You begin a project with enthusiasm, only to discover midway that you and your client have differing views on key aspects. It’s pretty frustrating.
Things become overwhelming when expectations don’t match up, details are overlooked, or revisions keep piling up. That’s when a good client brief template comes in to save the day. It assists you and your client in navigating each step of the journey, ensuring clear communication.
These templates make communication easier, set clear expectations, and give you a solid plan for success. This article will explore the best client brief templates to transform your project kickoffs from messy to super clear.
Free Client Brief Templates to Streamline Project Communication
What Are Client Brief Templates?
Client brief templates are standardized documents that outline the client’s needs, goals, and overall project scope. They act as helpful guides for creative teams, ensuring everyone understands what the client expects and what needs to be delivered for the project.
As such, these templates help reduce miscommunication by providing a clear structure that gathers all the important details right from the start. Consequently, teams maintain project goals and avoid unnecessary revisions and changes in scope.
Client brief templates also serve as handy references during the project, making it easier for everyone involved to track progress and confirm that all the requirements are being fulfilled.
💡 Pro Tip: When thinking of a client brief template, many confuse it with a marketing brief template, project brief template, or even a simple creative brief template. All these brief types have differing objectives and lead to a project or task being completed.
What Makes a Good Client Brief Template?
A solid client brief template is a well-organized document that lays out all the key parts of a project, helping ensure that both the client and the service provider are on the same page. Here are the key elements:
- Project overview: Concise summary detailing the project’s purpose and objectives
- Target audience: Specific information about the intended audience, including demographics and preferences
- Goals and objectives: Measurable outcomes the project aims to achieve
- Scope of work: Detailed description of deliverables, tasks, and responsibilities
- Budget and timeline: Clearly defined financial constraints and project deadlines
- Key stakeholders: Identification of individuals or teams involved, along with their roles
- Brand guidelines: Standards and references to maintain brand consistency
Incorporating these elements ensures understanding and effective collaboration throughout the project lifecycle.
🔎 Did You Know? Creating a client brief helps clients express their business challenges and goals more clearly, leading to smarter and more effective creative solutions.
14 Client Brief Templates
When you’re managing client projects, using the right tools changes everything. Client brief templates make communication smoother and set clear expectations. These client brief templates help kickstart your projects the right way.
1. Campaign Brief Template
The Campaign Brief Template helps make every part of your marketing campaign easier, whether you’re planning or executing it.
While not a client brief template per se, this template provides a solid framework that guides you in outlining clear goals, identifying your target audiences, creating key messages, and managing budgets effectively. It has customizable sections for timelines, strategies, and key performance indicators, ensuring everyone on the team is focused on hitting those measurable outcomes.
What you’ll love about it:
- Keep track of your campaign stages with custom fields for sorting tasks and custom views like List, Gantt, Workload, and Calendar
- Easily access nested subtasks and options for multiple assignees
- Integrate with Docs allows teams to collaborate for easier comprehension
🔑 Ideal for: Marketing teams and agencies looking to boost productivity and improve communication throughout campaign planning and execution.
Here’s what Ansh Prabhakar, Business Process Improvement Analyst at Airbnb, had to say about using :
2. Marketing Campaign Brief Template
The Marketing Campaign Brief Template organizes all the project details in one place, making marketing campaign planning and execution easier. It’s great for teams to set campaign goals, generate creative ideas, determine their target audience, and develop key messaging strategies within their marketing efforts.
The template includes sections dedicated to budget planning, managing timelines, and monitoring campaign performance.
What you’ll love about it:
- Use custom statuses to keep an eye on campaign stages and custom fields to remain on top of your marketing campaign checklist
- Boost visibility and teamwork during the campaign lifecycle with various custom views like List, Gantt, Workload, and Calendar
- Implement automated notifications to remain informed about the progress of advertising campaigns
🔑 Ideal for Marketing teams or account managers who want a structured and collaborative approach to planning and executing complex campaigns.
3. Marketing Proposal Template
The Marketing Proposal Template is designed to make it easier for you to create effective marketing proposals. It offers a clear layout that makes it easy to outline your campaign goals, share strategic solutions, and communicate timelines and budgets effectively.
This template has dedicated sections for determining your target audiences, outlining marketing tactics, defining success metrics, and ensuring your proposal is thorough and convincing. Plus, ’s collaboration tools let team members share ideas, give feedback, and edit together in real time, smoother the proposal creation process.
What you’ll love about it:
- Optimize approval processes by tracking proposal stages (Draft, Review, Approved) in one centralized workflow
- Organize critical campaign details with customizable fields for budget estimates, resource requirements, and campaign timelines
- Visualize project timelines and dependencies using List, Gantt, and Calendar views to align tasks and deadlines
🔑 Ideal for: Marketing teams, agencies, and freelancers who need a professional, organized, and collaborative approach for creating marketing proposals.
🔎 Did You Know? Shorter proposals tend to have a higher success rate—while a five-page proposal has a 50% chance of closing, a 30-page proposal sees that likelihood drop to around 35%.
4. Project Proposal Template
The Project Proposal Template is a comprehensive tool designed to help you present project ideas clearly and effectively. It provides a structured format for project objectives, deliverables, budgets, timelines, and success metrics.
