When you’re working with social media influencers as a brand, you have to make sure that they are aware of all of the requirements for their posts to be in line with your brand message. Even though everything appears fine and dandy on the surface, brands often run into issues and misunderstandings with influencers.
Instead of doing it in a disorganized way through communicating with the influencers and explaining some issues as they pop up, a smart way to go about it is to craft an influencer brief that will show them exactly how they should work.
This will not only save you a lot of time, but will give your influencer partner a clear and precise guide on how to post for your brand.
- Why Do You Need an Influencer Brief?
- Sections of a Perfect Influencer Brief
- #1. Brand/business information
- #2. Campaign information
- #3. Describe Goals and KPIs
- #4. Define Deliverable and Timetables
- #5. Include Guidelines for Content Approval
- #6. Include Examples of Good Practice
- #7. Add Visuals and Images
- Conclusion
Why Do You Need an Influencer Brief?
As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate, and it can be tempting to skip the process of creating an influencer brief in order to save time. However, this will actually waste your time in the long term.
Below, we are bringing you some of the most important reasons you should invest time in crafting a great influencer brief:
- Reputation Building: top influencers get thousands of campaign requests every day and you somehow have to present your brand’s message in a captivating way in order to partner up with the best influencers. Having an impressive influencer brief increases your chances of landing some of the best influencers out there.
- Clear Definitions and Expectations: for every influencer, it’s important to know what’s expected of them in terms of delivery and performance before the actual campaign starts. If you craft a detailed influencer brief, you can outline some of the most important guidelines for your influencer campaigns before they start.
- Straightforward Action Plan: your influencer brief should contain a clear call-to-action that will encourage the influencer to move forward and contact your brand for cooperation.
Sections of a Perfect Influencer Brief
Invest time into crafting an impressive influencer brief and remember to include the most important points that will help both you and the influencer to achieve success with your campaign.
You can follow this checklist of sections for an influencer brief:
#1. Brand/business information
Start by explaining who you are and what your company does. Include your logo, visuals and other multimedia content that will present this content in an interesting way.
“Try to briefly explain the journey of your company from its founding to present day, along with plans for the future. Keep it short and impactful in order not to lose interest or go too wide in your explanations in the beginning,”-says Diana Adjadj, a marketer and writing contributor to Studicus.
You can also include the company’s marketing strategy both on and off social media and include some of the examples of successful cooperation with influencers.
#2. Campaign information
After you have introduced your company, you can go into specifics about the campaign you’re about to roll out.
Emphasize whether it’s a general brand campaign or you want to advertise a single product or service. Also, outline the predicted rollout of the campaign from beginning to end. You can do this as a rough sketch because you’ll go into more details later on.
#3. Describe Goals and KPIs
This is one of the most important parts of your influencer brief. Every potential partner wants to know what exactly is expected of them. This way, if they see that your goals are unattainable, they can reject working on your campaign and save you and themselves time and money.
You can use metrics in the form of visuals like graphs or diagrams to explain your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) in detail.
#4. Define Deliverable and Timetables
Just like other parts of the campaign, deliverables should be clearly defined before any work on the campaign starts. Outline what kind of content you expect and provide guidelines on how the deliverables could be more in line with your brand. For example, if you want to run an Instagram campaign, do you want posts or Instagram stories?
It’s also important to lay out the exact timetable for all deadlines: clearly state the start and end date of the campaign. If you’re not sure yet, still include it into your brief and add that the timeframe will be discussed later on.
#5. Include Guidelines for Content Approval
Every influencer’s nightmare is to get content rejected over and over again just because the requirements weren’t clear enough during the negotiation phase. In order to avoid this and prevent any possible misunderstandings, you have to clearly emphasize what it takes for the influencer’s content to get approved.
If you don’t have strict guidelines, but want to allow your influencer some creativity and freedom in the content they post, you should also include this information into your brief. This will let them know that they will have freedom to express themselves and still get their content approved. This is a big benefit for many influencers.
#6. Include Examples of Good Practice
If you have cooperated with influencers before, it’s a great idea to include some of your successful influencer campaigns and describe what was great about them. This will give the influencer an exact representation of what you consider to be an amazing campaign.
It’s also a great way to show that you value your cooperation with influencers and that you consider them to be a remarkable addition to your marketing strategy.
#7. Add Visuals and Images
Throughout all the sections that we have listed so far, it’s recommended to include visuals to make your brief as engaging and compelling as possible.
Remember, many top influencers go through dozens of influencer briefs every day, so you can set your brand apart from the rest by using interesting imagery, colors, typeface, etc.
An influencer brief is not just a guideline document that shows the potential influencer what they should and shouldn’t do: it’s also a pitch to them. Based on your brief, an influencer will decide whether they and your brand are a right fit.
Conclusion
If you invest time and effort into crafting a perfect influencer brief, you could land some of the top influencers in the world and skyrocket your company’s success.
Influencer marketing is one of the most successful forms of advertising in 2019 and is expected to continue to expand in 2020. Make sure you don’t miss out on the potential of great influencer campaigns due to unpreparedness or a bad brief!