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Confident Briefing on Upwork

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I teach a lot of my clients how to use freelance platform marketplaces as a way to find good marketing support contractors.

Upwork is a popular platform. But getting the best out of it depends on one very important skill – briefing.

How to brief a marketing job

A well-briefed job produces the desired output on time and on budget. But many marketers will tell you that this is not what they’ve personally experienced – whether with an agency, with freelancers or sub-contractors.  Let’s set about understanding the skill and the process of making a robust brief and project managing a job to a successful outcome.

The brief parameters

Start by writing down what you want the job to achieve, a goal if you like.

  • We need a new design for….
  • Troubleshoot this issue….
  • Copywrite using these keywords….
  • Sell this product….

You get the idea.

Next go to the platform of your choice, I’ll use Upwork for now, and find out what the template briefing pages ask you to provide.

Write on a document each of the questions they ask. Use these to understand how the platform will use your information to brief the applicants. If they ask you to set an hourly rate or budget this means it will exclude experts who don’t fit your parameters.  Which skills are you listing as necessary? If you ask for questions to be answers, what do you want to learn from those questions – are you using them to screen in or screen out applicants?

You need to set guidance for what success looks like for your project.

The key to a successful Upwork hire

Get the expert to step slowly though the early stages of your selection.

What do I mean by that? Instead of diving into the job and assuming that the work track record examples are sufficient proof of expertise, create a carefully thought-through path whereby you gauge their skill, their communications, their responsiveness and align that with your personal project and its needs.

Here’s an example. I have a website UX redesign project – what are the stages or milestones? How can I find out who has deep expertise compared to shallow experience?  The key is to ask good questions.

These are actual questions set for an SEO brief

  • Have you drastically increased traffic for a website?
  • Can you briefly explain how will you help us achieve the expected outcome?

I recommended changing these to

  • How good or bad is our website SEO?
  • How will you research key words?

They are very simple questions – and the key is that you should know the answers already… In this way you can see if the responder is trying to bamboozle you or gives actual detail of their work process. You want the latter.

The answers will allow you to quickly find out

  1. is their English (written) good enough?
  2. do they sound confident they can do our job?

Creative briefing stage 2

After you have shortlisted, then you need to message the applicants. This is when you actually speak individually to your contractors. Beware of agencies applying where the salesperson replies and you don’t know who will be doing your work. Insist on speaking to them direct.

I usually ask these questions

  1. What are the stages and key milestones in this project?
  2. Can you estimate the number of hours you need for each stage?

And again assess their response, use of English and speed to reply.

Then I call the top 3 and have a 5 minute chat to run through their answers (stages and hours estimate).

After this, I make my hire decision…..

Can I help you learn how to brief?

Get in touch. Briefing is a skill and a process. You can learn how to do it well.  There are some nuances which are specific to types of job and not appropriate for a public post like this. Happy to help.

 

Resources

Marketplaces

How to write an awesome creative brief

What does a modern creative brief look like?

 

 

 

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water data visualisation

Marketing perception versus reality

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I love my profession. Marketers come in all stripes and sizes. Some are shysters and others are hard graft honest workers.

We use a lot of techniques to advantage the brands we are working for. Some are sly and dishonest and others are honourable.

And today I am focusing on two different ways to influence the customer’s perception versus the reality.

Pricing perception & reality

You may know that there is a “Left Digit Bias” which is well documented in the psychology literature.

This means when we read a price, the numbers before the decimal point get more attention from us than those to the right. And so if a price is slightly below a threshold number like $29.99 as opposed to $30.00 our perception of good or best value goes with the lower left hand number, 29 in this case.

Marketers advise on pricing. And it’s worth reading this recent research about when to use the left digit bias tactic and when not to use it.

If your product is normally priced $2.00 and your net margin is 9% and the price is lowered to $1.99 the net margin drops to 6%. That’s a lot of profit left on the table just for one cent of discount.

A better tactic is to show the Before and Now price. So the relative prices are known by the consumer.

By playing with the pricing you can advance a marketing perception which is less obvious than the reality and which delivers a better outcome for your client brand’s profitability.

Data visualisation perception & reality

I have a tiny obsession at the moment with water. We have a local hose pipe ban – it’s the middle of winter and has been

water data visualisation

Auckland Watercare data

raining heavily most days this month. So why the ban?

I investigated and found the local water company publishes daily updates on the water level in local dams, the volume of water consumed per week and the weekly rainfall compared to the long term mean.

We are currently at 64.95% water storage compared to a historical average level of 88.77% at this time of year. And they illustrate this in a handy graphic, updated daily.

Now I know why there’s a hosepipe ban.

Marketers could use images and data visualisations more often. They offer an easy way to explain things quickly to your customers and prospects.

Geeking out on data summaries isn’t everyone’s hobby of choice. Yet I was drawn into a very detailed analysis of what “good” actually looks like in data visualisation and ways to use this to advance your marketing reality compared to customer perception.

Define good data imagery

Avinash is a data geek – he works for Google. And he shares his expertise in a wonderful weekly email.

Here is a comparison of 4 data visualisations about Covid19. Timely, yes – and each trying to convey a lot of information to the public about what is and is not “safe” to do.

Which of these 4 do you prefer? Which can you ‘understand’ fastest? What is each trying to explain?

Is there a perception and reality gap in these four images? Which is best at showing Covid19 risk?

Avinash Kaushik data visualisation

Comparisons of 4 data visualisations for Covid19

Avinash writes a detailed analysis of his personal scoring system to appraise each image against 8 criteria.

He creates a weighted scoring for each so that a total score is out of 66.

The scoring is on a three point scale “Perfect” scores 3; “Could be optimised” scores 1 and “Reboot” scores minus -2. As you can see the weighting he applies rewards perfect far more than the midlevel score. But hey, that’s his choice. When you do well your score easily out-strips the others.

Which image got which score? [ For answers scroll down.]

  • 23
  • 7
  • 50
  • 64

How were they so different? Isn’t Avinash’s judgement seriously wrong? They all look great to me.

First understand the qualities he is seeking to appraise.

  1. Time to the most important insight.
  2. The effort to understand the whole graphic.
  3. Trust marks.
  4. Rank-ordering of key messages.
  5. Explaining the key logic powering the graphic.
  6. Exposing nuance.
  7. Visualizer trying to be too clever.
  8. Likely to recommend to influential leaders.

And now we can better understand the relative effectiveness of the designs against these criteria.

Read the full article – warning, it’s 6000 words long.

[Scoring – list top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right.]

Copywrite a marketing brief

Briefing is everything.

If you ask the right questions you get the brief right. Then you’re most likely to get the best answer / output to suit your goals.

Knowing your success criteria and metrics are important and also defining what ‘success’ looks like. This is a great methodology of writing the brief from the end back to the beginning.  Try writing the ‘conclusion’ statement as your opening paragraph.

We need customers to understand a Covid19 activity risk matrix. We will have succeeded if fewer people undertake risky activities as measured by…..

One of the things I admire about Avinash is his consistent support for people in the same line of work – how to impress your boss is a key theme. Hence item 8 on his list above.

As a marketer, it really MATTERS that you get noticed for doing good work. Learning some of these things I’m writing about could help your career.

  • Do good marketing
  • Get noticed
  • Get the next job / pay rise / promotion you deserve

If you would like to know how I would copywrite a marketing brief for this job – just email me. Happy to share.

 

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