how to write a marketing brief when you're the whole team

search how to write a marketing brief and page one is written for agencies and marketing teams: a client overview, campaign objectives, budget, deliverables, stakeholders to consult. useful if you have a team to brief. most founders don't. they are the team, and the brief is for themselves.

this piece is the version for one person: what a marketing brief is for when nobody else will read it, the sections that matter, how to write the hardest one, and what underway now does to write it for you from your own site and your own episodes.

what a marketing brief is for when you're the whole team

an agency brief exists to hand work to someone else. a founder's brief exists to stop you saying something slightly different every time you write a post, a landing page or an ad. it is the one page every other piece of marketing agrees with. without it, your homepage says one thing, your posts say another, and nobody remembers either.

it also shows you what you have not decided. if you cannot write who it is for in a sentence, no amount of posting will fix that.

how to write a marketing brief in nine sections

• in one line: what it is, said so a stranger follows. concrete nouns, no adjectives doing the work.
• what it is: two to four sentences on how it actually works.
• who it's for: one to three groups, each with why they would care.
• the problem it solves, in the buyer's words rather than yours.
• what they do instead today: the tools, the services and the manual way.
• who else they look at: real competitors, each with how you differ.
• where you stand apart: two or three sentences, drawn from what is true, not what sounds good.
• things to say: three to five sentences you would actually say out loud.
• how you sound: the words you use, the ones you never would, and a few lines you really said.

add a last list of what you could not answer. those gaps are often the most useful part.

the section most briefs get wrong: how you sound

most brand voice advice asks you to pick three adjectives. friendly, bold, honest. every company picks the same three, and nothing you write afterwards sounds any more like you.

the better source is how you already talk. record yourself explaining what you're building to a friend, or read back a few of your own unedited videos, and write down what you hear: the phrases you repeat, how you open, what you never say. then copy two or three lines word for word. a real sentence you said does more to keep your marketing in your voice than any list of adjectives.

what underway does now

promote has a fifth choice, your marketing brief. it is written for you, on every plan, and it is ready a few minutes after you first open promote.

• it reads your website: the homepage, the pages it links for features, pricing and how it works, and the pages in its sitemap.
• with github connected, it reads the titles of what you merged, so it knows what you actually built, not only what the site says.
• it searches for what your buyers use instead, and lists only what it found, each with its address and how you differ.
• how you sound is written from your own episodes. the lines under in your words are checked against what you said, and any line you did not say word for word is left out.
• every section has correct this. a section you correct keeps your words when the brief is written again, which it is each month.
• what it couldn't tell lists the gaps, things your site and episodes do not say yet.

it lives in promote, the shop window beside the diary, and it never reaches your interviews. the questions you are asked on camera come from your day, not from a positioning statement, because marketing language in the interview is how a diary turns into a pitch.

the same brief, with the same corrections, is on the phone under promote.

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