Are you making these 7 copy briefing mistakes?
An insider’s guide to the biggest bungle-ups, why they happen, the pain they cause… and what to do instead
We’ve all heard that it’s a good idea to have brief before you write something. You know, that thing that helps you figure out what you’re trying to do, then do it.
And by “good idea”, of course I mean “desperate fantasy”.
Why is the planning part of the process such a struggle? After all, you wouldn't build a house if you had no faith in the blueprint. Or no blueprint at all. Yet we’ve all felt the consequences of doing the equivalent of this. Not just copywriters and managers of copywriters but teams and organisations at large.
Millions of pounds spent on advertising that backfires.
Months of team time down the pooper with nothing to show for it.
Customers running into the arms of a competitor.
The opportunity cost of not prioritising other projects.
Fines dished out by regulators for broken rules.
A revolving door of copywriters hired then fired.
Work redone, re-redone, re-re-redone.
Conflict. Distrust. Disappointment.
Oh the humanity.
Sound familiar?
Worse, it’s not even clear where the rolling trash fire started. You find yourself wondering, what the heck happened?
You have a hunch that it was something to do with the planning (or lack of)...
I get it, briefing copy is hard. Arguably harder than creating a blueprint for a house, because there’s never an obvious “right” answer. You can’t check the maths in a spreadsheet.
Nevertheless, an effective brief improves your chance of success and reduces your risk of failure. It has the power to put out fires before they happen, making life a helluva lot happier for copywriters, marketers, brand bods, project owners, and anyone else the work touches.
(The same principle applies in the world of design, if that’s your bag.)
I’ve learned from my mistakes and so can you. Let’s get stuck into the gory details.
MISTAKE #1: Not doing a brief at all
This one time…
I was working for a sharing economy startup, a job I adored. I’d just been tasked with writing a sales email. My first ever hardcore copywriting project. Olé!
Back then I was more of a community manager type, coming up with interesting tidbits for blogs and social media, where the output’s objective was to get attention and stand out against the dull backdrop of the parking industry. A softer sort of copywriting. Pun-heavy. The stuff I was doing worked, but at the time I wasn’t really aware of why. Like so many others out there, I’d lucked into it as a natural match. And thanks to the openness of the startup, I’d lucked into the opportunity to dip a toe into other modes of copywriting, though as I would soon find out, it was not going to be a walk in the, ahem, park.
I hadn’t yet discovered the value and importance of a brief. So I didn’t create one for the sales email. I just assumed the objective was the same as it was for social media. Uh oh.
My email copy delivered quirk in abundance yet failed to give a single persuasive reason for booking a parking space. When the project owner saw the draft, he laughed till he cried. I don’t blame him one little bit.
Lord have mercy, I learned a lesson that day.
Why people don’t bother doing a brief
If you’re early on in your career, you don’t know what you don’t know until you screw up or someone else helps you out. No beef there! I owe my own development to a bountiful mix of hard knocks and amazing managers.
But if you’re pro, I know you know the theory. That taking the time to get a brief together makes the copywriting work itself easier. Not to mention better, i.e. more likely to have an impact and get results. It’s an investment you have to make in the present that pays off in the future.
Let’s face it though, few people look forward to this briefing malarkey. Wading through the details before of diving into a glittery piece of writing? Bahhhring!
And we’ve all been there in the heat of the moment. When it’s all systems go. When putting the brakes on instead of trusting your instincts and getting on with it seems like a terrible tradeoff, and teammates huff and puff at your mention of the B-word.
TOTALLY understandable. TOTALLY undesirable. TOTALLY fixable.
The consequences of this mistake
You’ve guessed it. If you skip the brief, you pay the price later. Some complexity or other will pull the rug from under your feet (a complexity you could have foreseen and prevented, gahhh), or you’ll discover that the rest of your team weren’t aligned on the point of the work and you have to start from scratch, or the performance flops and The Powers That Be question your ability. Ouch.
What to do instead
Write a brief. Period. For EVERY piece of copywriting work.
Before you hit the roof and remind me that there are only 24 hours in a day dammit Corissa!!, fear not. This doesn’t have to be a long and arduous process.
The briefing process is a sliding scale of effort. You need to ask yourself a predictable sequence of questions to figure out the whys, hows, whats and whos of getting the work done triumphantly. The exact number of questions and the amount of time you spend answering each one depends on the work at hand. Some questions will be easier, some will be harder. Once you’ve done it a few times you’ll be able to spot the difference and whiz through faster than you might think.
