As search engine optimization becomes more important for businesses of all sizes, it is becoming even more crucial for businesses to understand how to create effective content briefs. A content brief, or a basic content outline, is the most efficient way to ensure that the content you are creating fulfills the role you need. Creating these content briefs is typically a step of the overall content creation process that needs to be noticed. Many people view it as an unnecessary process that wastes time. But, when these briefs are not included, you may waste more time creating content that does not achieve its intended purpose. This is especially true for larger businesses that need to create a lot of content at a time.
Without an outline, content can easily veer into unwanted directions, go on tangents, and completely miss the key points you wanted the piece to discuss. Especially when creating content for search engines, you need to ensure that the piece is informational and helpful. It may help to think of a content brief like a table of contents in a book. While reading the table of contents alone does not make you feel satisfied with the story, it provides you with the chapters you will read in the book. In other words, it includes an overview of the book, but to fully understand the story, you need to read it. Similarly, showing your customers your content briefs will not give them the information they are looking for, but it will be enough for your writers to draft the content they want to read.
All of this is to say while including content briefs as a step in your content creation process may seem at a glance like a waste of time; it is essential to helping you create the targeted content that your customers want. The best content brief examples will be simple, straightforward, and easily customizable. One of the best ways to approach content briefs is to use a predictable and easy-to-customize template or generation system. This allows you to speed up your content brief creation while still providing your writers with all of the information they need to write the content you are looking for.
Content Brief Generator
If you are still unhappy with the time spent creating content briefs, then a tool like Demandwell’s Outline Generator might be what you are looking for. What started as a simple content brief generator is now a complete outline generation software tool that can create detailed outlines for your content in minutes. With so many content brief tools and software options today, you may wonder what sets Demandwell’s Outline Generator apart from the competition. Where a normal design brief generator can offer a simple outline template, the Outline Generator leverages both machine intelligence and human inputs to ensure that your outlines are what you want them to be.
Rather than simply spitting out an outline that cannot be edited like a traditional content brief software, Demandwell’s Outline Generator offers easy-to-adjust keyword and instruction sections. This allows you to fine-tune your briefs to get the exact type of content you are looking for. With the dynamic instruction templates, you can easily add specific instructions, add content to link to, and include any industry or company-specific words that you want to be included or avoided in your content. With a fully customizable tool like this, creating SEO content brief templates does not have to be a time-consuming step in your content creation process. However, it can still provide your writers with all of the information they need to create the type of content you need for your business.
How To Write A Content Brief
Because every great piece of content starts with a good content brief or outline, you may wonder how you can write a good content brief for your own pieces. In other words, what is brief writing, and how can you get good at it? The good news is that an SEO content brief is much simpler than many think. You have three primary components to any good SEO content brief template. These are your target keyword for the piece, the co-occurrent keywords that make up most of the outline, and your specific instructions for particular sections or the piece as a whole. With this simple formula, you know exactly how to write a content brief that will be effective and efficient for your SEO content production.
But, not all businesses have the time to manually sort keywords for every single piece of SEO content that they are producing. This is especially true for larger businesses that are producing large quantities of SEO content. This is where you can use an automated content creator, brief builder, or outline generator software option. Some software options will offer you a content brief template PDF that includes the requested keywords in sections. Others, like Demandwell, will offer you an easy-to-modify outline generator interface. In other words, with Demandwell’s Outline Generator, you can easily edit and customize your outlines to include any specific instructions, keywords, or important information so that your content is the best fit for your business.
Topic Brief Template
Search engine-optimized content production is one of those areas of your business where tools that make the process go faster are essential. Because businesses are constantly producing this type of content to stay relevant in search results, there is an almost never-ending need for new SEO content pieces. Luckily, there are some extremely simple ways to speed up the brief-making process so you can spend your time creating more content. One of these methods is to use a brief topic template when creating the briefs for each piece. As mentioned before, briefs are essential to ensuring that your content stays on track and fills the role that you intend for it. If you want to form your own content brief template, there are several content brief examples online that you can reference and use as a basis for your own template.
If you are less inclined to create your own format of content brief, you can utilize brief copywriting templates that already exist. One way to do this is to look for platforms or software solutions that generate outlines for you. For example, Demandwell features an Outline Generator tool that auto-groups your relevant keywords and offers space for specific instructions that can be customized as needed. This allows you to easily make each content brief quickly and efficiently without giving up the customization ability to write them on your own.
Content Marketing Brief Template
If you have never tried making a content brief for your other marketing content, like blog posts or articles on your website, you may find that they are quite helpful. You can think of a content brief like an outline for your writing. In school, we are told to make outlines before writing essays — this is the same, just shorter. Whether you are writing a piece of SEO performance content or an engaging blog about your business’s core values, you need a way to stay on track. This is what a brief blog template can bring to the table. You can find many brief article examples online that detail how best to structure an article depending on your end goals of the piece. In general, however, you can think of any type of brief template the same way you would an SEO content brief template.
In other words, you’ll want to detail the sections you want the piece to contain and the key points you want in each section. You can also include any desired keywords in this brief, which are typically more applicable to SEO content briefs than quality content briefs. The general idea is to create an outline that can help you stay on target while writing. The bottom line is that using a basic content marketing brief template when writing your blogs, articles, and other forms of content can keep you from going on tangents and losing focus on your piece.
SEO Content Brief
Content briefs can be useful when creating all types of content — from blog posts to SEO performance pieces. But, when it comes to SEO content, content outline templates are essential. There are simply too many ways to approach a document with only a collection of keywords and no further instruction or information. To create effective SEO-optimized content, you need strategically placed keywords and valuable information for your audience. If you are simply offering a list of keywords with no form of organization or instruction on how to use them, you could end up with a piece of content that is nothing like what you were looking for. This is especially true for larger companies that outsource their SEO writing. Because the writers creating your content are not experts in your field or company members, they may not know how to best group keywords or what synonyms to avoid.
This is where an SEO content brief can come in handy. You can include special instructions, a general outline, and keyword grouping in your brief to help your writer structure the content best. In other words, an SEO content template can help save you time in creating content briefs faster and help you avoid getting unusable content that is irrelevant to your business.
