A clear influencer brief is the cornerstone of every high-performing influencer marketing campaign.
Why? Because it offers your campaign a structure, provides a set direction and ensures all parties involved are clear on the desired outcomes. It also limits the potential for wasted time and marketing budget. Ultimately, great briefs mean a greater return on investment.
Of course, many other factors come into play, such as selecting the best influencers, creating detailed campaigns, setting clear goals and leveraging influencer involvement throughout your marketing effort.
In this article, we are going to focus on the 5 most important things you should be doing and considering when creating an influencer brief.
#1 Communicate Your Goals
There is no denying that there is a buzz around influencer marketing. Just navigate to your favourite influencer’s page and you are likely to find a whole host of collaborations and partnerships with some exciting brands.
If everyone else is doing it - you should too, right? Well not exactly. Influencers should only be included in your marketing when working with them will directly help you achieve your marketing goals.
For example, if your marketing goal is to develop a position of thought leadership in your market, then working with influencers can be a great idea. Whereas if your goal is to simply increase brand visibility, then other methods such as paid ads might work better.
If influencer collaborations are a good tool for achieving your goals, then you should clearly communicate these goals in your brief. This is for two key reasons:
It makes it clear what you are trying to achieve, allowing influencers to offer insight and expertise on how best to reach success
It makes it clear to the influencer why you have chosen to work with them and creates influencer buy-in.
#2 Keep it Short
Nobody wants to read pages and pages of a creative brief, especially not influencers who are often busy with multiple projects at once. Long briefs can also often be skimmed or not read in their entirety, meaning some of the key and most important points can be lost in the noise.
Offering a short, concise and direct brief is the best way to keep influencers engaged in your project and can also be the best way to ensure that the most important points actually get communicated clearly.
If you must write more than a page, it can be beneficial to include an executive summary at the top to highlight everything that is crucial to campaign success.
#3 Provide Creative Freedom
One of the biggest benefits of working with influencers is the creative expertise and insight they bring to the table. After all, most influencers have built their audience by creating content that
is engaging and compelling to those who follow them.
So, it seems strange that many brands decide to dictate to influencers exactly what content to create. All too often we see odd and unnatural looking branded content in influencers' feeds that has been over briefed. This can be a huge turn off to the influencer's followers.
A better approach is to provide influencers with as much creative freedom as possible.
Of course, the higher the level of creative freedom, the higher the level of risk. So, it is important to find the fine line between managing this risk and getting the best creative results.
A large part of managing risk will be done through the influencer selection process, ensuring that you find influencers who will responsibly represent your brand. However, you can also offer guidance in your briefs such as setting clear boundaries for creative work and communicating best practices.
#4 Set Clear Expectations
Although it is beneficial to offer influencers creative freedom, it is also important to be clear on exactly what will be expected of them when they take part in your campaign. After all, your are making a commercial arrangement by agreeing to pay money in exchange for a service - so you need to be clear on what you expect from that service.
You should set expectations in areas in which the influencer can directly deliver, such as:
Type of content
Platform
Post times
Post frequency
However, it can be a bad idea to set expectations for areas that the influencer cannot directly impact such as:
Content views
Content likes
Content shares
Content comments
Content sentiment
#5 Offer Inspiration
The majority of influencers are creative by nature. This means that a long, wordy briefs can often be a turnoff. We have already mentioned how keeping your brief short is a good way to keep influencers engaged. You can also use inspirational visual content to help inspire them and offer insight into what you are trying to achieve.
For example, you may include a ‘mood board’ as part of your brief to highlight the vibe you are aiming for. This can be a much better approach to influencing the creative process than trying to detail exactly what the influencer should create.
Offering visual inspiration like this can also help provide some consistency across all influencer content, whilst still tapping into their own unique creative style. This is especially beneficial when repurposing influencer content.
Creating a Killer Influencer Brief: Summary
It is clear that writing a killer influencer brief is incredibly important when it comes to campaign success. Get it right and you will benefit from the full power of influencer marketing, get it wrong and you are likely to waste a lot of time and money - potentially even damaging your brand image.
How could you improve your influencer briefs? Use our tips as inspiration to knock your next one out of the park.
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