Additionally, it includes sections for identifying potential risks, resource needs, and stakeholder roles, ensuring that all aspects of the project proposal are thoroughly planned. Unlike other templates, this one is designed to present ideas and facilitate project buy-in by providing a professional and visually engaging information presentation.
What you’ll love about it:
- Integrate with ’s collaboration tools, allowing team members to share feedback and edits in real-time
- Use Brain to automate content and fields for this template
- Link your project proposal to existing tasks and docs within your workplace
🔑 Ideal for: Project managers, consultants, and teams who need a clear and comprehensive approach to drafting project proposals.
💡 Pro Tip: A well-crafted client brief is an ‘ad targeted to creative people,’ inspiring them to develop innovative ideas that align with the client’s vision.
5. Creative Brief Document Template
The Creative Brief Document Template is designed to simplify creative project planning by organizing all essential details in one place. It helps teams define project goals, target audiences, creative brief requirements, and timelines, ensuring alignment from concept to execution.
This template also includes sections for budget allocation, messaging strategies, and key deliverables, helping teams maintain focus and consistency throughout the creative process. It also supports collaborative editing, automations, and Brain integration, making it easy to manage feedback and optimize workflows.
What you’ll love about it:
- Centralize all project information in a clear and accessible format with well-defined objectives and desired outcomes
- Build alignment and shared understanding among stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle
- Identify and define the target audience to ensure creative work meets their needs
🔑 Ideal for: Creative teams, marketing agencies, and designers who need a centralized and organized approach to planning and executing creative projects.
6. Creative Brief Demand Planning Template
The Creative Brief Demand Planning Template is designed to help teams effectively plan and manage demand generation strategies. It offers a clear way to lay out goals, identify target audiences, sort ideation techniques, craft messaging, and determine needed resources.
The template also includes sections for choosing marketing channels, setting timelines, and monitoring campaign progress. It offers custom views, including a Project Library, Accepted Projects, Rejected Projects, Brief Status, and a project or content calendar, helping teams efficiently organize and access information and essential details.
What you’ll love about it:
- Develop actionable outlines with clear objectives for each initiative
- Establish a framework for gathering and evaluating customer requirements
- Generate more accurate demand forecasts and receive insights into changes in consumer demand
🔑 Ideal for: Marketing teams and planners looking to simplify demand generation strategies and maintain alignment.
7. Design Brief Template
The Design Brief Template optimizes the creation of design briefs by clearly defining project goals, objectives, scope, and timelines. It bridges the gap between creative teams and stakeholders, ensuring consistent communication and alignment throughout the project lifecycle.
This template includes sections for project purposes, target audience, deliverables, and feedback collection, helping teams stay focused and organized. It also offers custom views, including Creative Brief Whiteboard, Timeline, and Task Views, providing a flexible and visual approach to client project management. These features enable teams to collaborate and ensure all details are documented and easily accessible.
What you’ll love about it:
- Develop a unified vision for the project and establish shared expectations for the outcome
- Guarantee the final product meets the client’s needs and expectations
- Enhance design brief tracking with time tracking, tags, dependency warnings, emails, and other project management tools
🔑 Ideal for: Creative teams, designers, and marketing departments that want a structured yet flexible approach to managing design projects.
Take a look at this video to learn how to optimize your creative and design workflow:
8. Design Brief Whiteboard Template
The Design Brief Whiteboard Template allows creative teams to brainstorm, visualize, and organize design projects in an interactive, collaborative space. Its flexible whiteboard layout helps teams map out design concepts, outline project goals, and manage creative workflows.
The template is especially effective for remote teams, supporting real-time collaboration, feedback integration, and stakeholder sharing.
What you’ll love about it:
- Simplify design processes with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that scales from beginner-friendly to complex workflows
- Brainstorm by connecting the whiteboard to ’s task management and client collaboration tools
- Transform brainstorming sessions into action by converting ideas into trackable tasks directly within the platform
🔑 Ideal for Design teams, creative agencies, and project managers who need a dynamic, visual approach to design planning.
📮 Insight: 37% of workers send follow-up notes or meeting minutes to track action items, but 36% still rely on other, fragmented methods. Without a unified system for capturing decisions, key insights you need may get buried in chats, emails, or spreadsheets. With , you can instantly turn conversations into actionable tasks across all your tasks, chats, and docs—ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
9. Brand Guidelines Template
The Brand Guidelines Template helps businesses maintain brand consistency by organizing all branding elements in one place. The template covers logo usage, color schemes, typography, brand voice, and messaging guidelines, ensuring cohesive client communication across all platforms.
It includes sections for creating usage policies, defining brand identity, and documenting visual standards, helping teams preserve brand integrity and maximize marketing impact.
What you’ll love about it:
- Customize guidelines with Docs, allowing teams to tailor branding rules to specific use cases
- Automate updates by setting reminders and notifications for guideline reviews and approvals
- Integrate seamlessly with design tools like Figma and cloud storage to centralize brand assets
🔑 Ideal for: Marketing teams and agencies aiming to maintain consistent brand identity across all marketing materials and communication channels.
