If you want your delivered content to consistently match the ideas in your head, you’re going to want to make friends with the creative brief. Think of the creative brief as the recipe for your project, containing all the ingredients freelancers need to include to craft the most delicious results. And you can create one right inside the platform for easy use with all your orders. This video shows you how.

The creative brief is golden for outlining exactly what you want in your content. That way the content that gets delivered matches the ideas in your head.

Here's how to make one:

1.        Head to the left-hand menu
2.        Go to Streamline Workflow
3.        Then to Asset Library 
4.        Click the zero (0) above Creative Briefs
5.        Click Create New Brief

Then select your brief type, either writers or designers, and begin by naming your brief. Review the options and check the boxes of things included in your project. 

While it may take a bit of time to craft a detailed brief the first time around, you can save this template for the future and save a ton of time later on. 

So what are some of the options? Let's take a tour. Let's say I was setting up a creative brief for a brand new company that made pickle-flavored popcorn. 

Here's how I'd fill out the brief:

•        In business description, I'd make sure that I'd say that we're new to the game and that our goal was to hit $1 million in sales in our first year. Pretty ambitious. 
•        Next, we're going to be adding demographics, which gives talent a good idea of the type of language and style to use. 
•        The objective gives details on what I want this content to do. This order is for a blog post, so it's meant to inform and entertain. Website content is typically designed to drive sales and social media content is used to grab attention or even to just amuse us. 

Here are some additional details: 

•        Tone of writing: Let's go casual informal
•        Style elements: We want fun copy with silly puns, alliteration and rhyming words
•        Narrative voice: Let's do second person 
•        Formatting options: We're big fans of bullet points and subheads. I mean, who isn't?
•        Samples: Let's include a link to one of our favorite blogs to show the writer what we like Things to mention: Facts about pickles
•        Things to avoid: Politics, religion, mentions of cucumbers. Yeah, that's right. No cucumbers 
•        Sourcing requirements: Links to any outside sources unless they’re our competitors

Once my brief contains everything that I want, I want to make sure that I hit Save. This saves my brief for quick use for future orders. 

Now for some pro tips:

•        Many of the creative brief options let you add your own categories if you don't see exactly what you want. 

•        Second person is the tops for narrative voice. The word “you” engages readers and helps them connect.

•        Bullet points and numbered lists with short paragraphs are tops for formatting. We're talking paragraphs of no more than three lines each.