You’ve finally gotten stakeholders to use your project request form instead of firing off emails. Victory! But now you’re facing a new problem: the briefs they’re submitting are barely better than those chaotic email requests.
“Need a brochure for the trade show. Make it look professional. Due next Friday.”
You’re getting the basics—what, when, and who—but missing the strategic insights that turn good creative work into great results.
During a roundtable with RoboHead power users, one marketing leader captured the challenge perfectly when asking: “How are you getting good creative briefs when you are asking such a variety of people for requests?”
The answer lies in empowering your stakeholders with the right framework, tools, and support. Here’s how the most successful teams are doing it.
The Quality Gap
Before diving into solutions, let’s acknowledge what you’re up against. Even experienced marketers often struggle with briefs, and the challenge multiplies when requests come from:
- Business users outside of marketing who don’t think strategically about messaging
- Junior team members assigned to “fill out the form” but lacking project context
- Senior stakeholders who know what they want but can’t articulate the strategic why
The result? Briefs that cover logistics but miss the insights that fuel breakthrough creative work.
Strategy 1: Design Your Form to Guide Strategic Thinking
The most successful teams don’t just collect information—they guide stakeholders toward better thinking. Here’s how:
Use Progressive Disclosure
Start with basic questions, then dive deeper based on project type. For example:
- All projects: Audience, timeline, budget
- Content projects: Add tone, key messages, success metrics
- Campaign projects: Add competitive landscape, brand positioning, and behavioral goals
Ask “Why” Before “What”
Structure your form to capture strategy before tactics:
- What problem are we solving for our audience?
- What should they think, feel, or do differently after engaging with this?
- What makes our approach different from competitors?
- What success looks like beyond delivery
Strategy 2: Create Business Liaisons Who Dig for Insights
The most successful teams don’t rely on stakeholders to magically become better brief writers. Instead, they position strategic thinkers as interpreters between stakeholders and creative teams.
As one expert shared, they rely on business liaisons to “look for that juicy insight that our teams can act on and latch onto. They’re the ones that we count on to find the fertile ground for creativity.”
These liaisons focus on uncovering:
- The real differentiator that will set the message apart
- Audience insights beyond basic demographics
- Success stories from similar past initiatives
- Competitive intelligence about what’s working in the market
This approach recognizes that “often our stakeholders just don’t think that way. They can tell you the audience, budget, when they need it, maybe the specs for the media plan, but that art of finding the differentiator—we rely on our marketing business liaison.”
Strategy 3: Provide Brief-Writing Training
Don’t assume people know how to write effective briefs. The skills gap is real, even among marketing professionals.
Focus on Strategic Questions
Train stakeholders to think beyond logistics by asking:
- What change are we trying to create?
- What barriers prevent our audience from taking action?
- What proof points support our claims?
- How will we measure success?
Use Templates by Project Type
Create brief templates that prompt for project-specific insights:
- Web projects: User journey, conversion goals, technical requirements
- Content campaigns: Editorial calendar, distribution strategy, engagement targets
- Event materials: Audience journey, key takeaways, follow-up strategy
Share Success Stories
Show stakeholders examples of how better briefs led to better outcomes. Make the connection between strategic input and creative results tangible.
Strategy 4: Use Visual Examples to Communicate Preferences
Sometimes the best way to communicate what you want is to show what you don’t want. RoboHead’s file markup feature allows stakeholders to upload reference materials—like last year’s brochure, a competitor’s campaign, or industry examples—and annotate directly on the files.
Start with Existing Examples
Encourage stakeholders to upload similar past projects and use markup to indicate:
- What worked well: “Love this headline approach—direct and benefit-focused”
- What to avoid: “This section feels too corporate—need more conversational tone”
- What’s missing: “Needed stronger call-to-action here”
- Style preferences: “This color palette felt too conservative for our audience”
Make Competitive Analysis Visual
Have stakeholders markup competitor materials to show:
- Elements they want to emulate or avoid
- Gaps in the competitive landscape they want to exploit
- Positioning opportunities they’ve identified
Capture Subjective Feedback Objectively
Instead of vague direction like “make it pop” or “needs more personality,” stakeholders can point to specific visual elements and explain their reasoning. This transforms subjective preferences into actionable creative direction.
The result? Creative teams spend less time guessing what stakeholders mean and more time delivering work that hits the mark on the first try.
Strategy 5: Make the Business Case for Better Briefs
Help stakeholders understand that spending time on better briefs isn’t extra work—it’s an investment in better outcomes and faster turnarounds.
Share metrics that demonstrate how better briefs lead to:
- Fewer revision rounds because creative work hits the mark initially
- Faster approvals because stakeholders see their vision reflected
- Better performance because strategy drives creative decisions
- More strategic creative work that moves business goals forward
Making It Sustainable
The most successful teams treat brief quality as an ongoing capability, not a one-time fix. They:
- Regularly update forms based on learnings
- Celebrate examples of briefs that led to great work
- Make brief writing a skill that’s developed and recognized
- Position strategic thinking as everyone’s responsibility, not just marketing’s job
Remember: your stakeholders want to provide good input—they often just don’t know how. By giving them the framework, support, and tools they need, you transform brief writing from a frustrating bottleneck into a strategic advantage.
Start by auditing your current brief quality, then pick one element—better forms, liaison support, or stakeholder training—to improve first. Small improvements in brief quality compound into dramatically better creative outcomes.
