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With influencer marketing gaining momentum, more and more marketers reach out to popular content creators to promote their products or services. And while such partnerships are an effective tool for winning new audiences, they still have their challenges and pitfalls. Effective communication of the requirements and expectations is an essential part of the marketer’s collaboration with an influencer. A comprehensive influencer brief will help you get exactly what you need at the end of the campaign.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the importance of proper campaign briefing to help you avoid common mistakes. Check out the tips below and learn how to compile an influencer brief in the most transparent and all-encompassing way.

Influencer Brief: Plan and Execute

Marketers’ lives would be much easier if influencers could guess how the brand sees the ideal collaboration. Still, it’s our task — and sometimes quite a challenge — to formulate, document, and put across an efficient brief for the influencer marketing campaign.

Campaign briefing is a tool that can help marketers and influencers clearly understand the requirements and expected results of the collaboration.  

Define the Goals Prior to Writing a Brief

Before reaching out to influencers, it’s worth highlighting the general purpose of your influencer marketing campaign, as well as the results the brand wants to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Maybe you are looking for a boost in your landing page visits? Or are you aiming straight for higher sales or more app downloads? Each objective requires its own specific message and strategy.

Once you have a clear vision of the goals and desired results, it’s time to search for influencers that have the best coverage of your brand’s target audience.

What’s the key to success when launching a campaign? Proper communication with influencers is the cornerstone for the campaign’s effectiveness. A comprehensive influencer brief usually consists of the following points:

Project Overview

To promote your product, an opinion leader needs to know the product’s characteristics and understand how it works. An influencer usually tries to ensure that the product matches his or her audience’s interests:

“We want to make sure that any partner we bring onboard makes sense for our players/streamers to represent and also that they make sense to our fanbase,” states Scott McMillan, a professional gamer and Twitch streamer.

Product overview helps to find out whether there’s a match between the audience and the product. Marketers always conduct user research, but no one knows their audience better than influencers themselves. So, it is beneficial for both brand and influencer to offer people what will resonate with them.

It’s a good idea to provide a short checklist of the product’s features and benefits – even if you don’t require them to be mentioned in the deliverables. This detail will help an influencer to get some perspective while communicating your ideas to the followers and answering their questions.

Therefore, we recommend starting your influencer brief with a short description of the product and its features, benefits, and ways it differs from competitors.

Agency Tip: It is also vital to mention the exact name of your product or app, especially if it consists of several words, to avoid confusion with a similar but incorrect brand mention. Emphasize the importance of using the product name without shortening it, changing the order of words, etc.

Scope of Deliverables

The following section describes the type of content you are looking to receive from the content creator. Note that briefing details vary significantly depending on the media channel being leveraged.

When working with Twitch influencers, for instance, it makes sense to indicate how many times a streamer should mention the product during the stream, the length of the promotion, and the time span, for example, at the 20th minute of the stream, at the end of the stream, or at the beginning of the second hour, etc. If you expect any additional actions from the streamer, make sure to specify them in the brief as well. Let’s say you’d like the influencer to tweet about the sponsored stream, to place your logo on his Twitch page, or to set up an automated message in the stream’s chat – you will need to outline all of these expected deliverables in the campaign brief.

If you partner with YouTube influencers, the content specifications would be different. Collaborating on a dedicated video, it would be great to provide a detailed plan for the video with the time frames and critical talking points. You can specify the overall length of the video, and describe the footage requirements. If your promotion is limited to an integrated video, it’s important to state the length of the sponsored integration.

When collaborating with an Instagram influencer, stipulate the number of posts or/and stories and their format – photo or video.

Deadlines

You may say that it’s quite obvious that the influencer brief should include publication timing. However, it’s important to mention all the details of the project’s timeline, such as the date by which an influencer needs to submit the content for review, how much time the content creator has to make changes if needed, and when the content should go live after approval.

These deadlines should be aligned with your overall marketing strategy. This way, you will be able to arrange your content plan more consistently if you have to manage a dozen influencers at once.

Brand Assets

Sometimes influencers might want to showcase their relationship with the brand by using the products of its creative work. If there are any marketing materials the brand wants to see in the sponsored content, it is a good practice to share them with the influencer. Some marketing materials that definitely can be included in the influencer brief are the brand’s logo, key art, video footage with a product shot or demo, etc.

Providing the influencer with these materials will save you from seeing an incorrect/outdated brand logo or other visual content.

Content Requirements

The most crucial part of the influencer brief embraces the requirements for sponsored content. We recommend listing them and adding a short explanation for every point. Start with highlighting the priorities – what information has to be mentioned and what you leave to be included at the discretion of the influencer.

Keep in mind that content production is creative work, and strict requirements from a brand might lead to lack of authenticity. We value opinion leaders for their connection with the audience — they know what their followers like and how to communicate with them. Each influencer has a unique speaking style and approach to content creation. Therefore, any influencer agency or marketer should aim for the best balance between brand guidelines and creative freedom.

Here are some basic tips on content requirements to specify in your influencer brief:

• Provide footage requirements for the video — specify what location or surroundings the promotion should be filmed in.
• Point out what product features should be mentioned and how the product demo should look.
• Guide the influencer on what hashtags should be used. Also, provide the name of the brand’s social media account for tagging purposes.
• Don’t forget to mention what should be avoided in the sponsored content.
• Spell out the call-to-action an influencer should integrate into the message.
• Don’t forget to provide some guidance about the video description: if it should include some information about the sponsor, it’s better to specify that as well. Provide influencers with the link to the brand’s website or other necessary details.
• One more vital thing marketers should take care of is FTC compliance. Regardless of the channel that you use for influencer marketing, influencers have to include a sponsorship disclaimer, and it is a good idea to remind them about it. You can even provide standard wording for this disclaimer, so the influencer’s task will be only to add it to the post or video description.

Giveaway mechanics

A sponsored giveaway can be a great tool to drive audience engagement. However, to avoid misunderstandings that might result in a negative backlash, it’s better to instruct the influencer properly on the giveaway’s mechanics. Important specifics of the giveaway that need to be clearly stated in the influencer brief include:

• Timing. What is the period of the giveaway, when will the winners be announced, and when will the prizes be delivered?
• Entry conditions. Make sure that the influencer is aware of all requirements for members of his/her audience to take part in the giveaway.
• Winners determination. To make the audience feel confident about the fair terms of the contest, the influencer should provide a clear vision of how the winners will be selected.
• Prizes. Specify how many prizes are envisaged in the gift pool.

Wrapping Up

Influencer brief is a tool that helps marketers and influencer agencies to spell out their requirements and expectations to ensure effective execution of a campaign. It helps everyone to avoid misunderstandings, missed deadlines, extra iterations of the content, and reputational losses.

The key elements of any influencer brief include influencer marketing campaign goals and objectives, product overview, content requirements, deliverables, and timing. The more detailed and precise your influencer brief is, the fewer questions will come up along the way. If you plan to launch an influencer campaign for your brand, don’t hesitate to contact Cloutboost influencer agency for help.

So as not to lose these tips, save this handy infographic on how to write an influencer marketing brief: