Marketing Campaign Brief

How to write a marketing campaign brief

A campaign brief exists to stop two expensive things: work that starts before anyone agreed what it's for, and a result nobody can judge because success was never defined in a number.

Most briefs collect the easy half — audience, channels, a budget range — and skip the half that decides whether the campaign can be evaluated at all. This is the structure of the marketing campaign brief in Coligna: eight sections, twenty-three questions, in the order a client can answer them.

The eight sections, and what each one is for

Business. Name, industry, website, primary product or service, target market. The campaign's context, and the thing that tells you whether you're briefing a category leader or a challenger — two campaigns that look identical on paper and aren't.

Campaign Objective. Primary objectives, the campaign description, key message and value proposition, and success metrics. Note what the description field is called: campaign description, not "what does success look like." That's deliberate — see the next heading.

Target Audience. Ideal customer profile, geography, B2B or B2C, and customer pain points. The pain-point answer is the one that writes your copy later; the demographic answer rarely is.

Channels. Where the campaign runs. One question, and it's worth pushing back on a client who picks everything — a budget spread across six channels is usually six campaigns nobody can measure.

Messaging. Brand personality, primary call to action, and reference campaigns they admire. Brand personality here is a single choice, not a list — a deliberate constraint, and a useful forcing function.

Assets. What creative the client already has. The gap between what they think they have and what's usable is where timelines go.

Budget. Range and campaign duration. Together, not separately — the same number over six weeks and six months are different campaigns.

Analytics. Tools in use, KPIs, and a catch-all. If the analytics answer is thin, the success metrics in section two are aspirations rather than measurements, and it's better to know at brief stage.

Two questions clients answer badly — and two the brief doesn't ask

"What's the primary objective?" — and hold them to one. Awareness, leads and retention are different campaigns with different creative and different measurement. A client who picks all three has described a marketing department, not a campaign.

"What's the brand personality?" — one trait, chosen on purpose. This field allows a single answer, and clients often resist it. That resistance is the useful part: a brand that is "professional but playful but authoritative but approachable" gives a copywriter nothing to work with.

Two more worth asking in the kickoff call, even though the template doesn't ask them:

"What happens if this works?" A campaign that generates 400 leads into a sales team that can handle 40 is a failure with good metrics.

"What did you run last time, and what happened?" Prior campaigns are the cheapest research available and clients rarely volunteer them.

From brief to project

A submitted brief lands in your inbound queue, sectioned and typed the way it was asked. From there it becomes an estimate, and an accepted proposal becomes a live campaign project carrying those original answers with it — so the key message agreed in week one is still attached to the project in week eight. See how the full lifecycle works →

That's the difference between a template and a live brief: a PDF gets filled in once and filed; a brief-capture link needs no account from the client and starts the work the moment they submit.

Frequently asked questions