Big, gnarly piece of work? You’ll want to treat it as a mega brief-a-thon with all the bells and whistles. Small, simple piece of work? You can sort out your brief within an hour or so.
But if you’re new to the world of briefing, I get that this will still sound overwhelming.
So to get you up and running bit by bit, I suggest starting with a minimum viable brief.
A minimum viable brief is a scaled-back set of four questions. Generally, you can think them through in just 10-20 minutes.
Here are the 4 questions you’ll need to answer in your minimum viable brief:
Who’s your piece of work aimed at?
What job should it do for them?
What job should it do for your organisation?
How will you know if it did the job it was supposed to?
For the non-briefers among you, these questions alone pack enough of a punch to make a difference to the outcome of the work.
I’m going to stick my neck out now and tell you that the vast majority of copywriting (yes, even the day-to-day stuff) benefits from a bunch of extra thinking on top. Nevertheless, doing the basics is so so so much better than nothing.
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #2: Cutting corners in your brief
This one time...
While contracting for an ecommerce startup, I had the following conversation about a flagship email journey I’d been drafted in to plan and execute.
Me: “Great, so we’ve got the next 90 minutes to create a brief together and really nail this initiative.”
Project owner: “Aaaaactually, I’ve only got half an hour. Another meeting slipped in. That’s fine right? And we’re already behind schedule. The sooner this is finished the better. I’d like us to have the copy wrapped up to hand over to the tech team by Friday.”
Me, squirming and hating myself for not pushing back: “No problemo, half an hour is better than nothing!”
Project owner: “Cool, let me just grab a coffee...”
We spent 20 minutes talking about the overall strategy. Happy days! But we had to stop before we could discuss who else was involved in getting the work over the line.
I did as bidden. I cracked on.
Then a couple of weeks later:
Engineer: “We can’t include this dynamic information in the emails. The infrastructure isn’t built yet. We’ve got it on the roadmap for Q4. Sorry about that.”
Me, dying inside: “Ah, umm. Gotcha. I’ll revisit the strategy then.”
Why people cut corners in their briefing process
Ever heard a driving instructor say “you’ve passed your test, now learn to drive!”?
They look infuriatingly pleased with themselves as they say it, but they have a point. The moment you’ve picked up a skill, you start to take liberties with that skill, believing you’re better at it than you perhaps really are...
This relates to a concept in psychology called the four stages of competence. You move from one stage to the next as you make progress:
unconscious incompetence → conscious incompetence → conscious competence → unconscious competence
The same applies to briefs. I stand by what I said above that a lean brief will put you strides ahead compared to not doing a brief at all. But once you’ve got your briefing habit up and running, you hit the problem of your briefing process becoming an autopilot exercise that leads to a feeling of overconfidence because you’ve ticked the brief box.
The consequences of this mistake
Same story as for mistake #1. Only with several degrees more danger.
Why? Because the fact that you’ve taken steps towards creating a brief in the first place suggests you’re tackling a high-stakes piece of work. And by “high stakes”, I mean the amount of blood, sweat, tears and headspace that’s being poured into the work and the risks at play if things don’t go to plan. (For example, an FAQ might be low stakes, whereas a billboard campaign might be high stakes.)
In the worst case scenario of cutting corners when the stakes are high, people lose their jobs and companies go bust. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What to do instead
To come back to the sliding scale of effort I mentioned in mistake #1: the higher the stakes, the more important it is not to cut corners and neglect to give your brief some heavyweight TLC.
Use the sliding scale idea to your advantage. Ask yourself, can you afford to only do the bare minimum of planning for the copywriting deliverables you have in mind? Or should you go the extra mile?
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #3: Over-egging your brief
This one time…
Gah, wracking my brains here! I promise you, over-egging a brief does not happen often.
OK. Got one.
I was planning an email for a fintech on the topic of coronavirus support for self-employed people. I knew the lay of the land, and I was in the target audience myself, so I could have spent 10 minutes on a quick brief and got on with writing the email. Instead I launched into a full blown brief-a-thon. Not only did this slow things down, it got me all tied up in knots of panic about the economic situation I and other self-employed people had found ourselves in. A win for empathy. A loss for sanity.
Why people over-egg their brief
Over-enthusiasm.
When I awoke to the power of briefing, I’d find myself bashed over the head by project owners for “overthinking things”. In hindsight I can say with confidence that most of the time they were mistaken, and the team paid the price.
But in a fraction of cases, they were right. The stakes were low enough that we didn’t need a meeting about the brief. I’d over-egged it.
