February 14, 2022
Crafting thumb-stopping social creatives is hard, but it’s even harder if your briefs are too vague, or even worse, too prescriptive. Today, we’re taking you through the do’s and don’ts of briefing for social media, with an example of how we approach briefing as well.
But first!
What is briefing?
As an agency, we work with a range of clients, creating assets for their social media pages either from scratch or using existing creatives, etc. When we receive an asset, something like a PDF, an infographic or even a video, we write a brief for those assets that might be four or five bullet points with simple instructions, or a full word doc filled with specific briefs for a longer video.
What could be considered a bad brief?
We could say that a bad brief is one that is very informative, a too descriptive brief that doesn’t let the designer be creative. Having too many stifling things make it much harder for the designer. There’s an element of overstepping, it’s the designer job to give you what you need to essentially work within the parameters, but not be too prescriptive so that you can still flex your creative muscles and do something fun with it.
It’s a learning process and it’s important to build a relationship between a designer and the Social Media team. For a designer, it’s important to stretch those creative muscles and get creative to come up with a great result.
What’s the one thing to remember when briefing?
The one thing to keep in mind is that you should always trust your designers, trust that they know what they think is best. Obviously, there are some things that need to be cemented, like the logo or text that needs to be in it. But you should give them the freedom to understand that the texture comes in one way, as well as the images because they’ll be able to achieve better results instead of it just being so cookie cutter.