Ensuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign depends on how you outline and communicate your vision and goals to the creator. You need to share with them the campaign’s details, the key message, and your desired outcomes and describe to them whom you’re targeting. This is where an influencer brief comes into play. A brief for influencers is a document created by a business entity or individual that summarizes the details and prerequisites of a collaboration. It has to be an integral component of your campaign and outreach strategy, paving the way for long-term influencer partnerships that deliver outstanding results for both parties.
In this post, we’ll discuss what to enclose in a brief for creators and provide you with tips on how to create clear and effective guidelines. Without further ado, here’s everything you need to know about briefing creators.
What to Include in an Influencer Brief
Whether it is short or long, an influencer brief helps creators understand your objectives and expectations. Here’s what should be included in a briefing:
Campaign overview: Start your brief by introducing your brand, describing the collaboration, and the product or service that will be endorsed. You can give a short summary of your target audience and goals too.
Your target audience: Even though you researched the influencer’s follower base and made sure that it matches your target audience, you still need to specify their age, gender, location, and interests.
Key message: The campaign's key message should leave a lasting impression on the audience and motivate them to act. By explaining the key message, influencers can convey your brand’s main idea through their social media content.
Brand guidelines: Brand guidelines refer to a set of rules for how a band is presented across all marketing channels. This includes all visual features and tone of voice and language.
Goals and expected outcomes: Describe in detail your goals, especially what you want to accomplish through the campaign. You can also add what metrics you want to measure the influencer’s performance with.
Deliverables, dates, and timelines: You have to specify what type of content you expect from the creators. It is best to define the number of deliverables, time frame, and timeline.
Budget and payment: You may share the budget allocated to the collaboration and lay out the terms of payment. There should be a clear indication of the type of compensation in the brief, whether it is a one-time fee, free products, or a commission after each sale.
Keep communication concise and professional to ensure the collaboration is successful for both parties.
Tips for Creating an Effective Influencer Brief
An influencer briefing gives creators a clear understanding of what is expected of them and ensures that everyone is on the same page. Now that you know what a brief for content creators should contain, let's talk about how you can write it.
Share relevant information about the brand and the product
Describe your brand’s story, mission, and vision. By learning about your business’s values, the influencer will be able to deliver your message efficiently to their audience.
Introduce the product or service the creator will promote by highlighting its specific aspects and unique selling points.
Last but not least, define the target audience, including demographics and psychographics, the level of education, and income, if possible.
Clearly determine the goals of the collaboration
Influencer marketing can provide businesses with multiple benefits, such as growing conversions, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or shaping how users perceive the brand. When you’re building your strategy, you establish your major goal and how you want to accomplish it. Breaking down your primary goal into achievable micro-goals or milestones will help make it easier to move toward your goal, stay motivated, and identify bottlenecks you need to fix. You can grow brand awareness by:
driving traffic to your website with the help of influencers,
offering product samples for creators in exchange for a product review,
partnering with industry experts and bloggers.
Specify your content requirements
There are several factors, like the platform, the target audience, your brand guidelines, and the budget that affect the format, length, and style of the content. Try to be as specific about your needs and expectations as you can to avoid misunderstanding and dissatisfaction.
Content format: Since you’ve already figured out whom you’re targeting and where these people are actively present, it’s evident what content the influencer has to create. It can vary from short TikTok or long YouTube videos to Instagram and Facebook posts and blog articles. Remember that writing a blog post takes more time than social media posts, and video production requires more resources.
Length: Make sure to explain how long the content has to be. For example, if you're working with bloggers, request a specific number of words.
Hashtags and themes: Elaborate on the key message and identify your product’s differentiators. Indicate if there are specific hashtags, call-to-actions, or captions you'd like the creator to use in their content.
Ways of content promotion: Be specific about how the creator will mention the brand in their posts. For example, they can tag the brand or add a link to a blog post or a product website.
Tone and voice: Your brand’s guidelines, the product, and the target audience will play a key role in outlining the content’s tone of voice. Clearly describe if the content has to be educational, funny, or thought-provoking.
References and examples: You may want to include content similar to what you expect. As a result, published content will be in line with the brand's values.
Define due dates, schedule, and content delivery
Share the campaign start and end dates, the publishing timeline, and content delivery requirements with creators to evade any glitches in the process.
Sure enough, you’ll need to determine a specific date for publishing each piece, but you'll also have to set a deadline for drafts. Allow plenty of time for revisions. Be sure to clarify the number of posts and that the schedule is agreed upon by both parties.
Define the means of content delivery and the approval process. Influencers may send their drafts via email, share them in the cloud, or upload them on an influencer marketing platform.
Provide necessary resources and support
Creators won’t be able to talk about your brand or showcase your product unless you provide them with adequate assets.
Access to the brand guidelines will help the influencer get insight into your mission and vision. They can also get to know your brand’s tone, voice, and style elements, like typography and graphics, etc.
To familiarize themselves with your product, send creators high-quality photos of the product.
If you opt for video promotion, assist the influencer by developing a script or storyboard.
To maintain high authority in a niche, research materials will help influencers educate themselves about the brand and create informative content for their audience.
With additional resources, you ensure that the influencer’s content is in line with your brand's values, and facilitate users to identify your brand on social media easily.
Lay out the terms of the partnership and the compensation
Summarize shortly the scope of work, the duration of the collaboration, usage rights, and most importantly how and when the influencer will be compensated. To ensure that no problems arise during the cooperation, make a detailed influencer contract that spells out the duties and responsibilities of both parties.
Create a content approval process and review posts before they go live
Avoid grammar mistakes, or content not fitting your image by developing a review and approval procedure before publishing.
Leave enough time for your team to review content before sharing it’s published on social media and provide feedback to the creator.
Keep in mind your brand guidelines. When evaluating, pay particular attention to whether the content's message, tone, and style fit your brand.
Scan the text for typos, inaccuracies, and factual errors to avoid any issues that undermine your brand's credibility.
Communicate any points of the content that needs alteration. Be careful not to impose your own ideas. To achieve the desired results, work collaboratively.
As soon as you're happy with the content, confirm that the influencer can share it.
Remember that working with influencers requires understanding and respect from both parties. Consider influencers' ideas and insights. Try to strike a balance between giving influencers creative freedom while staying true to your brand values.
Key Points to Remember
A brief for influencers can help you stay organized and ensure that your team and influencers realize what you aim to accomplish. Here is a recap of how to write an effective influencer brief:
Share relevant information about the brand and the product
Clearly determine the goals of the collaboration
Specify your content requirements
Define due dates, schedule, and content delivery
Provide necessary resources and support
Lay out the terms of the partnership and the compensation
Create a content approval process and review posts before they go live
By using our tips, you’ll be able to create briefs that secure an efficient collaboration and content that meets your ideas. However, keep in mind that each campaign is different! As you gain more experience with creators, you can add or remove elements to make creator collaborations as seamless as possible.