The consequences of this mistake
I’ll level with you here. There is an argument to say that this mistake isn’t even worth worrying about, since 19 out of 20 times, the benefits of doing a decent brief outweigh the consequences of overdoing one.
However. Because over-egging a brief can be a source of unnecessary distraction and delays, it has the potential to infuriate any boss who isn’t well stocked in the patience department...
Are alarm bells ringing in your head at the moment? If so, over-egging your brief is a mistake you’ll want to avoid making. (You might also want to think about seeking a better boss, though that’s a topic for another day.)
What to do instead
Again, and I’m a stuck record here, but remember the sliding scale of effort. Minor copy task? Not a complex topic? Only going to catch a few eyeballs? Keep it lean. You still need to think through the objective of the work in advance, but you might not need to bug other people as part of that process.
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #4: Failing to identify who might kibosh the work
This one time…
Four or so years ago, when I began freelancing on the side of a permanent role as an in-house copywriter, I took on a project with a catering startup. I’d been communicating with the CEO. It was billed as a brand messaging job, and I’d managed to convince myself that he was the main stakeholder.
Until. Until. The time came to get feedback from the team.
I logged in to check the comments and saw that the Head of Product had spent several days diligently poring over the draft copy word by word and ripping it a new one, using descriptions such as “retarded”. Charming.
Sure, this man needed to attend remedial classes in giving feedback. And I politely explained to the CEO why he’d have to find someone else to finish the work. But would it have helped to have an upfront conversation with the Head of Product to find out what he cared about? Could this have spared everyone the unpleasantness? Maybe. Just maybe.
Why people fail to identify kiboshers
Got the lowdown on who your stakeholders are? Hurrah!
And what about the stakeholders who pull the strings in reality?
You’ll find surprisingly little overlap between the two groups.
You might imagine that your official signer-offers are the people you need to win round. And you’re bang on the money. But only in part. That’s because there are always hidden power structures you don’t know about, or political rivalries where someone’s nose is out of joint because they haven’t been consulted and this “someone” holds a veto card…
An ex-management-consultant once told me about a time he was brought in to fix some issues in the running of a hospital. His team worked from two different organisation charts: the one the hospital gave him, and another one, a secret one, that showed how decisions actually got made and implemented (or not). And who were those stakeholders Not the management. Not the surgeons. The nurses. The nurses ran the show where the action happened. They were in a position to block decisions and scupper the whole thing. They needed to be listened to and brought along for the journey.
The consequences of this mistake
Work, meet bin.
What to do instead
Chat to a few people in the company (casually!) to learn who else calls the shots. There’s probably at least one person in your group of stakeholders that you wouldn’t expect to find there. Someone whose title doesn’t give any indication that they’re a stakeholder. You probably want to loop this person in ay-sap to get them on board, even if it’s just an FYI.
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #5: Failing to consider the company’s goals as well as your customer’s
This one time…
I was working for an A.I. startup, and we, the shiny new marketing team, had been set loose to overhaul the website from the ground up.
We were discussing our approach in a team meeting:
Me, naive and optimistic: “I propose we write the landing page copy to optimise for sales. Happy customers, repeat business. Not for leads. It would be really easy for us to bring in loads of crap-quality leads to pump up the vanity metrics on our dashboard but if we do that we’ll just be wasting people’s time.”
Manager, distracted by a million and one things: “Look, I hired each of you to get on with your role in this without needing handholding. You’re experienced. You know where we’re at. I want us to smash this website out of the park. We need to prove ourselves to the business.”
And then a few weeks later when we were gearing up for launch:
Me: “I’ll take you through the draft now. To recap, we care mainly about sales, not leads…”
Manager, veins throbbing on his forehead: “What do you MEAN we don’t care about getting loads of leads?? The performance of our marketing team is judged on LEADS ALONE!! Making sales is the sales team’s problem!”
Me, with a sense of impending calamity: “Oh. I see. I’ll rework the copy.”
In fairness, my manager was a decent bloke. As you may have clocked, the startup was in trouble. We had more challenges on our plate than just communication. But I’d still committed a fatal error. I’d been living in my La La Land, where The Customer Rules OK. I wasn’t factoring in the reality of the business. It was a startup. We were under a lot of pressure from investors. My manager had his targets. The business was divided up into silos, and regardless of the merits or demerits of that structure, that was the way it was. Go figure.
