ignoring SEO Requirements
- Problem: Neglecting SEO aspects results in content that performs poorly on search engines.
- Solution: Clearly outline SEO keywords, desired content length, and any linking strategies. Integrate these seamlessly into the content’s narrative.
Failing to Define Voice
- Problem: Without a clear understanding of your brand voice, writers may produce content that doesn’t resonate or engage effectively.
- Solution: Provide detailed voice attributes, examples, and audience personas in the project brief.
Not Setting Clear Objectives
- Problem: Unclear objectives result in content that fails to meet business or reader goals.
- Solution: Define the business objective and search intent for each piece of content. Whether it’s driving sales, improving SEO, or building brand awareness, be explicit about what the content aims to achieve, and be sure the writer understands the search intent associated with your topic.
Inadequate Instructions for Call to Action
- Problem: If CTAs aren’t clearly defined, the content may fail to convert readers.
- Solution: Specify the type of CTA, its placement, and the action you want the audience to take. Ensure it aligns with the business objectives.
Lack of Collaboration and Feedback
- Problem: Briefs created in isolation may not cover all aspects or miss key inputs.
- Solution: Involve stakeholders in the briefing process and ensure there’s a mechanism for feedback and revisions.
Expecting Too Much From a Writer
- Problem: Expecting a writer to determine your point of view or create content that reflects your expertise without providing sufficient information leads to generic content that doesn’t stand out from competitors.
- Solution: Ensure your content brief instructs the writer on how to differentiate the content they’re going to write. Include SME insights, original quotes, or your business’s stance or opinion on the subject matter to ensure unique content.

8 Best Practices for Using AI in Content Brief Creation

Leveraging AI can significantly improve brief creation by boosting efficiency and precision. To help you make the most of tools like ChatGPT, this list provides eight essential guidelines focused on quality, collaboration, and strategic use. These practices ensure you gain the advantages of AI while retaining control over content development.

Collaborative Creation
- Best Practice: Engage AI as a partner in the content brief creation process, rather than relying on it to generate briefs independently. Use it to refine and expand sections collaboratively, ensuring each part of the brief meets quality standards and aligns with strategic goals.
- Tip: Ensure the person using AI to create briefs has the capability to create a brief manually. This ensures they can effectively judge and enhance the AI-generated output.
Comprehensive Preparation
- Best Practice: Before starting with AI, gather all necessary background materials such as SEO keyword research, audience data, competitive analysis, and content insights. This preparation ensures the briefs are grounded in strategy and informed by data.
- Tip: Use AI to help organize these materials into a cohesive strategy that can be directly referenced in the brief.
Iterative Review and Enhancement
- Best Practice: Treat the initial AI-generated content as a draft to be refined. Carefully scrutinize each output before incorporating it into the brief to ensure precision and relevance.
- Tip: Use AI to suggest variations and improvements on key sections like the call to action or outline, ensuring they’re optimized for user engagement.
Quality Over Speed
- Best Practice: Emphasize the quality of the briefs over the speed of their creation. Although AI can accelerate the drafting process, the focus should be on using AI to achieve a higher standard of clarity and strategic alignment.
- Tip: Use off-the-shelf AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude effectively by providing clear and concise inputs each step of the way.
Integration of Rich Information Sources
- Best Practice: Incorporate detailed input such as quotes and insights from SMEs and summaries from strategic discussions to inform the AI’s output. Transcripts from SME interviews and webinars are particularly useful for injecting unique insights into content briefs, and transcripts from a working session help with AI-assisted project brief creation.
- Tip: Use meeting tools that are able to produce transcripts to make information sharing with the LLM simple.
Avoiding Overreliance on Automation
- Best Practice: Be cautious of over-relying on AI for critical thinking or strategic decisions. Use AI to assist with data processing and suggestion generation, but keep strategic decision-making and final approvals in human hands.
- Tip: Set clear guidelines for the human operator to ensure they guide the AI effectively, providing it with the information it needs to help create useful outputs.
Step-by-Step Component Focus
- Best Practice: Follow a step-by-step process when creating briefs with AI, focusing on one component at a time. This methodical approach helps maintain control over the quality and relevance of each section.
- Tip: Provide AI with the necessary information for each component, review its output carefully, adjust or redo if necessary, and then incorporate it into the brief.
Careful Outline Crafting
- Best Practice: Be meticulous when using AI to create content outlines. While AI can generate comprehensive outlines quickly, they need to be guided by detailed input from the user.
- Tip: Provide specific direction on how to differentiate the content, articulate the business’s stance or opinion on the subject matter, and specify the depth required for certain topics to ensure the outline leads to distinctive and competitive content.

