How to write the perfect paid media briefing

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A first-class paid media briefing for your in-house team or external paid media specialist can make all the difference between campaigns that win awards and ones that flop. Great briefings ensure there’s clarity on what you’re trying to achieve and that everyone’s on the same page. Here are some of our top tips for making sure your paid media briefings set you up for campaign success.

Share the right background information

The more relevant background information you can provide to your paid media team about your company and the service or product you’re aiming to promote, the better.

What are your most pressing marketing objectives/challenges? What is the most relevant information that can enable your paid media specialists to help you achieve or tackle them?

Other information about your company that may be useful might include your vision, your mission and values, your primary activities, company history and other vital corporate and brand information such as your USP.

Defining your USP in the eyes of your audience is one of the most challenging and important tasks marketers have; but if you can pinpoint this, it will make your paid media campaigns laser focused and consistent with your brand.

We help our clients get this right!

Share your current marketing strategy

Including details of all marketing channels you currently use is extremely important. For example, do you focus on traditional PR as well as online marketing? You may run live events, in which case it’s important that your paid media is designed to fit in with all your other marketing efforts.

Describe your existing online presence and activity, such as your website/s, any blogs and which social media platforms you’re active on, as well as the current activity that is undertaken on those platforms, all of this information is an essential part of briefing your paid media team.

Let them know about any campaigns you’re currently running or have previously run and the frequency levels of previous campaigns. It’s important to share learnings from previous successes and failures as this will really help your team get a sense of how they can best help you achieve success going forward.

As with any type of marketing, strategy is important; by ensuring that you bring your paid media team on board well in advance of key activity in your business, you will get much more value and effectiveness from your campaigns.

Be specific about who your audience is

Many businesses already have a clear idea of who their target audience is and have built up avatars or buyer personas which encapsulate their typical clients or customers.

Be as clear as you can on the demographics of your audience. For example, if you’re targeting parents, where are they based? Are they located in specific cities or are you targeting the whole of Europe and what is their age range?

If you still need to build a clearer picture of your clients, there are plenty of ways you can find out more about them. Google Analytics insights will provide a wealth of data helping you analyse online behaviours and which pages of your website and content your website visitors spend the most time on. Your CRM data can reveal profiles of customers with the highest lifetime value and your highest converting customers, for example.

If you have this information, it will be like gold dust to your team and will help them hone in on exactly the type of people who are likely to be interested in whatever it is your campaign is promoting and those most likely to convert.

If you need help gaining audience insights, find out more about our audience builder technology, the ATOM.

Outline clear goals and objectives in your paid media briefing

Try to set one overarching goal which sums up exactly what the objective of your campaign is. For example, are you looking to build brand awareness, drive online sales or build an engaged community online?

You may perhaps want to take a phased approach, building awareness first and then working up to engagement and conversion – try to be clear on whatever it is that you want the final outcome to be.

Try to set some quantitative KPIs too. For example, if your aim is to increase sales, it would be advisable to set some KPIs around the number of click throughs to a landing page, the number of promotion redemptions via coupon codes or the number of new leads/prospects generated, etc.

Which social media platforms do you want to use?

Which social media channels you use for your campaign can be a clear decision based on the channels on which you’re already active on, or it can be a collaborative decision between you and your paid media specialist. It depends very much on what you want to achieve, your target audience and where it’s considered you’ll have the most success.

Include any brand creative

Make sure you provide any assets, or even just starting points for creative, that your paid media team can work with. This could include any images you have, your style guide or brand guide, which will help establish the right tone of voice and ensure there is consistency with your brand’s messages.

If your aim is to drive traffic to a website then make sure you provide details of any landing pages and, if advertising on Facebook, a Facebook pixel so that traffic to your website can be tracked.

Budget

If you have a set budget it’s vital that you make this clear in your brief. You may of course wish to be guided on this, but budget is certainly something that should be clear before any action is taken on your behalf. At the very least, provide your paid media team with a rough idea of the media spend you are looking at.

Now you’re off to the best start, what’s the next step?

We hope these tips will help you to create a first-class paid media briefing for your next campaign.

We recently won the Best Paid Media Campaign at the Performance Marketing awards for our work with National Amusements where we delivered outstanding ROI. Get in touch to explore how we can boost your paid media results. If you want to amplify the impact of your social media ads find out more about the ATOM, our audience builder technology.