What does a digital brief look like?
Each company needs to construct briefs that are appropriate to their unique values, processes and resources—but we think that there are a few things every digital brief should embrace:
- Accept that users are active, not passive
They don’t want to receive messages: they want to do something. Single-minded message and unique selling propositions need to partner with user needs and goals. Ask questions in the brief that understand and directly engage with motivations and behaviours of the user. - Create personas or user stories, not target audiences
Address your users’ true context vs. just their demographic. Personas are great tools used for large scale platform projects, but they don’t very often get produced for marketing programs. We think they should. - Define outcomes not deliverables
I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but all too often we focus on the deliverable (a display ad, a microsite) and not on the outcome. Focussing on an outcome can be very liberating since you can come up with solutions that aren’t predetermined. - Define success
If you can define an outcome, then you should know what success looks like and how you can measure it.
We believe that building a more contextual, holistic and user-focused digital brief will help us define and design more relevant and effective digital marketing platforms and programs in 2011.
Via The Digital Brief (Teehan+Lax)
