Crafting an Effective Influencer Marketing Brief: Best Practices and Tips

An influencer brief provides your collaborating influencer with all the information and guidance they need to create and launch a successful campaign for your brand. A detailed brief can help you effectively communicate your goals and expectations, establish your content requirements, and define your campaign timeline.

But what is an influencer brief exactly, and what information should you include in this document?

In today’s post, we will explain what an influencer brief is and share a few tips and best practices to help you create your own. We will discuss the importance of setting clear campaign objectives, defining your target audience, communicating a targeted campaign message, and establishing clear guidelines for your influencer partnership. 

What Is an Influencer Brief?

An influencer brief is a document that outlines your influencer marketing campaign goals and expectations. It includes everything from your brand values to your campaign objectives, target audience, CTA, and guidelines for communication and campaign tracking. The ultimate aim of this document is to provide your collaborating influencer with all the information they need to create a campaign that helps you achieve your goals and specific objectives. 

Specifically, an influencer brief enables you to:

• Document your specific campaign requirements and objectives.
• Communicate creative direction (whilst allowing for a degree of creative freedom).
• Share influencer marketing examples of the types of campaigns that you are looking for.
• Explain your brand’s mission, vision, and values.
• Outline your target audience, including demographics, interests, etc.
• Establish a clear campaign message and CTA.
• Provide guidance on how you will be tracking and measuring campaign performance.
• Define communication channels, how often you will contact each other, when campaign updates will be sent, etc.

With all this information, you can enhance your influencer collaboration, avoid potential misunderstandings, leverage your influencer marketing strategies, and establish a clear timeline for your campaign.

Influencer Brief Tips & Best Practices

We are now going to share a few tips and best practices to help you understand what information you need to include in your influencer brief.

Set Clear Campaign Objectives

Make sure you include clear campaign goals and objectives in your influencer brief. This will help your influencer understand what your expectations are and what you specifically want to achieve in terms of performance. These objectives must be specific and actionable.

For example, are you looking to increase brand awareness or engage more potential customers? Do you want to drive more traffic to your website or build your brand’s social media following?

If you’re looking to increase engagement, for example, what types of interactions will you be tracking? Likes, comments, or shares? What engagement rate are you aiming for? How will you quantify campaign success? 

The clearer and more detailed this section of your influencer brief is, the easier it will be for the influencer to understand what they need to do and how they need to do it. 

Define Your Target Audience

Your influencer brief should also include details about your target audience. In other words, who you are targeting with your campaign. This includes basic information relating to demographics, but it should also include an explanation of their interests, goals, and desires. 

What does your ideal customer care about? What do they value? Do you understand their purchasing habits? Which types of content are more likely to elicit a response from them? 

All this information will guide your influencer so that they can work out what sort of campaign they need to create and how they can best communicate it.

Create a Clear Campaign Message And CTA

Including a clear campaign message in your influencer brief will help your influencer plan what they are going to say in their post. Make sure they understand what call to action you want them to focus on, and if information should be communicated in a particular way. Also communicate any other key information that they need to include in their post, such as specific promos, discounts, branded hashtags, or your brand’s USP. Moreover, make sure your CTA aligns with your brand identity and campaign objectives and it can elicit the response you are looking for. 

Establish Clear Guidelines for Influencer Partnerships

Finally, make sure your influencer brief includes clear guidelines for your relationship moving forward. This is especially important in terms of communication.

How often will you contact each other to discuss campaign performance? What platforms will you use to communicate? Emails, DMs, or video calls?

In terms of input, how much control do you expect to have over their posts? How will you access performance metrics? Who owns content usage rights? What happens if performance metrics aren’t being reached?

The more detailed and transparent you are in your influencer brief, the easier it will be to avoid confusion or misunderstandings. Ultimately, putting in all this groundwork will ensure that your collaboration runs smoothly, and your campaign meets your goals and ROI expectations.