Here's How To Communicate Content Requirements to Your Writing Team
Co-Founder / CMO
Often, when a final content draft lands in your inbox, it’s abundantly clear: your writers missed the mark entirely. Again.
And it’s not their fault!
You know the disconnects are happening, but avoiding the harsh reality is easier than confronting it head-on. You may start questioning your own communication abilities. Or convince yourself the misalignment is just the cost of working with writers who "don't get it."
But deep down, you recognize the truth: there's a fundamental breakdown in how you convey content requirements to your team. One that stalls productivity sinks quality, and leaves you endlessly chasing revisions and rework.
It's a maddening cycle that plagues content operations of all sizes and maturity levels. But you don't have to resign yourself to it.
Table of Contents
Where does the issue come from?
For most brands, this disconnect comes from a few core issues:
Lack of context and strategic framing
Oh wow, how I feel about the lack of context in some creative briefs. To be totally honest, it's one of the most maddening things as a writer.
You'll get this brief that's just a bulleted list of topics like:
- Top 5 productivity tips for remote workers
- Best project management tools in 2023
- How to build a virtual team culture
...and that's it. There is no background on why this piece is being created, what the core messaging should be, who the target audience is, and what its needs/pain points are—just a bland rundown of sections to cover.
You're left trying to stitch it all together based on your best guesses about the brand's goals and priorities.
And look, writers shouldn't need to be mind readers! We're here to creatively execute a defined strategy, not reverse engineer it from scratch.
The best briefs take the time to reflect:
- The core user persona(s) this content is targeting
- Their biggest challenges/pain points we're aiming to address
- The key messaging hierarchies and value props to prioritize
- How this piece fits into the overall marketing/sales funnel
With that kind of strategic groundwork laid, the writer can approach the piece with a clear understanding of the intent and desired outcome. We're not just blindly covering topics but purposefully crafting content tailored to real user needs.
Ambiguous, subjective direction
Familiar with "make it engaging" or "keep the tone conversational."?
As a writer, I want to be engaging and conversational—that's kind of my whole job. However, those subjective directions are meaningless without clearly defined guidelines and examples to back them up.
Because engaging and conversational means radically different things to different people based on their communication styles and preferences.
To you, an "engaging" blog intro might consist of short, punchy sentences packed with stats and bold claims that immediately hook the reader. But to me, an engaging opener could be a longer narrative anecdote designed to emotionally invest the audience before getting to the meat of the topic.
See the disconnect?
We both aim for the same vague target of "engaging," but based on our individual interpretations, we take entirely different approaches to getting there.
The same goes for something like "keep it conversational."
One writer's idea of conversational may be super casual, slangy. Another's could be more upbeat and breezy, but still adhering to proper grammar and avoiding cringey tonal missteps.
Without any defined boundaries or examples to reference, those requests are basically meaningless from a creative execution standpoint. It just becomes a guessing game of trying to mind-meld with the stakeholder's vision.
This, at best, leads to a time-consuming revision cycle as the writer misses the mark on the first few tries. At worst, it means subpar, misaligned content that doesn't resonate with the intended strategy at all.
That's why I always advocate for creative briefs that go beyond those subjective generalities and get granular with guidelines around:
- Defining target persona(s) and their preferred communication styles
- Establishing clear messaging hierarchies and narrative priorities
- Providing detailed examples of "on-brand" and "off-brand" executions
- Outlining specific standards for tone, formatting, structure, and more
With that level of explicit direction in the brief, writers aren't left guessing at the intent.
Overlooking technical optimization
No matter how brilliant the creative concept or how flawlessly the messaging aligns with your goals, it's all for nothing if your audience can't easily discover and engage with the content in the first place.
That's why I'm such a stickler for briefs that incorporate SEO requirements as foundational elements from day one, alongside strategic positioning and narrative framing.
It doesn't have to be overly complicated, either. Just clear direction around:
- Target keywords and priority terms to integrate naturally
- Desired content structure (intro, sections, etc.) for visibility
- On-page formatting and optimization best practices to follow
- Metadata, schema, and other technical needs
Sure, it's a little bit more work on the briefing side. But it prevents so many headaches and ensures your brilliant creative is actually set up to succeed where it matters most – getting found by your target audience.
Fragmented, one-off briefs
Content briefing often resembles a constant game of roulette, where you never know what you’ll get.
You might receive a relatively detailed brief for one piece that provides some solid strategic direction and creative framing. But then the very next assignment is just a hastily scribbled bullet point list of topics to hit, with zero context or guiding vision.
And the annoying part is that there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no established template or consistent workflow for how these briefs are assembled and what they should cover.
As you can imagine, it is incredibly difficult to establish any sense of efficient momentum or sustainable quality standards. You have to start from square one and reverse-engineer the strategic requirements with every single brief.
On the other hand, the smartest teams I've worked with have invested in templatizing and documenting their briefing processes to enforce consistency at scale. They have clearly defined sections and elements that should be covered in every single brief.
How to better communicate content requirements through briefs
The solution is simple. You just need briefs built on the following:
- Clear user personas that clarify the "why" behind every initiative
- Clearly defined sections, examples, and messaging hierarchies
- Awareness of the stage of the funnel
- Templatized structures and replicable workflows to enforce consistency
This may sound like overkill, but it's actually the opposite - an efficient framework for eliminating guesswork. Rather than leaving your writers to fend for themselves, you give them the perfect blueprint.
