Now that you’ve completed the questionnaire and competitive analysis, it’s time to synthesize the information into a creative brief.
In this lesson, you will learn how to boil everything down into these main points:
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All right, this is it. Showtime, developing a creative strategy for your brand film. This is where we take everything from the previous steps and collapse it, boil it, distill it, synthesize, whatever you wanna call it, we break everything down.
And at the end of this step you’re going to have a creative brief that you can then take into the next phase, coming up with ideas and writing a script.
So what’s involved in developing a creative strategy for a video? We wanna get aligned on marketing objectives. The persona, so the single most valuable customer that we have to speak to. We have to align on the mindset shift that we need that person to make. The communications objectives that will create that mindset shift. We want to distill down a core message also known as the single most important message so that’s like the, if no one else remembers anything from this video, what’s the one thing we want them to remember. The last part of this stage is finalizing that creative brief that you’ll then take into ideation.
All right, so let’s start with marketing objectives. So the idea here is, what is the primary objective where this video has to earn its ROI and the secondary? And keep in mind, it doesn’t eliminate the use beyond those objectives, those are just our main objectives.
Now we wanna boil down and create our vision of the single most important customer, the most valuable customer that we’re gonna speak to.
So here are elements of illustrating this avatar of a person. So I usually give them a name, usually an age range and a title. Now, here are the other fields you wanna fill out, what is their external problem? So if you were to walk up to them and say, “Hey, what’s your problem regarding work in your workplace?” They would say, “Our IT is out of control.” Or, “Our supply chain is really messed up.” What is the problem that they would tell you?
Next, fill out their internal problem. And this I have to credit Donald Miller at StoryBrand for this idea. But the idea is that there’s a problem that they are not going to tell you, that they’ll never tell you and usually the problem is maybe around confidence in themselves so, “I’m not sure I have what it takes to solve our IT.” Or, “I’ve never taken on a project that is as daunting as fixing our supply chain.” This internal problem is gonna come into play in the next steps ’cause this is what we really have to speak to, this is what we have to solve.
Next let’s fill out, how is job performance evaluated? What are the KPIs that they have to meet? Next, what’s the biggest goal this person has? The goal is usually something that’s determined by their boss. And usually that’s why we always put it after the KPIs. So usually the goal has to do with like we need to boost sales by 10%. But their external problem may be, we just don’t have enough leads or something like that. So the external problem is usually like more emotional, and then the goal is more tactical like what is their goal?
And finally, I always end with, what’s something they would say? So if you walked up to them, what’s some piece of insight they would give you? I think the best source of information is your on the ground sales team. They’re gonna know everything the clients are saying, they can help you out with this one.
But what we wanna do is just end with a quote of something they would say just to make them one more step real.
Okay, now our mindset shift. So Blair Enns, if you don’t know him he’s the founder of Win Without Pitching. I highly recommend his course. He says that sales is really change management.
So you’re managing someone through a change in their life. They have determined that they are going to fix their supply chain and they’re changing their company but they’re also changing themselves. And sales is just meant to help them along their metamorphosis. All we have to identify is, what’s the change that has to be made in order for this person to see the value of our services?
Think of Inception, right? What did they need that guy to feel in order to break up his father’s company? They had to incept him. This is your Inception moment. So where is your customer now? And what’s the mindset shift that this asset needs to make in order to say, “Yes, it is time to make a change.”
The next page are your communications objectives. So this is how we’re going to make the mindset shift, help buyers understand, in the middle so that they feel, and then on the right and that they believe.
And the way I like to fill this format is actually in reverse, like to reverse engineer it. So, I start with, what do buyers need to believe in order for that mindset shift to happen? So the belief is usually something like your company can help them realize profits they’ve never imagined. Or your company thinks different than anyone else. This is what we need to incept into their mind in order for them to make the mindset shift. Our brand film will not say any of this stuff in the actual piece, these are results of the understand column.
So if we work backwards we start with believe. In the middle so that they feel, well, what are the feelings we need to make people feel in order for them to believe something? So usually the feeling columns starts with words like relieved or confident. That’s usually the words I start with. So that means that what we’re doing is is we’re calming people or we’re giving them confidence that this is possible. None of that is being said in the video but the feeling of the video needs to exude that.
Finally on the left-hand side, help buyers understand this is the content of our video. You have to answer what are the significant few things you want buyers to understand so that they feel and that they believe the things that you’ve written down. So that’s your communication objectives.
Next, I like to boil everything down into the core message. And the core message is now simplifying even further, further, further, further, further, if no one remembers anything except one thing, what is that one thing? And this is gonna be your single most important message in the next step which is the creative brief.
So the creative brief, we’re just putting everything together. All these slides will get collapsed into this one slide the creative brief, that is the amalgamation of everything we’ve done to this point and kind of the only piece of paper you really need in order to make an idea.
What I usually do is all the work that I’ve done up to this point I just throw in an appendix in the deck and work off the creative brief, but the creative brief answers, what’s the objective of the video?
So this is where you’re going to your primary marketing objective. You could put shades of your secondary marketing objective in there. Who’s the audience? You’re referencing your persona page. What is the single most important message? That’s you’re referencing the previous page, that core message. What are the reasons to believe or why should people believe us? These are otherwise known as RTBs in the marketing field but this is the help buyers understand column. This is where these are the reasons to believe what that single most important message is.
The final field of the creative brief is the perception to change. And that’s your mindset shift. Right now our customers feel that implementing a cloud infrastructure IT program is too daunting, it’s not daunting and that’s the perception that our brand film needs to change.
So that’s it. The creative brief ends all the strategy work because the creative brief is now taken and you’ll use this to come up with your concepts and then your scripts from your concepts in the next video and I’ll see you there.
