We looked at four thousand briefs and sorted them by whether the first draft was published without being redrawn. The pattern was not length. Some of the best briefs were two sentences and some of the worst were two paragraphs.
The three questions that matter
Briefs that produced a publishable draft answered all three. Briefs that did not usually answered one and elaborated on it.
- What is being offered, concretely. Not the category. "Payroll software" is a category. "Payroll for companies of fifty to five hundred people, with the migration done for you" is an offer.
- Who it is for, narrowly. The narrower the audience, the better the copy, because a sentence written for everyone is written for nobody.
- What counts as a win. A demo booked, a stay enquired about, an email on a waitlist. This decides the form, and the form decides the page.
What to leave out
Three things showed up constantly in weak briefs and never helped.
Layout instructions. "Hero on the left, three columns underneath" describes a page you have already seen. Describe the offer and let the direction handle the arrangement, then move sections in the layout list if you disagree.
Adjective stacks. "Modern, clean, professional, trustworthy" narrows nothing. Every one of the twenty-six directions claims all four. "Quiet, no exclamation marks" narrows a great deal.
Everything you sell. A landing page with four offers converts worse than the same page with one. If you have four, that is four pages.
The best brief we have on record
A page for our eleven-room house on Cap Ferrat. Goal: direct enquiries for autumn instead of OTA bookings. Quiet, no exclamation marks. Open March to November, two-night minimum.
Thirty-four words. It carries the offer, the audience, the goal, the register, and two constraints that end up as real copy on the page. The first draft went live with one edit.
A note on tone
Tone instructions work better as prohibitions than as aspirations. "Confident" is hard to act on. "No exclamation marks, no questions in the headline, no words like unlock" is easy to act on and produces the confidence you were asking for anyway.