Home
.png)
You gave a writer a topic, a target keyword, and a rough idea of what you wanted. They sent back a draft. You opened it, read the first three paragraphs, and felt that specific kind of disappointment where you're not even sure who to blame.
Ain’t that relatable? Kind of reminds you of that middle-school relationship, doesn’t it?
So you rewrote it yourself. Or you sent back a list of notes so long it would've been faster to just write the dang thing from scratch. Or you published it anyway because the deadline was yesterday and you'd already paid for it.
Then you hired a different writer and did the whole thing over again.
Woof.
Ultimately, the writer probably wasn't the problem. The brief was.
Or more likely, there wasn't one.
A content brief is the single most leveraged thing you can create before a piece of content gets written. It's also the thing most marketing teams either skip entirely or treat like a formality.
This post covers what a content brief is, what goes in it, and why the thirty minutes you spend building one saves you three hours of editing on the back end.
A content brief is a document that tells a writer everything they need to know to produce a first draft you can publish. A brief answers the questions a good writer would ask before they started:
When a brief is done right, a competent writer can produce a first draft that needs one round of light edits. When it's missing, even a great writer is guessing, and guessing costs you revision cycles, back-and-forth emails, and drafts that fundamentally miss what you needed.
The brief is not the outline. The brief contains the outline, or at least enough direction for the writer to build one. More on that in a minute.
Three things that get confused with briefs constantly:
Not every brief looks the same, but every brief that works covers these seven things. Skip one and you'll feel it in the draft.
"A marketing manager at a 50-person B2B SaaS company who's never built a content program from scratch and is about to hire their first writer" is a target reader.
The more specific you get, the more useful your content becomes, because the writer can make real decisions about what to include and what to cut.
A specific, testable outcome. The writer knows what the finish line looks like.
Primary goes in the H1, URL, first 100 words, and meta title. Secondaries get woven into H2s and body copy naturally. List them explicitly so the writer isn't guessing at what you're optimizing for.
Oh, and you’re not telling your writer how to use the keyword. If that’s the case, go find a real content writer. They should know that already. You’re just telling them the keywords you care about.
Pull the top 3–5 results currently ranking for the primary keyword. List them in the brief. Flag what they do well and where they fall short:
That's useful direction.
You don't need to hand the writer a finished outline. That often boxes them in, and they’ll end up doing more research than you in the process of writing the piece.
But if there are sections the piece absolutely has to include (a pricing table, a specific comparison, a section that ties back to your product) put them in the brief. Otherwise you'll get a first draft that's competent and completely missing the point.
List 3–5 posts on your site the piece should link to. Writers won't know your content library (not at first, at least). They'll either skip internal links entirely or link to whatever they stumble across.
Sometimes, that’s good enough, but it’s better to just straight up tell them where to link.
If you have a style guide, link to it. If you don't, write two or three sentences that capture what you want:
That's enough for a writer to calibrate.
Here's roughly what the brief for this article looked like before I wrote it (yep, I do it for myself, too):
That's it. One page of direction and a writer knows what they're building.
One page. Fill it out before the writer starts and you'll spend your time editing for polish instead of rebuilding from scratch.
Target reader: [Who, specifically. Their role, company size, experience level, and the specific problem they're trying to solve right now.]
Outcome: [What should the reader know or be able to do after finishing this piece? Make it specific enough that you could test it.]
Primary keyword: [The one keyword this piece is optimizing for. Goes in the H1, URL, first 100 words, and meta title.]
Secondary keywords: [2–4 supporting terms to weave into H2s and body copy naturally. List them here so the writer isn't guessing.]
Reference articles: [Top 3–5 URLs currently ranking for the primary keyword. For each one, note what it does well and where it falls short. This is competitive direction.]
Required sections: [Any H2s or topics the piece must cover — pricing tables, specific comparisons, product tie-ins, non-negotiables. Leave blank if the writer has full structural freedom.]
Internal linking targets: [3–5 URLs on your site the piece should link to. Don't make the writer dig through your content library to find them.]
Voice and tone: [2–3 sentences. What does this piece sound like? What words or phrases are off-limits? If you have a style guide, link to it here instead.]
Word count: [Target range. Don’t make it too strict.]
CTA: [What should the reader do at the end? Subscribe, book a call, download something, read a related post? Be specific.]
Due date: [Self-explanatory, but you'd be surprised how often this is missing.]
Templates work when the brief type is repeatable. If you're publishing a new blog post every week targeting a similar audience with a similar structure, a template saves time without sacrificing quality.
Fill in the variables, do the SERP research, add the specific tone notes, done. Party time.
Custom briefs make sense when the content is genuinely different. That might be a new content type, new audience segment, a piece that requires a structure you've never used before.
Don't force a blog post template onto a case study brief. They're different documents for different jobs.
Most teams need one or two templates that cover 80% of their content, plus the judgment to know when to throw the template out and start from scratch.
Want a B2B freelance writer who can write briefs and use them, too? I’m your guy. Reach out, and let’s see how we can polish up your content program.
