A 7-Step Guide to Writing an Influencer Marketing Brief That Gets Results

Why would writing an influencer marketing brief be important to your business? This is the marketing that gets results, learn how to use influencers in this post.

Writing an Influencer Marketing Brief


Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

 

Whether you’re a small-business owner, digital entrepreneur, or online marketer, you are constantly developing resources. Consciously or unconsciously, you seek information, expertise, experience, connections, relationships, shortcuts, tools, and basically anything that allows you to evolve as a professional or as an organization.

 

Influencer marketing is one of the most underrated ways of skyrocketing your brand’s awareness and sales performance.

To me, influencer marketing is often considered the “results marketing”, and here’s why:

 

We’re living in a world where people lack individuality, so they constantly seek validation from people they trust (influencers)

People today have an impulsive online purchasing behavior. A well-designed influencer marketing campaign can provoke a lot of impulsive purchases.

An influencer is a respected individual who can form opinions. If used properly, an influencer can make their audience fall in love with your brand in no time.

 

Leveraging more than a few connected influencers (who are known, for example, by a specific city, country, or zone) can create massive effects in terms of brand positioning and business growth. In order to leverage influencers you have to first begin by writing an influencer marketing brief.

In today’s post, we’ll discuss the most important thing that you must deal with, the essence and playbook of your influencer marketing campaign – the brief.

 

The influencer marketing brief is like a special communication tool that can be served physically, as a written file, as an audio recording, or even as a video explanation.

By writing an influencer marketing brief, you’ll be establishing the expectations, requirements, the perspective of the project. A brief will save you time, money, and a lot of energy along the way, and that is why it’s crucial to spend enough quality time planning it accordingly.

Well, are you ready? Take a pen, a paper, some good vibes, and let’s go.

Create the Summary of the Campaign

The summary of your brief is a piece of text that explains – in large – what the campaign is about, what it tries to achieve, what are the aspects that need to be considered first, and it serves as the “first impression” of the project.

The summary needs to be carefully structured, so it flows clearly and professionally. A writer knows from paper or essay writing service exactly how to deal with such a task, as I’ve used plenty of them to help clients and contact influencers myself.  

The key deliverables, the key messages, the key rules of the campaign will be explained in another section, so focus on covering this summary from an angle of wholeness, make it broad rather than concise. Touch the points you need to touch (the purpose, the audience, the main interests) but leave some space because you’ll explain them later in the very same brief.

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

Explain the Key Messages

Let’s say that the summary was the first page of your influencer marketing brief. The second step, or the second page of your brief, should carefully explain the key messages of your content.

In this part, you should focus on the psychological effects that you want to obtain as a result of the entire campaign. A key message can be a breakthrough, a lesson, an inspiration, a motivation, a desire to do something or buy something, or anything that creates a psychological impact.

Think about how you want the campaign’s audience to feel once and after it interacts with the material promoted by the influencer you’ve appointed. Try to get into their shoes and put the details on a piece of paper.

Once you know what your campaign’s key messages are, it’s easy to create a bullet list accompanied by additional explanations for the points that required them. This is the second page.

Establish Specific Goals and Key Performance Indicators

The third step and the third page of writing an influencer marketing brief should talk about the goals and KPIs of your influencer marketing campaign.

I call these objectives, and some of the most common ones are as follows:

  • Improve brand awareness
  • Improve brand reputation
  • Improve product awareness
  • Improve product sales
  • Improve product reputation
  • Gain leads (email leads and other leads)
  • Improve traffic
  • Social media engagement/followers/fans

 

Now, you should choose one, and stick to that. I always advise marketers to keep their influencer marketing campaigns focused on a single goal.

If you choose one goal, then tracking, measuring, and optimizing your KPIs will be simpler and more accomplishable.

If you choose “improve traffic”, your main KPIs will be “website traffic, time spent on the website, the conversion rate of the site (visitors into leads/sales), etc.”.

Make sure you clearly establish the most important goals and KPI’s of the campaign and ensure that you make it understood in this section of the brief.

Conceive the Delivery Plan

The deliverables are common agreements that are initiated by you, and they represent the expectations you have concerning the deadlines, but also about the specifics of your campaign.

In this section, you’ll talk about the campaign’s specific rules, social tags, backlinks, landing pages, discount codes, hashtags, or CTAs.

This is the section of specifics, and you must ensure that you’re getting everything covered. You need to explain to the influencer what he shouldn’t miss and what is important to you. Here’s an example:

2x Facebook stories and posts (per week/ x4 weeks) featuring product X, using these hashtags, these tags, and these keywords in the description. – should be delivered by April 8th.

1x Blog post that talks about X topic encourages the target audience to do Y, and provides X backlink and Y discount opportunity.

Details, specifics, whatever’s on your mind.

Image from Pixabay

 

What to Do, What to Avoid

A professional influencer, even though he’s professional and experienced, can never know all the important details about your brand. Therefore, he might do some actions that can affect your brand’s reputation negatively. To avoid that, you should write a “What to Avoid” section and mention everything the influencer should pay attention to.

For example, to some brands, the lighting used on the logo is extremely important. To others, the positioning of the logo or the context in which it is presented matters a lot.

Also, some brands prefer not to tackle certain topics. For example, an altruistic brand will try to stay away from politics or anything that might damage its reputation and credibility. Think about what things you want the influencer to do and not to do, then make it loud and clear.

Don’t Be Shy to Mention Other Important Details

Okay, you might be thinking – what other important details could I cover since you’ve already told me to cover everything?

The answer is, I really don’t know. You must figure that out yourself. The idea behind this subheading, behind this advice, is this:

You’re the only one who knows the brand, the marketing approach, and the target audience at an advanced level. That means you’re the primary influencing factor that will contribute to the success or failure of your influencer marketing campaign.

Therefore, after your brief has reached the “What to Do, What to Avoid” section, read it two or three times, go to sleep, read it again, and think if there’s anything else (important) to add.

You shouldn’t write things that aren’t relevant, as that is not your purpose. The brief should be as short, concise, and impactful as possible. Some campaigns have a lot of rules and expectations, others not so much. That depends on you, on your budget, campaign, audience, and the influencer you connect.

Anyway – don’t be shy to mention anything that you feel as relevant.

Develop a Communication Bridge

Lastly, you should consider developing a relationship with the influencer you’re working with. That quality and strength of your relationship will define how work everything will work between you two.

When you learn and do your best to communicate effectively with an influencer, you’ll be able to send immediate feedback and produce adjustments to the campaign. It’s always great to change something immediately after you figure out the solution. That can’t really happen unless you create a stable communication bridge between you and your client.

That involves respect, decent payment, appreciation, and good vibes. If you approach a superior attitude the influencer will do his best to “escape” and finish with your work already, without involving the passion that your campaign actually needs.

 

Takeaways

Writing an influencer marketing brief is the first step towards influencer marketing success. It is the roadmap that both the influencer (the driver) and you (GPS) follow.

You always want your prospective influencers to understand and respect your brand’s culture, principles, and objectives. Without that understanding, the campaign is already corrupted.

After a prospective influencer inspects the brief, I’d highly suggest you ask some “trap” questions, some tough questions that will prove if he is the right person for the job or if he’s just pretending.