And you don't have to start from scratch each time. With a tool like Yahini, you can generate these briefs through content strategist-powered brief templates.
Simply input your URL and priority elements like competitors, target audience, and a few topics that define your product. Yahini gives you a list of high-priority topic clusters and keywords for each stage of the funnel and automatically maps that guidance to proven content frameworks and best practices, generating a complete, customized brief.
But if you want to take the process from zero, here’s how to do it:
Know who your target personas are and clarify the “why” behind everything
We must remember that we are not just creating words on a page. Our target audiences aren't faceless search volume metrics; they're people with specific needs, challenges, communication preferences, and reasons for seeking out our content in the first place.
As such, you need an intimate, empathetic understanding of the human dimensions that shape their worldview and buying mindsets.
- What are their biggest frustrations, fears, or sources of skepticism around your product/industry?
- What are their goals and aspirations that your content can help map a path toward?
- How do they prefer to receive and process information? Are they more logical and data-driven, or do emotional narratives and storytelling better capture their attention?
Having those deeper insights into your personas baked into the brief gives writers the context required to craft content that feels tailor-made for each specific audience segment.
And, of course, that persona work should extend to clarifying the fundamental "why" behind each piece of content and how it maps to your overall marketing strategy.
- Are we aiming to drive early awareness and educate cold audiences?
- To nurture warm leads toward conversion?
- To engage and delight existing customers to reduce churn?
Explicitly defining those goals and tying them back to your audience's reality allows writers to reverse-engineer the proper messaging hierarchies, content angles, and narrative priorities to inspire the desired actions.
Define sections, examples, and messaging hierarchies
Even with that strategic context and persona grounding, briefs often lack the depth and specificity around creative execution.
You can have a crystal-clear "why" defined, but if you don't clearly articulate the "what" and "how," your writers are still left guessing.
That's where providing explicit examples, section guidelines, and defined messaging hierarchies becomes so valuable. Rather than leaving it up to interpretation, you're giving your writers a tangible framework to follow.
For example, let's say you're briefing out an article comparing your product's features to a key competitor's offering.
You could just list out the sections to cover:
- Intro
- Overview of each product
- Head-to-head comparison
- Unique strengths and differentiators
- Pricing breakdown
- Conclusion
You could also go a step further and define the specific angle, flow, and messaging priorities for each section.
The intro should establish the audience's core needs, the overview sections follow a consistent template for clarity, and the head-to-head section should lead with your product's most persuasive value props.
Pair that with concrete examples of what you consider on-brand versus off-brand content, and your writers have a clear blueprint for nailing the execution every time - no guesswork required.
Be aware of the stage of the funnel
Speaking of delivering on objectives, one of the most important things to clarify in any creative brief is what specific funnel stage you're targeting with the content.
As we know, people in the awareness phase have vastly different content needs and consumption preferences than people actively evaluating solutions or preparing to purchase.
You could use the same target keyword or topic cluster. Still, the execution should look radically different depending on whether you aim for top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, or bottom-of-funnel audiences. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn't cut it if you want your content to move people through the buyer's journey.
For **TOFU/awareness **content, writers need clear guidance on prioritizing educational, audience-focused narratives that establish authority and credibility. We're not pushing products or selling anything just yet; we're simply aiming to capture attention and mindshare around key problems and topics.
MOFU/evaluation stage briefs should pivot toward product-centric positioning and messaging tailored to nurturing purchase intent. Dive into features and capabilities, but frame them around addressing the core needs and priorities you've established for your personas. This is where you want to start making your case.
Then, BOFU/conversion briefs should be focused on bottom-line selling. Highlight key differentiators, overcome objections, and provide social proof and evidence to assuage skepticism. Don't hold back on pushing for the desired conversion action, whether a purchase, demo request or something else.
Use templates and replicable workflows
At the end of the day, effectively communicating your strategic vision to writers through creative briefs is only possible if you have replicable processes and content brief templates in place.
Trying to reinvent the wheel and build one-off briefs from scratch for each new project is a recipe for inefficiency, misalignment, and plenty of headaches.
The smartest content teams have taken the time to document their briefing workflows and establish a core set of customizable templates that can be quickly tailored for any new initiative. That way, there's a proven framework and consistent set of elements to work from, rather than guessing what a brief should include.
A tool like Yahini has built-in template varieties for different types of briefs - whether it's a BOFU product comparison, MOFU use case exploration, or TOFU thought leadership piece. Having those purpose-built blueprints as a starting point saves time and guesswork.
From there, it's just a matter of customizing the brief template with your specific strategic requirements, target personas, brand guidelines, and other unique considerations. But the heavy structural lifting has already been done for you in an efficient, replicable way.
The same applies to templatizing your briefing processes and approval workflows. You may have a few core stakeholders who need to review and sign off on each new brief before it gets executed.
Or you follow a specific cadence of draft > feedback > revision cycles. Whatever your unique processes entail, they should be documented and built into reusable templates.
That way, there's no ambiguity around roles, responsibilities, and procedural handoffs, and everyone understands their part in the well-oiled briefing machine.
Follow a standardized approach to content brief creation for better communication
And that’s a wrap! The key to better communicating with your writers and getting exactly the type of content you’re looking for is how you create your briefs.
Yahini offers you the strategic advice you need to create a content strategy from the ground up. Its AI has been trained by seasoned content strategists, providing you with expert-level content briefs right at your fingertips.
Ditch the generic outlines! Sign up now.