Why people fail to consider the company’s goals
These days all the kool kidz are banging on about “user needs” and “customer centricity”. Fear not, I am fully on board with that! If you neglect your audience’s context and their hopes, dreams, fears in a piece of copywriting work, it will crash and burn. (More on that in #7.)
Thing is, it’s only half the story.
Ask any CEO whether they’ll do things for their customers that won’t benefit the company first and foremost. Go on. I dare you. I double dare you.
The consequences of this mistake
At best? If you ignore the commercial aspect of copywriting, people will view you and copywriting in general as an “optional extra”. It’s not. Done well, it’s a force of nature that contributes to the bottom line. (Done REALLY well, it finds that sweet spot where customer value and business value meet in the middle and are sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.…)
At worst? You’ll do work that actively harms the business by wasting resources, and you won’t be there for long.
I’m sorry not to sugarcoat this, but when you’re not playing an obvious role in the success of the organisation, you are viewed as expendable.
I say this from a position of love and compassion. I say this because it’s happened to me, and because I know others who’ve suffered this fate. I want to help you avoid it happening to you too.
What to do instead
I’m going to make a controversial point here. Most copy and design practitioners will evangelise that you should “start with the user”. OK, this can be sound advice... but only when you’re developing a new offering that has to be dictated by meeting an unmet need in the market. In those cases, yes, the customer’s goals matter most, and you have to figure those out alongside your own goals.
But a lot of the time, a piece of copywriting is not related to a new offering. The company is already set on the purpose of the work. It’s a path they’re already walking. In those cases, you have to start with the result the company is hoping to get from the copywriting, and work back from there to dovetail this with your audience’s goals.
Yes, it would be bloomin’ lovely if we could always start with the customer and dictate a roadmap from there. But that’s not how businesses work. Let’s not forget that every enterprise is started because someone, somewhere, wants to make money, and that too much empathy for the customer can drive a lack of empathy for colleagues, who also have a job to do.
TLDR, ya gotta consider both sides of the coin. Your organisation’s wants and needs matter as much as your customer’s.
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #6: Losing sight of your customer (or relying on crappy personas)
This one time…
I’d been hired as a German-speaking marketing intern for a recruitment startup. This was the job that got me hooked on copywriting as a career, the job that led me towards Copywriting Proper. But I had a LOT to learn. And to complicate matters further, I had no idea how little I knew. (Hello, unconscious incompetence!)
It was my responsibility to organise a careers fair for a startup accelerator in Munich. Planning the event, handling the logistics… and *dun dun dunnn* writing persuasive comms to drum up interest from the local universities and students and the companies based at the accelerator.
I had seen how this was done at the accelerator’s location in London, where our team’s efforts were a victory. Hurrah! I could just roll out the same process for our German audience, right? I could translate the existing comms and we’d all ride off merrily into the sunset, right? The same puns, the same tech bantz, the same gifs, the Germans would totally resonate with that too, right?
NEIN. Leider nicht.
Instead of engagement by the hundredweight, I got... crickets.
I’d assumed that Munich startups would be more similar to British startups than to the German stereotype of no-nonsense business.
ASSUMED. Because I didn’t know any better. Because I hadn’t done the research to understand the customer.
The event went well enough in the end, but only following a herculean effort on my part to plug the gaps. I realised I had to adjust my style of writing and what I was saying. The tone and the messaging.
Why people lose sight of their customer
Short answer = hard things are hard!
Long answer = realtalk:
Unless you happen to be in your own target audience, you won’t – you can’t – see eye to eye with your customer’s needs and wants and context by default. Your audience is not like you, so you don’t have the freedom to rely on x-ray vision. You have to break down the wall brick by brick. This takes a lot of elbow grease. It’s worth it, but it’ll drive you up the, erm, wall.
The consequences of this mistake
Aside from the obvious consequences (not getting the outcome you hoped for and so on), this mistake is bad news for you on an existential level.
How so? Firstly because trying to structure your messaging and churn out words for a faceless crowd (or to use the familiar marketing jargon, a “bucket” or “segment” of customers) is deeply unsatisfying work. It’s so much more satisfying to be able to call to mind a real human being. Someone you can picture listening to what you’ve got to say and nodding along with you. You know. With their face.
And secondly, if your customer research looks and sounds like “marketing” (why oh why do companies use fake photos for their personas and give them fake names like Happy Harriet), the game is lost. When you try to use this material to persuade colleagues about the robustness of your approach, all they hear is “bullshit bullshit bullshit”.
What to do instead
Load up on elbow grease and establish the fundamentals.