7 Essential Tools for Content Brief Creation

Choosing the right tools is essential for streamlining and optimizing the brief creation process. This carefully curated list highlights tools that can support different stages of creating a content brief. Each tool is outlined with its key benefits, enabling you to build a technology stack tailored to your needs.

Automated Keyword Research: These tools generate a list of relevant keywords based on the primary topic, helping ensure search engine optimization.
- Semrush: Offers comprehensive keyword research, tracking keyword strategy against competitors, and provides SEO audits.
- Ahrefs: Provides keyword suggestions, search volume, and keyword difficulty, along with competitive analysis and site audits.
- Google Keyword Planner: A free tool that generates keyword ideas and gives estimates on search volume and competition.
Content Outline Generation: Use these tools to create structured content outlines by analyzing top-performing content.
- Clearscope: Generates content reports that help writers ensure their content aligns with search intent and industry relevance.
- MarketMuse: Uses AI to analyze your content and compare it with existing content on similar topics to suggest improvements and keywords.
Audience Analysis: Understand your audience’s needs and behaviors to tailor your content effectively.
- SparkToro: Quickly discovers what your audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows.
- SimilarWeb: Provides analytics on your audience’s online behavior, including traffic sources, geography, and user engagement.
Competitive Analysis: These tools help identify content gaps and opportunities by analyzing your competitors’ content strategies.
- BuzzSumo: Analyzes what content performs best for any topic or competitor, offering insights into popular trends and content engagement.
- SpyFu: Provides insights into the search marketing formulas used by your most successful competitors.
SEO Suggestions: Get recommendations for optimizing your content for search engines.
- Yoast SEO: A WordPress plugin that provides real-time page analysis to enhance your content, images, meta descriptions, and more.
- Surfer SEO: Analyzes your pages against the top 10 ranking pages to suggest optimal keyword density, common words, proper content length, and more.
Quote Gathering: Tools and platforms to source expert quotes and insights can add authority and depth to your content.
- Qwoted: A platform that connects media and content creators with industry experts to source quotes and insights.
- SourceBottle: A free service where journalists and bloggers find sources for stories and content, including expert quotes.
Transcription Tools: Convert audio from interviews and webinars into text to easily extract insights and quotes for content briefs.
- Otter.ai: Provides accurate real-time transcription services and includes features for sharing, editing, and organizing transcripts.
- Rev: Offers audio and video transcription services with high accuracy, delivered by human professionals, suitable for detailed content creation.

12 Guidelines for Creating a Project Brief

This process guides you through the creation of a project brief, starting from the initial client interaction in the working session to the finalization of a comprehensive document. These 12 guidelines ensure all essential information is gathered, organized, and articulated in a way that guides your content team to successful content production.

