The 411 on Influencer Marketing briefs
“Always love receiving a Part Three Digital brief!” Versify.
Collectively as a team, we’ve been working with influencers for more than 20 years. It’s safe to say we now have an airtight and reliable briefing process that ensures quality influencer marketing campaigns for our clients!
Don’t just take it from us, though. We have received feedback from influencers, their agents, and clients alike on the high standard of our influencer marketing plans and briefs. They love how well detailed our briefs are, ensuring minimal amends and timely approvals. Along with positive feedback around ‘easy-to-follow’ industry and paid partnership guidelines, protecting both the influencer and the brand. Not forgetting, creating content that is inspiring, helpful and/or entertaining!
We deliver our influencer marketing briefs to such a high standard for our clients, considering how influencer collaborations and brand ambassadorships are aligned with brand’s commercial values including: Brand Awareness, Mental Availability, Online and Offline Sales.
We’re often asked how we prepare influencers for collaborations. The answer is that we take a COLLABORATIVE approach. Think of it this way; influencers are the experts in their niches. They know their audience inside out. They understand the styles and format of content that will be most engaging, authentic, and relatable for their followers. As well considering the timings of when is best to post organically.
We combine these factors along with our experience in social media and search marketing. Considering client’s brand strategy, their target customers, industry and platform trends, best-in-class content creation and what target audiences are searching for online.
5 step guide to briefing influencers.
We take into consideration a number of factors when qualifying influencers and content creators to be a part of a brand’s campaign, before presenting rationale proposals to our clients.
After service level agreements are in place, briefs are built out and pre-approved by our client [as well as any regulatory bodies as and when required]. This ensures that everyone is ‘on the same page’. Our clients know what to expect content-wise, in-keeping with the brand’s goals, tone-of-voice, values and guidelines. It also really builds excitement for the high-quality content they’re about to receive!
For each campaign we develop Key Performance Indicators, considering the collaborators previous content performance, channel algorithms, the time of year, popular culture and industry benchmarks.
The following details five key elements of our influencer marketing content briefs – happy reading…
1. Summary overview of the brand and campaign goals.
Perhaps the campaign brief in question is for an influencer who has been a long-term brand ambassador, or maybe it’s the first time engaging in a collaboration relationship for a brand. Either way, it’s time to get them better acquainted!
Our brief introductions always include a summary of the brand in question – this may include history, accolades, product and service offering, plans for the future, as well the campaign in more relevant detail and any goals content creators should be made aware of and how they’re going to help achieve these through their AMAZING content. And of course, thanking them for being a part of the campaign!
2. Rationale of why we are working with an influencer.
Usually at this stage the collaborator in question knows exactly why we are working with them, but this is a great opportunity to remind them, and our client. Whether it be their content niche, their demographic profile [or their community’s], their content style, values, community size and/or engagement rate.
3. A note of key dates and agreed content.
Here we specify the amount and type of content agreed, as well as if ‘advertising rights’ have also been agreed, for what platforms and the duration eg. weeks, months.
We acknowledge that everyone involved in an influencer marketing campaign are busy people, juggling multiple priorities. There may also be a number of approval milestones that are required, depending on the brand’s marketing team structure and regulatory requirements.
How do we help ensure campaign deadlines are met? We breakdown a simple easy-to-follow table detailing date and times for the following milestones to keep all parties on track:
· Briefing calls [as required]
· Content creation to be sent for approval
· Feedback/amend rounds [as required – we try to keep these to 1]
· Final approvals [considering approval requirement lead times]
· Go lives
· Reporting
4. Brand & regulatory guidelines
Depending on the industry and the stage we are at in a ‘brand x influencer relationship’, our briefs vary from 5-30 pages. For alcohol and early life nutrition there is a requirement for briefings to be more extensive to set expectations and ensure compliancy.
We have extensive experience working with alcohol brands in the UK and Ireland, ensuring campaigns are compliant with Drink Aware and obtain approval from Ireland’s Copy Clear, considering ASAI code. For more information on how we work with alcohol brands in Ireland, check out our blog post.
Our team also have many years’ experience, working with early life nutrition brands in Ireland, which is a highly regulated space.
To ensure both the brand and brand ambassador are protected by industry guidelines and regulations. It’s important to consider ASA/ASAI guidelines, such as adding Paid Partnership in platform content and where relevant ‘AD’ in captions and copy.
We’re aware that not all brand ambassadors have a lot of experience in these areas and aim to make our briefs as easy to digest as possible. Detailing guidelines with helpful and practical examples. As well as always being on hand to answer queries or give guidance.
5. Content briefing
Now we get into the content creation deliverables. Time to get creative! Content briefs are considerate of the brand’s holistic marketing strategy, and specifically their social media marketing strategy objectives. Content is informed by our qualifying ideation, informed by topic research and data insights. We also love to hear feedback from content creators on if they feel the content seems a good for them and their community.
This section of the brief can include:
· The channel/s the content will be created for eg. Instagram, TikTok etc
· The type of content to be created eg. Instagram Reels, Stories, Posts, Carousels or TikTok etc
· Key brand messages, taglines and call-to-actions that are required, whether they be in text overlays, voice overs or in a caption. [we try to keep these to a maximum of 2 to ensure authenticity and ensure messages effectively land with target audiences]
· Relevant tags or hashtags to be included in creative, copy or captions
· A storyboard or shot-list overview of what the content should look like and include
· Consideration of key ‘Do’s and don’ts’ e.g. not featuring other brands, considering aesthetics of location, ambience, setting, clothing and props.
· Any other requirements e.g. Cover images [considering featuring the influencer and brand/product clearly in the grid square when shooting in portrait for Reels].
· Examples of best-in-class examples of the influencer’s work and/or style or moodboard references, to give a bit of inspiration.
Our influencer marketing briefing process helps maximise quality output and minimise amends and rework – avoiding wasted time for all parties.
After the brief.
After a brief has been approved by a client, we send it to the influencer and their agent [where relevant] for feedback. We also have video calls to chat through briefs to ensure they understand the collaboration requirements fully.
We will be sharing more insight into our influencer marketing process on our blog, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. Sign up to our newsletter or follow of us for more helpful insights.
You can also check out some of our influencer marketing results for our clients.
Interested in working with us on your next influencer marketing campaign? We would love to hear from you, we are always up for a chat or a coffee, just drop us a message 😊