Of the five keys to developing great B2B creative, striving to generate deep prospect insights and messaging tops the list.

But you also need to clearly convey that messaging and your specific business and marketing objectives to the agency creative team. And that takes a well-organized, concise creative brief.

Bottom line, a well-written brief saves you time and money when working with an ad agency and greatly increases your chances of success.

Conversely, a hastily written brief almost guarantees that you will end up sending the creative team back for revision after revision.

So what makes for a complete brief? There is no one right answer. But in my mind, I want to know the following:

Who are we talking to?
Give me a complete profile of the prospect or customer. I want to know demographics and psychographics and firmagraphics, primary research and secondary research. Details, details, details.

Ideally, I’d like all of that translated into a persona – a narrative that has a hypothetical prospect telling me about his or her needs, hopes, fears and dreams in the first person. Personas are powerful ways for everyone involved to share a definitive picture of the prospect.

What do we want to say?
Last week, I laid out the critical importance of completing positioning and messaging before any creative work is begun.

Yet, so many creative briefs I’ve seen over the years contain a key message that goes something like “Acme Company is the one-stop shop for all your blank needs. Oh, and we’re cheaper too.” You want to know why so many B2B ads lack differentiation. That’s why.

When you don’t include well-researched, well-conceived messaging in your brief , you force your creative team to come up with messaging at the same time they are coming up with creative concepts. So if you don’t agree with their take on the messaging, you’ll be throwing out both the messaging and the concepts.

Who is our competition?
Yes, tell me whom your sales team finds themselves competing against every day. But make sure your research digs into this as well. I want to know the full set of direct and indirect competitors in your prospects’ minds.

Just like Coke views its competitors as not just Pepsi but also milk, orange juice, beer, water and any possible beverage, you too need to think more broadly about what stands between you and a sale.

What specifically do we have to do right now? Next week? Next month? Next year?
In the brief, share your full marketing plans with the media buy, direct response strategy, trade show plans, collateral needs, etc.

This is nothing more frustrating for everyone involved when a creative concept is approved that has been designed primarily for online banner units and suddenly the media team pipes up that “oh, most of our buy is skyscrapers.”

Also, try and think ahead to what you might want to do down the road. Sharing this with the creative team in the brief can do wonders in them coming up with ideas that will take best advantage of all your planned channels.

Having been on both sides of the client/agency relationship, I can tell you that if your brief is not up to snuff, everything that goes wrong from that point forward is on you. Yes. It’s that important.

I’ve spent five minutes trying to find a nice way to say this.

But I think our subject demands candor. So here goes.

Great creative in B2B marketing is simply not the norm.

Believe it or not, in my experience, few in our industry will even bother argue this notion.

Now, some will say that innovative B2B creative:

• Is not needed in B2B as long as the targeting is correct and the offer is strong
• Is actually counterproductive because B2B buyers are “turned off by it” and “just want facts”

This is simply total bunk.

The need to grab a prospect’s attention, to convey value propositions quickly, has never been more critical in a time where marketers are being held accountable for proving strong ROI.

Engaging, relevant creative concepts are critical to helping us use that fraction of a second we have to command attention so that our offer gets noticed and acted upon.

We know this in direct response and Internet marketing because we can test it. And have.

The accepted rule that creative contributes 30% of a campaign’s success is too often viewed as proof it is not very important.

In fact, improving this factor represents a huge opportunity to lift performance when the difference between break-even and success is often moving from a .7% response rate to .8%.

So if you accept the premise that strong B2B creative will drive better response rates and thus improve ROI, then the next question is why it is so rare and what you can do to get better creative from your agency or in-house team.

Over sixteen years split between client and agency jobs in both creative and strategic roles, I’ve identified five keys to producing consistently great B2B creative:

1. Get your prospect insights and messaging down first
2. Develop a solid brief
3. Hire the right people
4. Create a small, controlled oversight team
5. Teach this team how to judge creative

Over the next five weeks, I’ll dig into each of these keys. Stay tuned.