Want to make sure your creator partners have the details they need to execute campaigns?
Enter an essential component of influencer marketing: Influencer briefs.
Influencer briefs ensure your campaigns are efficient, high-quality, and consistent with your brand values and guidelines.
Jordan Bettinson, Manager of Professional Services at Later, shared her insights into what makes a good brief from her work on some of Later Influence’s mega-successful influencer campaigns.
Read on to learn everything you need to know about influencer briefs.
Table of Contents
What Is An Influencer Campaign Brief?
An influencer campaign brief is a document that explains campaign objectives to influencer partners and provides guidelines for content creation.
What are Campaign Objectives?
Campaign goals are the outcomes you want your campaign to achieve or deliver.
This might mean building brand awareness, growing revenue, or driving community engagement.
Briefs contain all the information necessary for someone to execute against those goals, like calls-to-action, style considerations, and key messages.
Why It’s Important To Brief Your Influencers
Briefing might seem time-consuming, but it's an essential part of running an influencer marketing campaign.
Here are three reasons why the right brief can be a game-changer.
#1: Set Clear Expectations
You want to make sure you’re giving influencers everything they need to create content that resonates with both your brand and their audience.
While your influencer contract handles the legal and administrative sides of your partnership, a brief provides creators with the insights that they need into the campaign itself.
By providing your influencer partners with clear expectations, they’re set up to do their best work for your brand, reducing back and forth.
#2: Create Boundaries
If your brand has dealbreakers, boundaries, or no-go’s, the brief is where they get documented.
Briefs enable influencers to be creative and unique without breaking any rules. This gives them free reign to be creative while also reducing the number of feedback and edits.
#3: Enable a Single Source of Truth
All important pieces of communication and ideas go into the brief.
If there are any disagreements, concerns, or issues, everyone can reference the brief as a single source of truth.
This is especially helpful if you have a team working on influencer marketing campaigns, multiple creators, or a managed services team.
The Essential Components Of Strong Influencer Briefs
Here are the key elements to include in your briefs.
A Description Of Your Brand
Start with a short outline of who you are and key details that are important for creators and their audiences to know.
Make sure to add more detail if your brand is smaller, less established, or is the parent company of multiple sub-brands.
Campaign Concept And Goals
Including campaign objectives in the brief makes sure your influencer marketing campaign contributes to your overall marketing strategy.
Key Messages
What’s the overarching theme or message you want to ensure the end user gets?
Jordan Bettinson, Manager of Professional Services at Later, recommends keeping this section as light as you can, rather than being overly planned out.
“There are times like if you're working with a government agency, for example, where it's very, very scripted and has to be to meet the legal guidelines of the space,” says Jordan. “But if it's a food product, grocery store, (or) clothing, there's a lot more freedom… What do we need people to be telling their audiences?”
Specifications For Content Deliverables
Deliverable specs let creators know the actual deliverables they need to provide for the campaign, including spacing, size, logo position, and more.
For example, if you’ll be sharing creator content on your brand’s Instagram page, it must be optimized for Instagram.
“Any sort of nuance that would make your content unusable to you… We want to call out to creators so that they know not to do it,” explains Jordan.
This is not just about brand guidelines, but also process efficiency.
“If there's a draft review stage, we don't have to go through and say, 'Hey, you need to recreate your content because we had outlined this and you did it and we need to remove that or we need to work around that.’”
Do’s And Don’ts
This is your space to provide clear outlines and expectations for what creators can and can’t do.
For example, if your brand uses the word “global” but never “international,” that’s something you want to include so creators are aware.
This is also the space to highlight any topics you either have a brand perspective on or explicitly don’t want creators to mention.
Do’s and don ’ts should be essential and important.
Pro tip: Eliminate the guesswork when it comes to briefing. Later Influence’s campaign management tools include built-in messaging and briefing templates you can use in your influencer outreach.
Book a free demo today to see how to make our platform work for you
Best Practices for Influencer Briefs
Here are our Services Team’s top tips for creating successful influencer marketing campaign briefs.
Tip #1: Provide Essential Details
Not all briefs are created equal.
Different products and industries require varying amounts of detail. “(For example, for) child-focused products, the level of detail and security, safety, things that you need to go through are all super important,” says Jordan.
While information overload should be avoided, never leave out anything that could make or break a campaign.
Tip #2: Let Creators Be Creative
While you have to give creators a brief that explains your brand, you don’t want to micromanage and scrutinize everything they do.
Creators know their business, their audience, and how to make engaging content. Let them take inspiration and run with it!
If you over-plan and micromanage, you run a huge risk: “You lose authenticity,” says Jordan. “It's a word that we talk about all the time… You remove the raw feelings or the experience when you get too scripted.”
Tip #3: Set Realistic Timelines
A good brief usually leads to limited edits or content resubmissions. That’s a good thing!
You should give feedback as quickly as you can, particularly if you’re trying to jump on a viral trend.
“Timing is everything,” said Jordan. “Be thoughtful and diligent with your asks then allow your creating partners to get content into you for review and approval or live as soon as possible.”
Tip #4: Think Like A Creator
As you’re looking over documents, put yourself in the creator’s seat: is the brief enough to execute from, assuming they used no other notes or documents?
If not, you should add more detail.
“Put yourself in the position of what you're asking someone to do… Consider if it's the right thing,” said Jordan.
There’s also a nuance here depending on the creator’s experience level.
“You may work with smaller creators or younger creators, newer creators who are a great fit for your product and need extra information,” Jordan added.
Tip #5: Keep The Conversation Going
While the brief kicks off the campaign, it’s not a once-and-done.
As the campaign changes during check-ins or after reviewing campaign analytics, update the brief (with time stamps and notes) so it continues to be a central source of reference.
“A brief is a first step,” said Jordan. “You may need to have additional conversations to really help ensure that your ask is clear. Being willing to do that is super important. It's not just set it and forget it. That's setting yourself up for a really generic output.”
Influencer Campaign Brief Template
Briefs are action documents—they make it easy for creators to do their job (creating amazing content!) for your campaign.
Here’s what you can use as a template to outline your own influencer campaign briefs:
About the Brand & Product
Campaign Concept
Key Messages
Inspiration from Other Campaigns / Brands
Submission Guidelines
Do’s and Don’ts
For specific guidelines you can provide based on your platform of choice, check out this immersive guide for more details.
Get Started Writing Powerful Briefs
The briefing process not only sets the tone for the project, but also is the reference document you come back to when making decisions or solving problems.
The brief process is even easier when you have the right tools to help you with the admin around briefs, so you can focus on the quality of the document itself.
Later Influence can help you select the best influencers for your program, help you with outreach directly within the platform, and give you a central source for communication.
Schedule a demo with Later Influence to learn more about how we can help you scale your influencer program.
