Is Anyone Listening?

Recently we surveyed our clients to identify the gaps they observed while working with various content marketing agencies. One observation that stood out was that, before working with Concurate, clients had to carry considerable heavy lifting to get their pieces of content across the finish line.

The output will most likely be subpar if the article’s content brief – the blueprint – isn’t well prepared.

At Concurate, as a content marketing agency, we prioritise preparing robust content briefs that ensure the output is powerful, brings visibility and helps our clients convert prospects into customers.

Having a dependable content brief and a process to create it helps us maintain the quality of output for our clients. With this in mind, here is a template that your business can use to prepare content briefs.

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Guidelines for Preparing Content Briefs

Title

A concise and catchy title for your content will allow you to hook your target audience and give them a clear indication of what the piece attempts to achieve.

You would not like your article’s title to drown in a sea of search results. Strong emotions and staggering statistics sway people. Incorporating words that indicate why and how something happened increases the upside of your article getting clicked.

For example, “From Almost Bankruptcy To $1.53 Billion Valuation: The Journey of Loom From A B2B Marketer’s Perspective”

Reader Persona

Identifying your target audience is imperative. Start noting down the ideal audience of your article and try to make the description as precise as possible. By undergoing this exercise, you can provide your audience with timely, relevant, and actionable information. This step will allow you to know the following about your target readers:

• What industry do they work in
• What kind of business do they operate
• What type of clients does their company serve
• What is the amount of revenue that their company generates
• What is their position in the hierarchy
• What is their job profile
• What pain points are they looking to resolve

For example, “Founders of medium-sized SaaS enterprises who want to hire a SaaS-based content marketing agency.” This statement can act as a starting point in assisting you in crafting the right content that will address pain points such founders are likely to possess. 

Current Perception

What is your ideal audience’s current outlook on a problem or approach to getting work done? What blindspots do the readers possess? Understanding their perceptions will help you to emphasise and address the core problem right at the outset. In addition, it will give the readers a clear idea of what they can expect to achieve by the close of the piece.

For example, founders of medium-sized SaaS enterprises might not possess a clear plan of action for hiring a content marketing agency that will be the right fit for their company. Moreover, they might not be aware of SaaS-based content marketing agencies or inclined to hire one.

New Perception

Strive to transform your reader’s neutral or negative outlook into a positive one. After going through your content, ideally, the reader is now aware of a possible solution to their problem and incentivised to adopt your proposed solution.

A unique selling proposition in your article nudges the reader to try moving to the next stage of the buying process. For example, the founders will understand the different elements of SaaS content marketing. They might also be subtly inclined to give your marketing agency a try based on the actionable insights.

Content Inspiration

Inspiration can strike anywhere. You might have been reading a publication, listening to a podcast, or perhaps come across a helpful article while entering queries on search engines. Ensure to link such resources to create engaging anecdotes in your articles.

Content Sources

Did you find any valuable resources such as a webinar, blog post, or interview while researching for the content piece? Then, make sure to hyperlink it to establish the proper context for your writer.

Article Opening

Statistics

A good content piece cites statistics to support the overarching view. It is always great to pick up statistics from reputable and authoritative sources and add a link.

Anecdote

Adding personal stories helps establish a connection with the reader. These stories can be something you experienced yourself or received from your clients. Your readers will likely think, “I felt the same way!” For example, do you recall the opening for this piece?

Messaging

Messaging helps writers to write the piece and pitch the brand’s solution in an intended manner. For example, at Concurate, we attempt to create content that brings business, not just traffic. We do this by adding relatable stories which maximise conversions.

Target Keywords

Is your content informative or conversion-focused? Your target keywords will vary accordingly. Providing these through keyword research will help your writers weave them seamlessly and allow the piece to rank higher organically. You can guide your writers by providing primary and secondary keywords.

Publishing Platform

Where will the content be published? For example, will it be published on your website or as a guest post?

Publishing Platform Guidelines

For example, if your content will publish as a guest article, ensure to denote pertinent guidelines to which the writer must adhere.

Internal Links

Internal linking refers to linking to your own website’s pages or blog articles. Your writers may not know all the past articles you’ve published. Save precious time and resources by including links to related pages in your content brief. This assistance will allow the writers to weave them into the piece seamlessly.

Word Limit

The word count is just an estimate. What is more important is that the message comes across correctly. Ideally, the article’s topic should dictate the length, not an arbitrary boilerplate word count. Contrary to popular wisdom, your audience does possess lengthy attention spans. You stand to gain higher backlinks, shares, dwell time, and click-through-rate with the right content. You can avoid setting artificial barriers and provide your writers with ballpark lengths, such as “1000-1200 words”.

Internal Chatter

“Internal Chatter” is stories from within the organisation that you can embed within the article. Provide your writers’ stories that increase relatability and help maximise conversions from the content piece.

Key Takeaways

Based on Concurate’s approach to preparing content briefs, here are six benefits you can expect the following:

• Ranking higher on search engines by using the right keywords while preparing quality content that matches the search intent.
• Achieving the purpose of your content by writing relatable, credible and valuable content. How? By successfully changing your readers’ perception through research-backed content.
• Adjusting to readers’ maturity linguistically and depth of understanding by clearly outlining the persona.
• Maintaining your branding and tone of voice by guiding your writers on how to approach messaging.
• Connecting with your audience by sharing relatable “internal chatter” from within your organisation.

About Us

We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information.

If your organisation wants thoughtful content brainstormed and designed by Concurate, let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today!

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