Looking to standardize your processes, wow clients, and reduce scope creep? Want to keep your creative team on track and reduce revisions? Then you need to make it a regular practice to use a client brief every time your agency takes on a new customer.
A client brief is an industry-standard document that generally stretches one to two pages and provides you and your team with everything required to meet (and even exceed) your customer’s needs. Bigger clients often expect to work with a client brief, and smaller clients can benefit immensely from the clarity it provides. Using a client brief with every customer will make your pitch process and client onboarding more professional and is a universal good for all parties involved in the project.
First, let’s break down the difference between a client brief and a web design proposal.
The client brief covers the big picture, focusing on the overall business problem a customer is trying to solve and recommended solutions. This can include strategies for PR, digital advertising, social media, web design, listings management and a whole host of other potential marketing initiatives.
The website proposal builds on the client brief and covers specific website design aspects, goals and ROI targets. An easy way to remember the differences between the two types of documents is a proposal typically covers much more granular details (such as brand colors, number of website pages, SEO strategy and content responsibilities) than a client brief.
Though the content of a client brief and web design proposal will differ, there are some structural elements that may appear in both types of documents, including:
If you’re working with a large company, they will often come to your website design agency with a draft client brief that’s ready to go. Subsequent meetings with the client can be used to add elements that highlight your expertise in web design and digital marketing strategy.
A small business probably won’t come to you with a client brief and may not even know how to fill one out. Your meetings with the client will help you to gather the information required to create a brief that sums up their main business problem and potential solutions.
Above all else, the client brief ensures that you understand your client. It will help guide your team in preparing a compelling website proposal that perfectly matches the client’s needs and outline the bounds of your entire relationship. Getting client buy-in on the client brief is an important first step when kicking off any project.
Having a properly prepared, professional client brief will also:
In short, the client brief is essentially your roadmap.
As Campaign, a media outlet dedicated to celebrating creative excellence in the communications industry, says, “The perfect client brief is a clear statement of the business problem that needs solving. The perfect client brief is co-written. The perfect client brief has a numerical KPI. The perfect client brief is small. The perfect client brief is more than just a piece of paper.”
Given that the client brief is such an important document, it may seem difficult to keep yours “brief.” As stated above, it really should not run for more than one to two pages in length.
However, every client brief should include these elements:
Let’s examine each of these elements in more detail.
This short section (think one to two paragraphs) should outline the company's goals, as well as background on the company history, branding info, and place within the industry. It should also include the business’s one-sentence value proposition.
Examples of objectives you would add to a client brief include more product sales, more website visitors, more phone calls to the business, increased NPS score, more consistent website branding, etc.
The “Target Audience” section of your brief should answer the following questions:
You’ll want to include detailed customer personas and demographic information if you have them.
This short section is essentially a list and analysis of key competitors. Some questions you may want to answer in this section include:
Who are your three main competitors?
What three things do you like most about competitors’ brand marketing initiatives and web presence?
What three weaknesses do you see in competitors’ brands and digital presences?
Explain the business problem concisely in one or two sentences (if possible).
Here are a couple of examples of how this sentence will read:
In this section, you want to offer a high-level overview of your solution(s) that can be expanded upon in the website proposal. This section may run from one to three paragraphs, depending on the problems you’re solving.
The “Solution(s)” section is also where you want to provide an ROI goal. In order to create a realistic ROI, you will need to compare local competitors that operate at the same scale as your client.
Protip: This should be the most inspiring part of your client brief. As managing partner at Bullish Brent Vartan stated in a Campaign article, “Find the good. Don't wallow too long in the problem(s). Then, focus on the unlocking mechanism. The perfect brief is one that's just as inspiring as it is instructive.”
This is where you want to include why your solution solves for the business problem. Feel free to use the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to show how your proposed solution (for instance a fast website with a robust online store) positions your client differently from the competition, or helps your client surpass the competition. This is also where you want to emphasize how the solution will achieve the previously stated ROI goals.
The client brief is without a doubt one of the most valuable tools any web design agency has in their tool box when it comes to managing clients and their expectations. High quality client briefs inform the entire relationship between you and your clients and ensure each project is a success. They also reduce miscommunication and scope creep. With a little effort, putting together strong client briefs for every customer can quickly become something you and your team do well.