Prepare for the Working Session: Utilize the working session deck and agenda provided in our resources to guide the discovery process with the client. These tools are designed to help gather comprehensive information about the project’s goals, audience, desired voice, and content structure effectively.
Conduct the Working Session: Engage in a detailed face-to-face meeting with the client, using the prepared materials to facilitate discussion and ensure all vital aspects of the content are covered.
Complete the Working Session Summary: After the session, use our template to compile a summary of all critical points discussed. This summary should capture the project’s scope, specific content requirements, and any client preferences outlined during the session.
Client Sign-Off on Session Summary: Before proceeding, have the client review and sign off on the working session summary to confirm all information is correctly understood and agreed upon.
Determine Necessary Brief Components: Refer to the table in this guide to decide which components are essential for your project brief. This step ensures the brief will include all the relevant sections needed for writers and editors to create content that aligns with the project goals. Aim for components that’ll contain information that doesn’t change at the individual article level.
Draft the Project Brief: Using our project brief template, start drafting the project brief, focusing solely on information that will direct the content creation process. This includes detailed instructions on voice, style, content structure, and any specific content formats discussed during the working session.
Review of Style and Tone Guidelines: Incorporate detailed voice, tone, and style guidelines to ensure consistency across all content. This section should be informed directly by the client’s input and aligned with the target audience’s preferences.
Peer Review by a Writer or an Editor: Have a writer or an editor review the draft brief. This step is crucial for identifying any potential blind spots or areas of confusion that can hinder content production.
Test the Project Brief: Assign a writer who has no prior knowledge of the project to create a piece of content based on the brief. This test helps evaluate the clarity and completeness of the brief.
Collect Feedback and Adjust the Brief: Gather feedback from the test phase and use it to refine the brief. Adjust any sections that are unclear or insufficient to ensure the brief effectively guides content creation.
Finalize and Distribute the Project Brief: Once the brief is finalized and polished, distribute it to all relevant team members involved in the content creation process.
Create Your Content Brief Template: With your completed project brief in hand, begin crafting the accompanying content brief template.

Create a Reusable Content Brief Template: A 10-Step Guide

Developing a reusable content brief template is key to streamlining your content production process for a project. This 10-step guide provides the framework for creating a template that can be adapted to various content pieces within a project.

Project Overview and Strategy Review: Begin by thoroughly reviewing the overall project’s strategy, goals, and target audience, as learned in the working session. This review helps inform the fundamental structure and components of your content brief template.
Define Template Components: Use the component table in this guide to select essential elements that should be included in every content brief for this project. Avoid including components that are defined in the project brief or aren’t needed by the writer.
Organize the Flow of Information: Arrange the chosen components in a logical order that will make sense to writers and editors. Start with the broad information like title and content goals, then move into specifics like keywords, links, and call to action. Outlines are typically left for last.
Gather and Prepare Resources: Compile all necessary resources that will consistently be part of each content brief, such as a link to the project brief and any templates for specific types of content (e.g., blog posts vs. white papers). Having these resources at hand will ensure each individual content brief is easy to complete and accurate.
Draft the Content Brief Template: Construct the template based on the organized flow of information. Ensure each section of the template is clear and provides guidance on how to fill it out.

For example:

Introduction: Brief description of the content’s purpose within the project.
Keywords: Primary and secondary keywords to be included.
Content Objectives: Specific goals for the content piece (e.g., lead generation, educational, SEO-focused).
Required Links: A list of internal links that must be included in the content.
Content Outline: Outline of headings and key points to cover.
Call to Action: Specific actions the content should prompt from readers.

Internal Review and Feedback: Have team members who will use the template, such as writers and editors, review it. This is to ensure the template addresses all necessary aspects of content creation and is clear in its instructions. Use their feedback to refine and improve the template.
Pilot the Template: Test the template, along with the project brief, with one or two pieces of content to see how well it works in practice. This helps identify any areas where the template may be lacking or additional guidance is needed.
Final Adjustments: Based on the pilot test, make any necessary adjustments to the template. This might involve adding additional sections, clarifying existing instructions, or rearranging components for better logical flow.
Template Finalization and Distribution: Once the template is fully adjusted and approved, finalize it for regular use. Distribute the template to all relevant team members and provide a brief training session if necessary to ensure everyone understands how to use it effectively.
Ongoing Updates and Revisions: As the project progresses, be open to making revisions to the template based on new insights, changing project needs, or feedback from content creators. This will help maintain the relevance and effectiveness of the template throughout the project’s duration.

Project Brief Template

Click here for an editable version of this template. Once it opens, click File>Make a Copy.

Content Brief Template