How to Outline Quality Standards in a Content Brief in 4 Steps

Content briefs help ensure quality by detailing the goals, requirements, and strategy of a piece of content. 

A good content brief serves as a guide for writers, helping them stay on target and deliver content that meets your expectations. It also helps reduce the time spent on revisions and rewrites. 

A well-constructed content brief is the best way to outline your quality standards clearly. Learn how to outline quality standards in this guide.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

1. Define quality standard criteria and metrics (for example readability scores) so that they’re clear to writers at the beginning of the project.
2. Align your quality standards with the content marketing strategy (for example creating content that will also perform well in social media posts).
3. Create a consistent content brief template that clearly outlines the elements a writer should include in the project.
4. Be specific and concise to keep expectations clear and reduce editing in the long term.

Then, streamline your editing process with a suite of best-in-class tools for marketers, publishers, and editors, with the Originality.ai Predictive SEO Tool, AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Grammar Checker.

Step 1: Define Quality Standard Criteria and Metrics

Before you can use a content brief to express how to meet standards, you must clearly define them. What does quality mean for your business and your audience?

Know what you are asking your content creators to achieve by breaking down quality standards into content-specific elements and how they will be measured. 

For instance, if a standard is readability, you may measure it on the Flesch Reading Ease score. If another criterion is consistency of style, you’ll need to have a specific style guide to reference.

In other words, ensure you know which resources and references to share before asking a writer to meet specific standards. The more a content writer understands the expectations, the closer they can align their writing with them.

Step 2: Align Quality Standards With Content Marketing Strategy

Knowing the goal of a piece of content is integral for content creators. So, before designing your content brief template, review your strategy and goals. Define the different ways a piece of content can be successful.

For instance, how does social media fit into your content strategy, and how can social content help reach your overall goals? 

If a part of the strategy was to promote the content on social media, you could include a requirement in the content brief to prepare a caption that would accompany the piece and make it easier to share on other marketing channels.

Reviewing these connections before creating your template gives you a clear idea of how to communicate them with the writer when sharing the goals of an assignment.

Step 3: Develop a Consistent Content Brief Template

Once you have defined your quality standards, broken them down into content-related criteria, and reviewed them alongside your content strategy, it’s time to create a template. A good content brief template is designed for use with any content marketing project.

Whether it’s a blog article, social media post, landing page, product description, or anything else, using the same content brief ensures consistency and quality across all platforms. 

Common elements to include in a content brief template include:

• Project title
• Meta description
• Word count range
• Is the use of AI tools allowed?
• Deadline, timeline and workflow
• Purpose, goal, connection to strategy
• Target audience
• Readability and reading level
• Customer journey stage 
• Search intent
• Key message
• Call to action
• Tone and voice
• Point-of-view
• Style
• Structure or formatting
• Keywords and links
• Competitor information
• Image guidelines
• Stakeholders
• Background information
• Resources (style guide, brand voice examples, image libraries, templates, etc.)

If the writer will be revising existing content, include any previous versions, evaluations and recommendations. Include anything that will help the writer understand exactly what you are looking for and want to achieve. 

Step 4: Be Specific and Concise

The list of elements to include is lengthy. Keep in mind that when you create a brief, you will tailor it to your needs. So, you might not need all of those elements. 

Include what is most relevant to your content strategy and what will give your content creators the best chance of writing content that hits the mark. 

When we create content for our audiences, we focus on giving helpful, relevant information that is easy to understand and consume. The same goes for content briefs. Give the writer as much information as they need to be successful, and not too much to feel overwhelmed.

The more concise and specific you are, the easier it will be for the content writer to understand your needs and deliver something that aligns with your brand and quality standards. 

Final Thoughts: How Content Briefs Serve Quality Standards

Together, all the details of a content brief add up to a set of guidelines for a writer to create content that is accurate, consistent, relevant, and adherent to brand and style standards. 

The brief is a communication tool that helps a team center on the same expectations and reach the same goals — with fewer rounds of revision and rewriting.

When used regularly, content briefs allow your team to efficiently create high-quality content that aligns with your marketing goals and delivers on-target messaging to your audience.

Get industry-leading content quality tools with Originality.ai’s Predictive SEO Tool, AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Grammar Checker.

Then, learn more content marketing best practices in our guides:

• What Is a Content Marketing Funnel?
• 4 Tips for Repurposing Content Across the Content Marketing Funnel
• How to Create a Content Calendar in 11 Steps
• What Is Topical Authority?