Campaign brief template for Healthcare

The campaign brief with four fields a clinic, provider or health product needs: which service line this is for, who it speaks to, exactly which claims it intends to make, and the reference of the clinical review that cleared them.

Everything else is the general brief, unchanged. One outcome, one metric, one message, one approver by name, and a definition of done with a date in it.

Write it before anything is designed, and before the targeting is sketched. In health advertising the audience is constrained by policy and the claims are constrained by evidence, so a brief that settles both first is the only one that survives contact with a review.

Use it again whenever a service changes what it offers, a practitioner joins or leaves, or a platform changes what it permits. Any of the three can make a cleared claim wrong, and the brief is where the claims are listed in one place.

Health advertising is constrained twice, and both constraints belong at the top of the brief rather than in a review at the end.

The first is what may be said. Every outcome, timeframe, comparison or credential the campaign intends to use is a claim, and each one has to be true of this service and defensible by somebody qualified to defend it. The claims field asks for that list in plain words, and the list is what goes to clinical review. Reviewing a list takes an hour. Reviewing a finished campaign takes a round of rework with the media already booked.

The second is who may be reached. The audience a provider would most like to build is defined by a condition, and condition-based targeting is what platform policy removes. So the audience field is written inside what is actually permitted — geography, life stage, the ordinary signals — and the work of reaching the right person moves into the creative, where it is allowed to live.

The service line field sets the claims, the capacity and the definition of a result. Two services in one brief produce an average that describes neither, and they almost always have different review histories as well.

The audience type field is the one that most often changes a brief in a useful way. A patient, a carer, a referring practitioner and an employer are four different readers with four different questions. A carer wants to know what the process will be like for somebody else. A referring practitioner wants to know what happens to a patient they send and how quickly they hear back. An employer wants to know about cohorts and cost.

Writing the reader down changes the message, the proof and the landing page. Leaving it as everyone produces work aimed at a patient by default, and quietly gives up on the referral channel that is often the cheapest source of the right appointments.

There is a temptation to brief a vague claim in order to avoid a difficult review conversation. It produces campaigns that say nothing, and it means the strongest true thing about the service is never written down anywhere.

Brief the claim you actually want to make. Where review refuses it or narrows it, record that in the notes with the date and the reviewer. Those recorded answers accumulate into the most practical guide a provider's marketing team can have: what this service may say, in what words, and why the obvious phrasing was refused.

Because the targeting cannot be precise, the message has to be. This is the field that carries the weight in a health brief, and the test is the same as everywhere else: one sentence, which a person could repeat to somebody else without the ad in front of them.

What works here is usually a plain statement about the process rather than about the outcome — how long the wait is, whether a referral is needed, what the first appointment involves, what it costs. Process claims are checkable, they are usually cleared without difficulty, and they answer the question that is actually stopping somebody from booking. Outcome claims are what most briefs reach for first and what most reviews reduce to nothing.

A clinic can be full, and a brief that does not say what capacity stands behind it can promise appointments that do not exist.

Write the position into the brief — weeks to the next available appointment, or slots a week — with the date it was read. Then treat it as a condition. A service line with a six-week wait does not need a campaign; it needs the budget moved to one that can see people, and the brief is the cheapest place to make that decision.

The opposite case is worth briefing too. A service with spare capacity is worth a higher cost per attended appointment than a busy one, because the marginal appointment is genuinely worth more. Say so in the outcome rather than holding every service to the same number.

An enquiry, a booked appointment, an attended appointment and a referral are four different events, and the gap between the first and the third is where most health advertising quietly fails.

Brief against attendance where the practice management system records it, and use the system's own words so the brief and the report can be read side by side. A campaign judged on enquiries will fund whatever produces enquiries, which is frequently not what fills a clinic.

The baseline and target fields ship blank for the same reason. The rate at which an enquiry becomes an attendance depends on your reception process, your waiting times and your reminders as much as on your advertising, and it varies by service line more than any published figure can capture.

The definition of done names a date, a number and a person: far enough after the flight that appointments have had time to happen, the primary metric against the baseline, and whoever writes it up.

Keep closed briefs with their review references attached. Over a year they become a record of what each service has been allowed to say, what it cost to fill, and which claims were narrowed — which is worth more than any single campaign in the pile.