Writing the Perfect Influencer Marketing Brief: 7 Steps

Growing your business is an ongoing process. You can never stop working on the goal of raising brand awareness, increasing sales, acquiring and retaining more customers, and beating your competitors.

Naturally, investing in proper marketing is your best tool, and influencer marketing can skyrocket your sales and help you reach your goals faster.

But, you need to be careful with influencer marketing campaigns if you want to make them a success.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a promotional marketing strategy used by many marketing teams. You find people with a social influence to promote your products or services to their audience – it doesn’t just have to be Instagram influencers.

You can look for any social media influencer that matches your target market.

Because there are so many different types of influencers, whatever your business is, you will be able to find relevant people to promote you. Some people use influencer marketing platforms for this, but many others do their own searches to find the best fit.

This is an effective way to find more potential customers and should be included in your marketing planning. It is a very popular form of marketing because it is effective – people trust others and word of mouth marketing, even if it is sponsored content.

Influencer marketing campaigns are effective, too. On average, businesses make $5.20 for every $1 spent. It doesn’t have to be a celebrity endorsement, either to be successful.

Let’s have a closer look at those advantages:

• Builds trust: consumers are more likely to trust the recommendations of other consumers, and influencers are people who have spent much time building relationships with their audience; therefore, they have more sway than usual.
• Increases brand awareness: although your influencer of choice should target a similar audience to your brand, the audience isn’t necessarily the same. There will be plenty of people in the influencer’s audience that have never come across your products until now.
• Cost-effective: influencer marketing can be more cost-saving than other more traditional methods of marketing, and influencer marketing offers the same (if not better) return on investment.
• Improves your content strategy: partnering with an influencer opens your content strategy up to forms of content you may not have been willing to put effort into as a business, such as Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and even live videos. Perhaps you don’t have the expertise or the time. 
  You can write an influencer marketing brief to ensure your collaboration with an influencer will run smoothly and successfully.

To ensure your collaboration with an influencer will run smoothly, you can write an influencer marketing brief.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gennifer Rose (@genniferrose_blog)

What is an Influencer Marketing Brief?

Finding a new brand ambassador and ensuring they do the job correctly is often risky and challenging. Collaborating with people you don’t know yet, and trusting them to promote your business is delicate and requires precaution.

While creative freedom is an essential factor to consider, an influencer marketing brief helps you confidently approach the influencer and define the nature of your potential collaboration.

Simply put, an influencer marketing brief is a written document summarizing the main points and marketing goals of the collaboration between a business and an influencer promoting that business.

This document will secure a prosperous and stable collaboration between the two parties.

Why Do You Need it?

You may feel like an internal word-of-mouth agreement between you, and the influencer is more than enough for a successful collaboration. But, having an agreement makes it more transparent for all parties involved.

We’re not saying that influencers will try to trick you or sabotage the campaign. But, unclear instructions and ambiguity can lead to substantial marketing mistakes that you’ll find impossible to correct once they happen.

So, you need an influencer marketing brief to:

• define the nature and details of the collaboration
• secure your business interests
• show your credibility and professionalism to the influencer
• set marketing objectives, goals, demands, and rules
• make a mutually beneficial agreement

A written agreement between a business and the influencer is a standard document that gives reassurance and security to both sides. You need to write an influencer marketing brief for potential collaborations.

How to Write an Influencer Marketing Brief: 7 Steps

Writing an influencer marketing brief might seem difficult initially, but with the proper guidance and practice, you’ll soon become an expert.

We’ve prepared the ultimate guide for writing an influencer marketing brief in 7 steps.

Basic Information

Every brief should start with a formal introduction, whether you’ve already collaborated with this influencer or not. This section should contain the following information:

• your company name and logo
• a brief explanation of what your company does and any necessary key details
• your mission and vision
• the service or product descriptions that your influencer will promote
• contact details (should they need them)

Campaign Details

Your collaboration with an influencer is a part of a campaign you’re preparing. The influencer needs to know the details of this campaign to be able to fit in it perfectly. This goes for everyone from micro-influencers to nano-influencers, regardless.

This section explains the main details of the campaign and introduces the influencer to what you’re preparing. Make sure to cover:

Campaign objectives: Describe what you want to achieve with the campaign. You can set multiple goals. Is the project goal to raise brand awareness? Or is it to get the word out about your latest product launches?

Channels to be used: Decide which marketing channels your influencer will use to conduct the campaign, e.g., social media platforms, YouTube, influencer’s blog posts, and so on.

Influencer role: Define the primary role of the influencer and how their actions should help achieve the campaign goal. Briefly explain what you expect them to do if they agree to collaborate with you.

You can also set a title for the campaign to be able to refer to it more easily in your later conversations. For this part, you could even include a mood board to show what vision you are aiming for so that the influencer’s content reflects that.

The campaign Main Message

Both you and the influencer should look at the campaign from the target audience’s perspective. The campaign’s primary message summarizes it and explains what you want your customers to take away after being exposed to it.

So, define the key messages you want the influencer to help you deliver. Here are some examples:

Your products offer a solution to a specific problem.
Your innovative solutions are unique and valuable.
You’re socially responsible by selling new vegan or cruelty-free products.

Be specific about the key message to ensure the influencer is on the same page as you.

Specific Requirements

Now that you’ve introduced the influencer to the nature of the campaign, it’s time to discuss further details. You must set expectations for the influencer and define them in your brief.

