Buyer's Brief Mini-Series | Episode 3 | Strategic Creative Brief

Full video transcript

All right, episode three of the Buyer’s Brief mini-series, complimentary to the Buyer’s Brief book, which you can buy on Amazon and get through our website for the total manuscript and all the book bonuses, as well as the recipe that I’m working through here inside of the series for the MarketSauce methodology.

We’ve covered the buyer blueprint — you may call it the marketing blueprint — that we developed with John Benson, and now we’re onto the strategic brief. This section was developed after I went through a program led by a marketer by the name of Ron Lynch. He is the marketing mercenary — you can Google his name, you’ll find that he is known as the $4 billion do man, a brilliant genius marketer — and really was the tipping point, turning the corner, at the early stages of when we launched our initial membership for our programs, back when we were called The AI Author.

Ron’s program, the marketing mercenary, was an intense program that went into the mind of what makes a marketing campaign successful at the end of the day. Ron has done this and practiced this for decades and is arguably one of the best in the world at marketing and creating powerful commercials and videos that tell a story and get a message to the market — but also how you slice and dice a market into having one product, offer, or service and being able to expand and scale by catering your messaging to different segments and creating specific content that helps you reach different audiences and expand, simply by understanding at a deep, empathetic level what’s driving that market and that customer to buy.

So we’ve gone through the buyer blueprint as part one of this workflow. Now, part two, we’re diving into the strategic creative brief, because we need to funnel and focus in on the buyers we’re focusing on and how we’re going to create the marketing campaigns and copy. It’s not necessarily all the copy you’re going to need for running something, but it’s the messaging you’re going to want to build from — understanding what you’re going to want to start to speak and articulate your message in a way on social media, your podcast, and your content that you’re creating, and your organic outreach, and any other way you’re communicating your brand’s message.

Whether you’re a solo creator or a big brand, you need to align that not only with yourself but also with your team, so the agencies or the partners or the internal team members you’re working with understand where you’re going and where you’re heading. That’s where a strategic creative brief comes into place. As you go from the top down of this section in the MarketSauce method, we’re getting that game plan together that we’re going to be able to implement and execute on — but if we’re not planning, we’re not prepared, and we’re not organized, then it’s going to make the execution really muddled and messy. So we want to get really clear on this first, and again, with AI we can take this process that before would take sometimes weeks or months, and now we’re condensing it down into a matter of — depending on how fast you’re working through this workflow — a matter of even less than an hour in some instances.

This is all about getting everything aligned on the same page and testing out different offers and messaging and frameworks that can help you align your brand’s market and message to a specific segment of that audience. The style guide and the brand tone will help with your instruction to AI and keep things consistent across the board. Again, your first output generated here — as you see with the MarketSauce example and all the different case studies we’ve got — is giving you inspiration; maybe it’s 80% of the way there. But you can take this output and then mold it into what’s going to be your staple for your brand voice and messaging. It also helps the team keep their messaging on-brand and consistent across the board, but this one document will have all that information in place so everyone can go in and access it right away.

You might already have a creator brief for your business, so you can add that into the mix with this, because I think you’ll find some sections of the strategic creative brief very valuable and useful in some way, shape, or form — even if you’ve already got a creative brief. So go ahead and implement this section once you’ve got your buyer blueprint, so you’re focusing your message on those different offer targets. Then you can expand — I would recommend doing at least three of the offer targets, but you can go up to, I would maybe say up to ten is usually where I go on a specific blueprint, and then maybe run a separate one if I want to continue going more and more deeper and more segmented. But you’re going to generate a lot of context here and a lot of stuff to review.

So just make sure that as you’re implementing the step, the things coming out of AI, with your instruction alongside it, are aligned with what you know to be true, and that you’re not just giving it full reign to just go off and run and do it and take it as a perfect example. No — you want to be in here, working and collaborating with the AI as you’re building it, but also making sure it’s not going off the rails. Because once you have all the pieces set up beforehand, generally you can keep the theme and the context going the same, and as we get larger and larger windows of context and work with tools like ChatGPT, even then that’s going to be more and more factual and on point and in line with it. But if you notice that sometimes when you’re running this it might start to go off in a different direction — when that happens, we might want to reset and reuse the context and go back through. So again, it’s kind of a refine, get the results back, edit and repeat.

Then continue on to the next step, which — once your strategic and creative brief is done — we’re going to go ahead and create our micro content that we can start to use in our social media, our content, our graphic design, and getting out on more of the channels and having our message land with our audience where they’re at. I’ll see you in the next episode.