Influencer marketing returns roughly $5.78 (£4.35) for every $1 (£0.75) spent, and 66% of UK brands expect influencer campaigns to pay for themselves within a month.
It’s all down to an influencer’s authenticity, relatability, and (often huge) online reach. All well and good, but the key to successfully harnessing those benefits often relies on just one short document: the influencer brief.
It’s a document that a brand or marketer gives to an influencer as part of its marketing campaign, serving as a detailed guide that sets out everything expected on each side. You’re basically trying to balance creative freedom with some adherence to brand guidelines while working toward a certain goal.
An effective brief should:
- Improve the quality and effectiveness of content
- Save time on back-and-forth messages or misunderstandings
- Set out a clear timeline
- Clearly communicate your goals and what’s important to you
Knowing how to write an influencer brief is a skill in and of itself, so let’s check out what to include, how to set it out, and how it differs from a UGC brief.
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1. Company and product overview: who you are and what you offer
Briefly cover your company ethos and typical brand messaging. “It’s about inspiration, not a company history,” says Imogen Coles, head of influence at marketing agency Ogilvy. Try offering three words that capture your brand’s personality and three you’d never associate with it.
Next, put the campaign in context by describing what the product or service is and why customers love it. Adding snippets of positive reviews is a particularly effective way to convey that.
2. Campaign overview: what you’re hoping to achieve
An influencer who understands the overall goals of the campaign is far more likely to help you achieve them, so cover these key points:
- Purpose: Are you boosting awareness? Driving sales? What does success look like for this campaign?
- Audience: Include key demographics, such as age, gender, education, location, and income, and interests, such as sustainability and fitness.
3. Deliverables: what you want
Define exactly what influencers must deliver.
Content
Provide a clear and specific overview of your desired content. Common details include:
- Format
- Platform
- Concept
- Duration
- Date and time
- Key talking points and actions
- Audio
- Thumbnail
- Number of images or video slides
- Image and video quality
- Time left online
Instead of “Instagram content,” you may request “three Instagram Reels that mention the product’s durability; 30 to 45 seconds long; posted 1, 3, and 9 December between 5 and 9 p.m. GMT; shot in 1080x1920p with a 9:16 aspect ratio; staying live for at least six months.”
If you’d also like the content cross-posted across different platforms, this is where to mention that.
Being specific increases the likelihood that you’ll receive exactly what you paid for – and influencers will have an easier time planning content too.
Analytics
Cover the metrics you want tracked and the desired date range. Common metrics include:
- Views and reach
- Engagement figures, such as likes, shares, saves, and comments
- Click-through rates
- Purchases
- Audience demographics
Raw footage
This includes unedited video files, alternate takes, and B-roll your editing team can repurpose, generally provided for an additional fee.
Text
Most social posts include text alongside other media, so adding some direction can be helpful. Such opportunities include:
- Captions
- Descriptions
- Links
- Tags
- Mentions
4. Timeline: feedback and communication process
Specifying when content should go live is one thing, but you probably want influencers to touch base a couple of times – especially if there’s a long lead time – so you can keep tabs and address any issues.
Ensure that happens by setting out a timeline that includes:
- When and how you’ll communicate, such as DMs or Zoom calls
- When content should be submitted for review
- When feedback will be received
- Maximum number of revisions
Influee’s Katja Orel offers this standard format for revisions: “One review at storyboard or rough cut, one review at final cut, 48-hour brand turnaround on each round.”
5. Regulations: how to disclose
Per UK law, content creators must disclose when they’ve been incentivised to promote a brand or product. Their failure to comply with ad disclosure rules could reflect on you (and possibly incur fines), so specify exactly which tags they should use and where they should go.
6. Usage rights: how content can be used
Outline how you plan to use the content after it’s been posted. You may include:
- Organic rights: Allows sharing of a post on your own social media pages.
- Paid rights: Allows use of content in paid advertising, such as Spark Ads on TikTok, either through your own brand or through an influencer’s account. (This is known as “whitelisting.”)
- Perpetual rights: Allows the use of content indefinitely rather than the typical six to 12 months.
Unless specified in your agreement, the influencer retains intellectual property rights for all content they create, even if it was created at your request. That also means they are free to post it on their own channels if they wish (and so long as they clearly label the content as “sponsored”), unless your contract specifically prohibits it.
7. Language guidelines: What should (and shouldn’t) be said
“As a brand, you hire creators for a reason,” Marissa Hoffman, creator marketing manager for the dating app Hinge, told Link In Bio. “The best move you can make is to give the creator all the right tools to guide them, but let the creator do what they do best and create content that is natural and exciting to them.”
In other words, give them enough information and guidance to stay on brand without inhibiting their ability to produce authentic content.
What to say
Focus on two or three key messages to communicate. Beyond that, it’ll start sounding a little staged and salesy – exactly the effect you’re trying to avoid through influencer marketing.
You might also offer:
- Preferred tone of voice
- Examples of past content that you liked
- Positive feedback from existing customers
- A mood board or aesthetic inspiration
What to avoid
Rules that seem obvious to you may appear less so to influencers, potentially leading to anything from negative publicity to legal issues.
Most briefs, for example, stipulate that influencers must not:
- Make comparisons to other brands by name
- Make unsupported claims about a product’s benefits (health claims being a particular concern)
- Record with alcohol or other recreational drugs in frame
- Use gross, offensive, or politically charged language
8. Payment details
Payment terms should be in your contract already, but it’s worth reiterating to avoid any potential misunderstandings.
Enumerate:
- How much will be paid
- Payment structure (is it a flat fee, commission-based, or a combination?)
- Where and when invoices should be submitted
- How soon payment will be made after the campaign is completed
Each influencer content brief is a little different according to market, campaign, audience, platform, and other niche factors, but these examples collected by influencer marketing agency The Cirqle furnish a good model from which to work.
Credit: PeopleImages/Shutterstock
- Brand and product: four short sentences describing who you are, what makes you different, what you’re offering, and why customers should be interested
- Campaign: one sentence that covers the key thing an audience should take from the content
- Audience: three to five bullet points that cover who your audience is and what they care about
- Deliverables and dates: format, particulars, draft dates, and posting dates – best set out in a table
- Nonnegotiable inclusions: up to three talking points, plus links, tags, and number of CTAs
- Nonnegotiable restrictions: claims, language, and associations to avoid
- Usage: rights duration and scope
- Disclosure: how and where ad disclosure should be made (on each platform when posting to multiple)
- Payment: how much will be paid, when, and any contact details associated with the payment (in other words, who the influencer should contact if they need to chase the payment)
Influencer marketing content is posted from the influencer’s own channel, leveraging their audience, credibility, and creativity. Their own personality and sway is central to their role in the campaign.
User-generated content (UGC) is delivered to brands directly for use in their own marketing, relying more heavily on the content than the UGC creator, who needn’t necessarily have their own audience on social media.
As such, a UGC marketing brief is typically much stricter.
“Everything I’ve learned about keeping influencer briefs light? With UGC creators, I do the exact opposite,” says Brieflee founder Beverly Banahene. “They don’t know your product, your audience, or your customers’ language…That’s why UGC briefs are brand-led: you give the direction.”
In contrast with your average influencer creative brief, briefs given to UGC creators typically include:
- Stylistic choices, such as fonts, primary and secondary colours, and editing styles that align with your brand
- Specific B-roll and alternate-take requirements
- Pricing per asset, with full usage rights generally transferred from creator to brand