This includes:

• The platforms the influencer will be using
• The type of content they’ll use for promotion, e.g., social media posts,reels, stories, live videos, Q&As, interviews, etc.,
• The specific hashtags they’ll use
• The call to action
• The links they’ll be sharing
• How many social media posts or blog posts they’ll be posting
• The times of the day when they’re expected to post

This part of the brief ensures the influencer has clear guidelines and knows what you expect from them.

You need to be in control and ensure they represent your business’s values and image the way you’ve defined it in your branding.

Design Instructions

Creative team, this is where you step in. It’s essential to define the visual aspect of your collaboration with the influencer and include design instructions in your brief.

These instructions will explain what type of visual content you want as a part of the campaign and how the influencer needs to handle it. Discuss specific details and key elements such as:

• Image size and type
• Video format and length
• Colors and fonts

The influencer can be responsible for creating the visuals, or you can deliver the visuals and other marketing materials for them to publish.

Make sure this is all specified in the brief, but remember that this is a collaboration and allow them the freedom to explore their creative ideas.

Language & Vocabulary

When choosing an influencer to promote your brand, you should choose someone close to your brand and your target audience. Still, you can never be sure they’ll respect your brand image unless you define it in your brief.

This section needs to define:

• The type of vocabulary you want them to use
• The writing style
• The tone and voice

If there are some sensitive topics you’ll be covering, reflect on political correctness, bias, and other necessary details.

Timeline & Payment

Finally, to run successful marketing campaigns with influencers, you need to define the technical details of your agreement and set up a tentative timeline:

• When will the campaign take place?
• How long will it last? 
• How, when, and how much will you be paying the influencer?

In your influencer marketing brief, you must ensure that you have anticipated and answered any key questions the influencers may have.

Other Essential Elements Worth Including in your Influencer Marketing Brief

So you’ve created your influencer marketing brief, but how do you make yours stand out from the rest and get your message across? Below are several other elements that may be worth including in your brief:

Who your ideal influencer is

You can target influencers that are ideal for you and only hand your marketing brief over to them, or you can let influencers come to you. 

If you are opting for the second option, then it is essential in your brief to outline the kind of influencer you’re looking for. This ensures that influencers applying don’t get their hopes up unnecessarily, and you also have a lot fewer unqualified applicants.

To define your ideal influencer, you need to think about the kind of message you want to give out, the target audience you’re looking for, the size of the audience you want your influencer to have, and, more importantly, the minimum engagement rates you’re looking for.

Do’s & Don’ts

Yes, your entire influencer marketing brief talks about the dos and don’ts. However, it is easy to lose sight of these or skip over them entirely when they are nestled into the content.

Explicitly stating the do’s and don’ts means that there are no excuses if the influencer does not meet your expectations. To avoid any confusion, make an easy-to-read list that covers everything necessary.

A solid call to action

Providing your influencers with a strong call-to-action ensures some standardization across your influencer marketing campaigns. It will drive better results, and it will make the objectives of the campaign clearer.

A solid call to action can be the difference between a user converting or not. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dorcas Quarshie ?Maryland (@stylepashion)

Any legalities

User-generated content is a great content type to add to your strategy. If you plan to reuse any content your influencer creates on your own social media platforms or website, then it is essential to state this in the brief. Add a clause in the brief about content usage rights so that it isn’t a shock to the influencer when it happens.

Other legalities to state include that most countries now require influencers to disclose whether their content is sponsored or not. The last thing you want to do is break the law, so ensure that your influencers know this disclosure policy.

Examples for inspiration

Perhaps when scrolling through social media, you came across an influencer marketing campaign you loved. Well, then, save the link and add it to your brief. 

Adding examples of other influencer campaigns or content that caught your eye means that everyone is on the same page, and there is less potential for disappointment on your behalf.

You can create a mood board filled with examples and potential topics that the influencers can use as a great source of inspiration for your influencers when they are curating their content.

Common Influencer Marketing Brief Mistakes

We have told you what you should do to create the perfect influencer marketing brief, but what are some things you should be steering clear of? Let’s find out.

Unclear objectives

There is no way your influencer marketing campaign can be successful if your marketing brief doesn’t clearly outline your objectives.

Emphasize your goals and reduce the amount of text clutter so that you drive your main point home. 

Overuse of bullet points

Your influencer marketing brief needs to be concise and to the point, but using too many bullet points may not be to your advantage.

Bullet points are great. However, since they are most effective when short, using too many bullet points means you could be using out on important information.

You make disclosures optional

Some countries don’t require influencers to disclose when their posts are sponsored. However, it is better to air on the side of caution and make disclosures compulsory.

Having a disclosure ensures that you aren’t breaking any laws. It also means that you (and your influencer) are being completely transparent, and your marketing efforts don’t get misconstrued as misleading.

You make too many rules

When creating an influencer marketing brief, companies risk being too prescriptive and imposing too many rules on their potential influencers. 

They may do this because they believe that the more rules, the more likely they will get the desired results out of the campaign.

However, too many rules only limit the influencer’s creative freedom and reduce their enthusiasm towards your brand – trust us, this will (unintentionally) come across in the content they create for you, and the consumers will recognize it is inauthentic.

Make sure that you guide your influencers but do not control them. The idea behind influencer marketing is that the influencer brings their own personality and creativity to the brand.

If you hinder this, you may just be creating all the content yourself.

Perfecting your influencer marketing brief

When planning a collaboration with an influencer, having a game plan, being in control of the campaign strategy, and being clear on what you expect is essential.

Writing an influencer marketing brief is necessary for making sure things run smoothly and for you to achieve the goals you’ve set.

Use the seven steps above to turn all your influencer campaigns into success stories. Just make sure you avoid the influencer marketing brief mistakes that so often lead to the campaign’s downfall.