5 tips for writing the perfect creative campaign brief

Intro to creative campaign briefs

A great creative campaign starts with a great brief. The quality of your campaign brief really can make or break the final result.

Get it right, and you’ll give your creative team the context, vision, goals and inspiration they need to deliver an outstanding campaign. Get it wrong, however, and you may be left with vague, tangled ideas, wasted time and weak campaigns that miss the mark.

Lucky for you – we’ve broken down the basics of writing a great campaign brief into five simple steps.

Chester Zoo Shopify Gift Shop moodboards for photography

What is a creative campaign brief and why it matters

A creative campaign brief is a document that outlines your campaign’s purpose, objectives, audience, and deliverables. It should set your team up with enough information to guide them through the creative process.

A clear, comprehensive brief should help everyone to stay aligned on the same vision – reducing hours of back-and-forth to deliver on both creative and commercial goals.

Writing a successful campaign brief

1. Define clear objectives

A clear goal should sit at the very heart of your campaign. Without one, it’s impossible to measure the success of your efforts. Objectives could include –

Raising brand awareness
Generating more leads
Driving conversions to a CTA (call-to-action)

It’s important to anchor your campaign goals with your wider marketing objectives, by attaching a tangible number or timeline. This keeps your team focused, grounded, and accountable. For example –

We want to gain 100 newsletter sign-ups by the end of the campaign.

2. Know your audience

To convert your audience, you need to understand them. Think back to the classic, “who, what, where, why, how” you might have used in school!

Who are you speaking to?

What do they want?

Where will you reach them?

Why will they care?

How can you guide them to convert?

It’s great to go beyond basic demographics to include deeper traits like their interests, behaviours, and pain points. Useful tools and methods include customer surveys, social media analytics, website behaviour insights and competitor research.

When you know your audience, you can shape everything from tone of voice to visuals in a way that resonates with them. Your messaging to 20 year old women studying at university should be very different to 50 year old men who own their own business!

3. Provide key brand & campaign details

Your creative team needs the right background to get started. Make sure your brief includes –

Brand values and messaging
The overall campaign idea or purpose
Budget and timeline
Any non-negotiables (e.g. mandatory taglines, logos, or compliance details)

Keep it concise. Too much information can overwhelm, while too little can leave the team guessing. A few clear paragraphs explaining the brand and campaign context is usually enough.

4. Outline deliverables & channels

One of the most common reasons for project delays is when new deliverables get added to the scope along the way.

Clearly list what you need from the get-go, for example:

Paid social ads
A campaign landing page
Video content for YouTube
Email campaign templates

Also, outline where the campaign will run – LinkedIn, Instagram, out of home, or elsewhere. Knowing the channels in advance helps the creative team tailor assets to each platform.

5. Encourage creativity with clear limits

The best briefs strike a balance between guidance and inspiration. Be clear on your goals, deliverables, and must-haves, but leave room for creativity.

You can provide:

Inspiration or competitor examples
Tone and style guidelines
References to what’s worked well before

However, it’s best to avoid being too prescriptive. A brief that’s overly constrained can limit the range of ideas and stop your team from bringing their best work to the table.

Choosing the right creative agency

Even the best campaign briefs benefit from a great creative partner. Here at Ultimate, we have buckets of experience bringing creative campaigns to life, with solid results. We’ve worked across sectors like hospitality (see Revolucion de Cuba), tourism (see Chester Zoo) and beyond.

A good creative agency won’t just execute your ideas, but should guide you through shaping the brief, planning deliverables, setting tangible goals, and building on your vision. You should come away from the relationship feeling inspired by a campaign that elevates your brand.