Have you ever been asked to run a LinkedIn or a Search campaign, without a clear explanation why? A sales director asks for a webinar. A product manager asks for a launch campaign. A regional lead asks for something at the conference in March.

That's what happens when the marketing department is simply treated as a tactical execution arm, and is not seen as a strategic partner.

Strategy must come before tactics.

What's missing is a clear strategic brief to marketing from the business stakeholder. The purpose of a strategic business brief is to give marketing the decisions only the business can make: the commercial problem behind the request, what the work has to deliver and by when, which customers and markets are in scope, and how the business will judge whether it worked.

Once marketing is aligned with the overall business or stakeholder objectives, they should then be empowered to decide: who to target, what to say, which channels to use, and how to measure it. Marketing has a strategic role to play, and that is to determine the marketing strategy and execution tactics that are aligned with the overall objectives of the business or their internal stakeholder.

This article will focus on the key elements of a strategic business brief that are necessary to inform strong marketing and campaign briefs.

How a Strategic Business Brief Differs From a Campaign Brief

A strategic business brief comes from the business stakeholder. It sets out the commercial objective, the customers and markets, the constraints, and how the business will judge success. It is written before marketing plans anything.

A campaign brief comes later, and it belongs to marketing. It covers the audience, the message, the channels and the measurement, and it is written for the team or the agency doing the work. If that is the document you need, how to brief an agency covers what belongs in it.

The order matters. Marketing cannot choose an audience until the business has said which customers are in scope. It cannot choose channels without knowing the budget and the deadline. It cannot design measurement until someone has said what the work must deliver.

Once the objective is agreed, the plan belongs to marketing. Nobody outside finance tells finance how to build a forecast, and nobody outside legal redrafts the contract. Marketing should get the same treatment. A stakeholder who arrives asking for a LinkedIn campaign has skipped the part of the job that is theirs, and taken over the part that belongs to marketing. This is the same sequencing problem that shows up in the confusion between strategy, plans and tactics.

What the Research Says About Weak Briefs

Most campaign briefs are not good enough. The BetterBriefs Project, published by the IPA in October 2021, surveyed more than 1,700 marketers and agency staff in more than 70 countries. 80 per cent of marketers believed they wrote good briefs. 10 per cent of agencies agreed. The study estimated that around a third of marketing budget is wasted on poor briefs and the work that follows them.

Business alignment is not the only reason. BetterBriefs names six common faults: briefing before the strategy is settled, changing the brief after it has been briefed in, letting a committee rewrite it, writing in internal jargon the agency cannot decode, setting vague objectives such as "drive awareness" with no measurable target, and loading a single brief with several objectives and audiences at once.

Some of those faults belong to marketing. Jargon, focus and measurable objectives are craft problems, and better writing fixes them.

Two of them start before marketing is involved. Briefing before the strategy is settled, and rewriting the brief because stakeholders were never aligned, both happen when the business has not made its decisions. The same study found three in five marketers using the creative process to work out their strategy, and 69 per cent of marketers and 73 per cent of agencies saying rebriefs happen too often.

That is the case for asking the business stakeholder for a strategic business brief first. Once marketing is aligned with the business objective, it can get on with the marketing decisions it is expert in: the audience, the message, the channels and the measurement. It can brief agencies and execution teams against a clear objective. The campaign brief that comes out of that is a better document, and it is aimed at what the business actually needs.

What the Business Needs to Answer

A strategic business brief covers the questions marketing cannot answer alone. The business owns all of them.

The commercial case. What problem or opportunity is this about, what does the work have to deliver, and by when? A usable answer has numbers in it. "Grow the HR module business" is not something marketing can plan against. "$1.5 million in new HR module revenue by 30 June, which is 30 deals at $50,000" is, because marketing can work out how many leads that needs and tell you whether it is achievable.

The target customers and markets. Which markets and customers the work is for, and which ones are out of scope. Out of scope matters. If the business cannot yet sell or support in a market, marketing should not be spending money there. In B2B a group of people decides together, so the brief should say who they are rather than leaving marketing to guess. The buying committee is usually wider than the person who signs.

Why a customer would choose you. Who else the customer could buy from, including the option of doing nothing, why the business believes it wins, and what proof it has. Kotler and Armstrong define positioning as arranging for a product to occupy a clear, distinctive and desirable place, relative to competing products, in the minds of target customers. That place is decided at strategy level, and a campaign communicates it rather than creates it. Proof is a customer result, a reference, or a demonstration.

The constraints. The budget, the deadline, and anything already committed, such as a launch date, a price change or a conference. Sales capacity belongs here too, and it is the constraint most often forgotten. If marketing generates more opportunities than the sales team can handle, the money is wasted, even though the marketing results will look good.

Who decides whether it worked. Name the person who will judge the result, and agree the review date before the work starts. Without a named decision maker, the result gets argued over after the event, and the most senior opinion wins. The IPA and BetterBriefs guide found that 30 per cent of marketers had no clear criteria for evaluating the work they briefed.

How to Ask So You Get Answers

Ask when the request arrives. Asked at the start, the questions read as diligence. Asked two weeks into planning, the same questions sound like you are building a case for why the campaign cannot be done.

Ask in writing, and allow proper time for it. The stakeholder is thinking through their own commercial case, and that is not a quick job. The time it takes comes back later as fewer rounds of rework and a sharper campaign brief. Writing the answers down matters as much as getting them, because the written objective is what you measure the campaign against when it finishes.

Let the stakeholder answer it. Filling it in for them feels helpful and costs you the argument later. The business stakeholder is accountable for the commercial objective, and writing it down is part of that accountability.

Then talk it through. The written answers tell you what was decided. The conversation tells you which answers were typed quickly and which were fought over. You will want to know the difference when the plan has to change.

What to Do When the Answers Do Not Come

Sometimes the answers do not come back.

Nobody has made the decision yet. A blank next to the question about markets usually means the business has not chosen which markets to go after, and that the campaign request was a way of moving ahead without making that choice. The blank puts the decision back with the person responsible for making it, before any budget is committed.

The stakeholder is too busy, or thinks the questions are marketing's job. Chasing rarely works here. Write the assumption into the brief instead, label it as an assumption, and name the person who would need to correct it. For example: "Assumption: mid-market accounts in Australia and New Zealand only, because no scope was confirmed." People who will not complete a form will often correct a wrong answer. If nobody corrects it, you have a record of what you were asked to assume.

The point of a strategic business brief is to make the business goals and objectives clear, so the campaign brief and the marketing plan are built on them. Getting that clarity and alignment at the briefing stage is also what makes the review possible. If the objective was agreed up front, you can say afterwards whether the marketing programme delivered it. If it was never agreed, there is nothing to accurately measure the result against.

Sources

• The BetterBriefs Project (Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler, with Flood and Partners), published by the IPA, October 2021. Survey of more than 1,700 marketers and agency staff across more than 70 countries. Source of the 80 per cent against 10 per cent figure on brief quality, the 69 and 73 per cent figures on rebriefs, the three in five figure on using the creative process to define strategy, and the estimate that around a third of marketing budget is wasted on poor briefs.
• BetterBriefs, "How to write a better marketing brief: 6 mistakes to avoid". Source of the six common faults listed above.
• BetterBriefs and Mark Ritson, in partnership with the IPA, "The best way for a client to brief an agency", 2022. Source of the figure that 30 per cent of marketers had no clear criteria for evaluating the work they briefed.
• Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, Principles of Marketing. Source of the definition of positioning, and of the segmentation, targeting and positioning sequence.