Who is your customer, in more than just two dimensions? What keeps this person up at night? Their hopes, dreams, fears? What’s “normal” for them in this area of life? What sort of experiences have they had in the past? And all the other layers that make them a match for you and vice versa.
We’re talking research here. Proper research. Conversations, interviews, scouring the internet for online watering holes where people are talking to each other in the wild. Not “tell us what we want to hear” surveys, or personas bodged together using stock photos of models and a few feeble bullet points with demographic facts that are at best irrelevant and at worst plucked out of someone’s nether regions without a shred of truth. And especially, especially, not NPS.
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
MISTAKE #7: Writing the copy in the same session as writing the brief
This one time…
I was writing a landing page about wedding loans for a financial services company. I got carried away and started writing the copy within the brief I was writing for myself to help me plan the work. The upshot? I hadn’t switched out of planning mode and into creative mode.
Structurally the copy all made sense, but the headline was a snorefest. I can’t recall exactly. Probably just “Wedding loans”.
Then along came the interaction designer, who suggested “Wedding loans to make your day”. BOOM! I realised my head was still stuck in the weeds from thinking through the details, and he’d come along and injected the 5% pizazz that depended on travelling into the clouds for a moment.
For the record, I want to note that clear but bland is very much the lesser of two evils. Clear is good. Clear is functional. And functional is the baseline, the table stakes. The opposite way round (too much creativity, not enough clarity) is guaranteed to miss the mark because your audience won’t have a clue what you’re on about.
Why people try to do both things at once
Are you a copywriter who sometimes project-manages, or a manager who sometimes writes copy? Solidarity! You’re part of a growing army of people who need to brief themselves to write copy that gets results. Because at long last, writing is being acknowledged as a core business skill, not a sprinkle of pixie dust.
But the challenge you’re up against here is that planning the work and doing the work feel dangerously akin to each other.
They’re not similar. Not at all. They demand different hats. You should tackle them in separate sessions to give you a chance to adjust your mindset.
Naff metaphor incoming:
Your planning hat is a deerstalker. You’re a detective, looking under rocks, asking probing questions. You’re trawling through research and other types of information to unpack the scale, scope, purpose of the work. You’re on the hunt for clarity, and you won't take no for an answer.
Your creativity hat is a beret. You’ve been given the watercolours, the brushes, the tools for the job, and set loose to MAKE something. You know the objective of the work. You’ve pulled back the curtains on your scene to paint. Now it’s time to make the subjective decisions that have to be made within the realms of your medium.
Mix up these hats at your peril.
The consequences of this mistake
Tempted to wear both hats at the same time? You’ll end up with a brief that’s all over the shop or creative output that lacks the wow factor. (Fashion hero for life though.)
What’s more, easy though it be to get caught up in the excitement and jump ahead, a half-finished plan leads to mis-directed copywriting. If you’ve only thought through half of the things you need to, in all likelihood, any copy you write will be barking up the wrong tree.
What to do instead
Take a break between the two sessions, and set yourself up before each session to trigger the mindset you need for the job.
To trigger a planning mindset, spend a few minutes recalling all the conversations and meetings that have occurred up to now in relation to the work. If you’ve got notes on ice, review them.
Then the break should be as long as it needs to be for you to reset your brain, switch into creative mode, and let the seeds of your planning begin to germinate in your subconscious.
Minimum an hour, in which you leave the building and do a specific and intentional activity to switch mode from planner to creative, like reading a chapter of fiction or looking at art or calling someone who makes you laugh.
Can you allow a day to let the cognitive wizardry of sleep work its magic? That’s a bonus.
(Don’t leave it for days on end or the plan will have dribbled out of your brain altogether!)
💡 Looking to level up? I’ve made a step-by-step copy briefing Q&A you can use for free: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6
So to recap...
A copywriting brief has the power to help you achieve what you want to achieve. And your audience too. Cowabunga, baby!
Creating an effective brief is hard, but it’s not impossible, as long as you avoid these 7 common briefing mistakes:
Not doing a brief at all
Cutting corners in your brief
Over-egging your brief
Failing to identify who might kibosh the work
Failing to consider the company’s goals as well as your customer’s
Losing sight of your customer (or relying on crappy personas)
Writing the copy in the same session as writing the brief
Go forth and conquer!
Want to have a go at putting all of this into practice? Head over to my free step-by-step copy briefing Q&A, and I’ll walk you through it: https://forms.gle/VhCKofHEVNGG6Zfw6