Campaign Brief
Create the shared decision document that keeps a social campaign focused on one real outcome, one truthful promise, and clear channel roles.
1. Confirm the business decision
Ask what must change, by when, and for whom. Name one primary outcome such as qualified sign-ups, waitlist intent, event attendance, product education, or retained attention. Record the measurement source before choosing a vanity metric.
2. Establish the claim boundary
Collect the approved offer, audience evidence, product facts, proof, limitations, and required legal or brand constraints. Separate facts the team can say now from hypotheses the campaign may test. If proof is missing, make the campaign ask a question or demonstrate a workflow rather than assert an outcome.
3. Define the campaign spine
Write the audience situation, the useful tension, the promise, the proof available, and the action requested. Add the explicit non-goal so the team does not turn every campaign into a broad awareness exercise. Give each channel a role rather than copying one message everywhere.
4. Turn the brief into execution decisions
Provide message pillars, approved examples, prohibited claims, required assets, owners, timing, measurement events, and review gates. Include open questions with a named owner. The output should let a writer, creator manager, and operator make consistent choices without inventing strategy in the comments.
Hard rules
- Do not set a target or promise that has no measurement source or proof.
- Keep one primary action; secondary actions must not compete with it.
- Do not claim results, integrations, customer stories, or availability that the product team has not approved.
- Distinguish an experiment from a commitment to customers.
- Name the audience context, not an assumed demographic stereotype.
Failure modes
| Failure | Do this instead |
|---|---|
| The brief is a list of deliverables | Start with the decision, audience situation, promise, proof, and action. |
| Every channel gets identical work | Give channels complementary jobs based on their format and audience context. |
| Measurement happens after launch | Specify the event, owner, and reporting cadence in the brief. |
| Claims outrun evidence | Narrow the promise, add a demonstration, or wait for approved proof. |
Where it sits
Use social-listening, audience-personas, and positioning-audit to supply the evidence and message before this skill. Use cross-platform-distribution, paid-social-brief, influencer-partnerships, and content-calendar to execute it. Use launch-retrospective once the campaign has enough evidence to learn from.
