Think of your event as a brand.
It needs a visual language and a clear message that runs through all of your marketing collateral; pre-event, on social media, on your website and during your live event.
By effectively leveraging creative content, you can deliver your message in a clear, professional and impactful way. It takes skilled concept design, art direction, graphic design, animation and video production to tie it all together and it all starts with an effective brief.
A clear brief will communicate the vision and objectives for your content while helping your creative team understand your audience. Here are our tips for briefing your creative team.
1. Define your Target Audience
Who are you talking to? The tone, style and delivery of content for an audience of 20 – 25 year-old millennials attending a social media conference is going to differ vastly from an audience of senior decision makers attending a finance conference.
Key demographics to include in your creative brief include your audience’s age range; location(s), job title(s) and interests. You can go the extra mile and include your their challenges and values for added context.
2. Key Messages
Do you have a well-known speaker? Is your audience attending because you have strong networking options? When promoting your event, think about what will engage your audience, generate demand, sell tickets and convert live attendees. Place the value your audience will draw from your event at the forefront of your message.
Give your creative team as much information as you can so they can fully understand your message and assist with brainstorm ideas to conceptualise it in creative ways.
Once you’re onsite, your message will be targeted to the live audience. Now it’s all about what you want them to come away with. Revisit the core idea of your event to inspire your onsite message.
3. Tone of Voice
Your tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with your audience and influences how your message is perceived. Examples include formal, informal, casual, respectful and irreverent.
Think about some of your favourite brands and how they communicate. What words, phrases and calls to action do they use?
Imagine you are talking one-to-one with an actual person within your demographic; give them a name, give them a story and share this with your team. Personifying your target market is a surprisingly effective way to guide your tone of voice and communicate it to your stakeholders.
4. Treatment & Design
How do you want the content to look?
Think about the colour-palette, narrative, voice-over and music. Provide your team with a copy of your brand guidelines, links to videos, images and music that are a source of inspiration. Pinterest and Designspiration are great resources to search for and collect ideas.
Discuss your ideas with your content team to help develop them further. When discussing your ideas, be open to new opinions to help build out the concept. An open-minded conversation can help spark new perspectives and directions.
5. Deliverables
The nuts and bolts of what you need from your creative team. Give them a list of the exact deliverables you expect, for example:
- 3 x 30 second promotional videos
- 10 x award stings
- A 1 minute highlights video showcasing the event
When putting together your deliverables, look at all of your digital platforms. Do you need different versions of your content for each one? For example, a 16:9 video may work for a projector screen, but a 9:16 vertical video take up more screen space on a mobile device and is better for social media sites like Instagram.
Bookmark this page and reference these tips when putting together your next creative brief. You can thank us later 😉
Make sure to drop us a line for your next content project.
