Top Creative Brief Templates for Social Media Managers

For Social Media Managers, a Creative Brief is a strategic blueprint guiding campaigns and content creation, ensuring alignment with broader marketing objectives. It helps in structured planning, streamlining the ideation process and enhancing collaboration within teams and with external partners. A Creative Brief template in Notion can simplify this process further, offering a standardized format that captures essential information, such as goals, deliverables, timelines, and budget, making it easier to communicate ideas and track progress.

Before starting on your own Creative Brief, consider exploring the templates provided below to facilitate the process.

What Should Creative Brief Templates Include?

Choosing the right Creative Brief Template is crucial for streamlining your social media projects. Here are key components to look for in an effective template:

Objective: Clearly defines the goals of the campaign. This section should help you understand what success looks like for the project.
Target Audience: Identifies who the campaign is aimed at. A good template will help you pinpoint demographic and psychographic characteristics of the audience.
Key Messages: Outlines the core messages that need to be communicated through the campaign. This ensures consistency across all content.
Deliverables: Details the specific outputs required, such as posts, ads, and videos. This helps in planning resources and timelines effectively.

Selecting a template with these components will provide a solid foundation for your social media strategy, ensuring all vital aspects of the campaign are addressed.

What Should Creative Brief Templates Avoid?

Choosing the right creative brief template is crucial for streamlining your social media projects. However, not all templates are created equal. Here are three key components to steer clear of:

Overly Complex Sections: Avoid templates with too many intricate sections. They can confuse rather than clarify, leading to miscommunication and wasted time.
Undefined Objectives: Steer clear of templates that do not emphasize clear, measurable objectives. Without them, assessing the success of a campaign becomes difficult.
Generic Content: Avoid templates that generalize content needs. Specificity in content requirements ensures that the final output aligns with your brand’s voice and goals.

Selecting a template that avoids these pitfalls will help ensure that your social media campaigns are both effective and efficient, aligning closely with your strategic goals.

1Small Design Agency Task Management

This template helps to organise incoming work from the client account management teams into a creative design team at a small design agency. Often there are competing creative deadlines across account management teams which can lead to miss management of task priorities. On this template both the management team and creative team have their own workspace which is connected together, providing a way to manage creative tasks.

A template preview for Small Design Agency Task Management

2Influencer brief

The influencer brief template is your go-to resource for streamlining collaborations with influencers. This template organizes all vital campaign information, such as campaign objectives, content examples, talking points, and deliverables. By providing a clear brief, your team can ensure influencers align with your brand's vision, ultimately leading to more impactful promotions.

3Brand Design Brief

Ugh, tired of design drafts that miss the mark?

You know, the ones that look kinda pretty, but don't really connect with your audience or boost your sales?

Been there, done that. That's why I created this super-simple Brand Design Brief Template.

Think of it as your magic wand for crafting a brand that:
Turns heads with stunning visuals that capture your unique vibe.
Speaks to your ideal customers like they're old friends.
Crushes the competition by standing out from the crowd.
Drives real business results, not just likes and shares.

No more design drama, Just a clear roadmap that helps you and your designer:
Understand your target audience inside-out. Who are they? What makes them tick?
Unleash your creative vision. Playful? Sleek? You name it! ✨
Spot your competitive edge. What are they doing right (and wrong)?
Fuel your designer's imagination. Share visual inspo to spark their creativity.
Align design with your business goals. Let's make it happen!

4Content Deliverables

Devin Reed's Content Deliverables Template is designed to help you effectively plan and track your content deliverables for an entire quarter. This template lets you record the deliverable name, its status, project description, demand, target audience, lift, and ETA. The option to view by status, lift, or ETA gives you the flexibility to manage your content projects in a way that best suits your workflow. Simplify your content planning and stay ahead of your deliverables with this efficient Notion template.

A template preview for Content Deliverables

5Brand Foundations Framework

You can use this visual framework is a tool to help you structure your brand foundations and map out the hierarchy of your brand narrative and supporting messaging. Use it as a reference for a more robust messaging guide, or use it as a template and fill in each block with your actual mission statement, vision statement, and so on.

6Creative Brief

A simple document to help you organize all requirements and information needed to enable smooth collaboration with agencies and freelancers.

7Approving Campaigns/ Briefs with External Agencies

This template efficiently organizes campaign information, including goals, target audience, and key messaging. It features a table for tracking tasks and deliverables, an approvals checklist, and an integrated Calendly booking page for effortless scheduling of review sessions with agencies and internal teams.

A template preview for Approving Campaigns/ Briefs with External Agencies

8Design Brief

A simple document to help you organize all requirements and information needed for effective execution of design projects.

9Content brief

A major bottleneck in content programs is a lack of alignment on content expectations. This content brief template helps all stakeholders — SEOs, writers, and marketing leads — align on things like keyword requirements, brand & audience settings, content structure, visual elements, and more. A well-crafted content brief keeps projects on track, guards against frustrating rewrites, and keeps everyone happy.

10Creative brief

Creative projects have many moving parts. This creative brief lets you gather all the necessary information and materials in one place — goals, deliverables, timeline, budget, and more. Get aligned with internal or external teams to set expectations and move forward with clarity.

Closing Thoughts

Utilizing these templates streamlines your workflow, ensuring consistency and coherence across all posts. This not only saves time but also enhances your brand's voice.

Start implementing these tools today to see a significant improvement in your social media management. Embrace the ease and efficiency they bring to your daily operations.

What is a Target Audience?

The specific group of people a campaign is designed to reach, characterized by behaviors and preferences that align with the brand’s objectives.

What is a Content Pillar?

Key themes or topics around which all content is strategized, ensuring consistency and relevance in messaging across all media platforms.

What is a Call to Action (CTA)?

A prompt on an advertisement or marketing piece, aimed at inducing an audience response leading to a conversion or further engagement.