FREE DOWNLOAD · ONE PAGE
The brief the business should give you
When someone asks marketing for a campaign, they hand over the tactic and keep the business case in their head. This one-page PDF carries the eight questions that get the business case out of their head and onto paper, before you plan anything.
Free. The PDF lands in your Back2Marketing library and the link is emailed to you.
What is on the sheet
Eight questions, in the order the business should answer them. What they ask the business to supply:
- The commercial case. What is happening now, what the work has to return in money or customers, and the date it has to land by.
- Who it is for. The markets and customers in scope, the ones deliberately out, the people who decide the purchase, and the action you need from them.
- Why they would choose you. The alternatives they are weighing, including doing nothing, the reason you win, and the proof.
- The constraints. Budget, deadline, sales capacity, and the launches, offers and events already committed.
- Who calls it. When the work gets reviewed, and the named person who decides whether it worked.
Each question carries a prompt underneath saying what a usable answer looks like, so the person filling it in knows when they have actually answered it.
PDF · 1 page · A4 · free
How to use it
STEP ONE
Send it before you agree to anything
The moment to ask is when the request arrives, not after you have started scoping the campaign.
STEP TWO
Let them answer it
Filling it in on their behalf feels helpful and costs you the argument later, because you now own a guess about what the business wants.
STEP THREE
Treat the blanks as the agenda
Whatever comes back empty is the decision the business has not made yet, and that is the conversation worth having before any plan exists.
The questions are the easy part. Getting them answered is the work.
Before You Say Yes is a 30-minute short course on how to ask so the brief comes back completed, how to test the answers in 20 minutes, and how to turn them into a campaign brief the business has signed off. Six lessons, three tools, US$39.