🧠 Fun Fact: A brand must be trusted by 81% of consumers for them to consider purchasing its products and services.
10. Marketing Project Brief Template
The Marketing Project Brief Template is designed to help marketing teams efficiently plan and execute campaigns. It provides a structured layout for defining project goals, target audiences, and key messaging, ensuring strategic alignment across all campaign elements.
Enable teams to stay organized and focused on their objectives by managing timelines, tracking budgets, and allocating resources efficiently with the template. It also supports real-time collaboration and feedback integration, making it easier for teams to coordinate and communicate effectively.
What you’ll love about it:
- Enhance the tracking of marketing projects through the incorporation of multiple assignees, comment reactions, priority levels, and nested subtasks
- Reduce the risk of misunderstandings by providing a clear and concise view of the project
- Improve communication between team members by providing a single source of information
🔑 Ideal for: Marketing teams and agencies looking to optimize project planning, improve collaboration, and execute marketing strategies more efficiently.
11. Agency/Client Discovery Doc Template
The Agency/Client Discovery Doc Template kickstarts the onboarding process by capturing detailed client requirements, goals, and project expectations. It provides a structured layout to gather key information about customer discovery questions, the client’s needs, target audience, budget, and timelines.
Furthermore, the template ensures that all stakeholders are aligned before starting any deliverables, reducing the risk of miscommunication and scope creep. Key features include custom statuses to track discovery stages, custom fields for organizing client data, and custom views like List, Calendar, and Gantt for visualizing project timelines.
What you’ll love about it:
- Build greater agency-client communication by outlining expectations and requirements in a structured format
- Assess project scope efficiently with a well-documented discovery process
- Better the client discovery process with screen recording, collaborative editing, automations, and AI-powered insights
🔑 Ideal for: Agencies and project managers who want to enhance client communication and optimize project onboarding with a clear, organized, and professional approach.
12. Services Discovery Document Template
The Services Discovery Document Template simplifies service discovery by documenting comprehensive client requirements and project details. With a clear structure for defining the scope of services, this template makes it easier to document client expectations and outline project objectives.
This template’s unique features include custom statuses such as Draft, In Review, and Approved, which help track the document’s progress through various approval stages. It also offers custom fields to capture specific details like budget constraints, service categories, and stakeholder information, allowing for better organization and visibility.
What you’ll love about it:
- Clarify objectives, processes, and required resources to identify new opportunities for improvement
- Align teams around key priorities for collective success to define the scope of services and associated costs
- Increase customer satisfaction by providing accurate and detailed service descriptions
🔑 Ideal for: Service-oriented businesses, agencies, and consultants looking to improve client onboarding and project planning with detailed and collaborative discovery documentation.
13. Scope of Work Template
The Scope of Work Template provides a detailed structure for defining project objectives, deliverables, timelines, and responsibilities. It ensures clear client communication and alignment among all stakeholders. The template also helps teams outline the project’s scope, resources, milestones, and budget, minimizing scope creep and avoiding miscommunication.
The template has multiple custom views, such as Gantt charts for timeline visualization, Calendars for scheduling, and List views for task management. Additionally, it integrates with ’s collaborative tools, allowing team members to provide real-time feedback and share updates.
What you’ll love about it:
- Define the scope and objectives of your project by outlining timelines, tasks, and deliverables
- Simplify time and cost estimation for project completion to ensure all stakeholders are informed and aligned
- Improve project tracking with screen recording, AI, automations, and other project management tools
🔑 Ideal for Project managers, agencies, and teams that need a comprehensive and organized approach to defining project scopes, tasks, and timelines.
14. Services Agreement Template
The Services Agreement Template simplifies the creation of clear and comprehensive service contracts. Its extensive and structured layout defines essential service details, payment terms, timelines, and responsibilities, ensuring transparent communication between service providers and clients.
Furthermore, the template is crucial in managing legal requirements by meticulously outlining terms and conditions. This protects both parties from potential disputes and fosters a more collaborative working relationship.
What you’ll love about it:
- Guarantee compliance by incorporating legal clauses that protect both parties
- Boost approvals with collaborative editing and built-in commenting for quick revisions
- Enrich collaboration by integrating with e-signature tools for seamless contract execution
🔑 Ideal for: Service providers, consultants, and agencies looking to formalize client agreements while maintaining clear terms and accountability.
Choose the Best Client Brief Template for Your Requirements
Choosing the right client brief template depends on your project needs, how your team works together, and how detailed you want to get. If you want an easy way to outline your project goals and deliverables, the Campaign Brief Template is a fantastic option.
If you want to dive into detailed planning with timelines and budgets and get everyone on the same page, the Marketing Project Brief Template is a great way to stay organized. Are you looking to gather all the specifics for client onboarding? The Agency/Client Discovery Doc Template makes communication and expectations smoother.
If you’re part of a team that must tackle complex projects with detailed scopes and structured agreements, offers great templates and tools. These include custom statuses, fields, and collaborative and writing tools, allowing you to manage any project from start to finish.
Sign up for free today to see how can help you manage projects more efficiently and effectively.
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