How to Write a Killer Social Media Influencer Briefing That Will Give You the Content You Need

Working with social media influencers can sometimes be complicated as you don’t usually meet everyone that’s contributing to your campaign face-to-face. You exchange emails, join platforms, send briefs and mood boards, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

You can write detailed instructions for everything that you expect to see from the content creators, but can you be 100% sure that they get the right idea on what you’re asking them for?

Tell them everything about you, or better yet — show them!

You can’t expect every person out there to know your brand through and through. So the best thing you can start your brief with is an in-depth introduction.

It doesn’t have to be long at all! If you have any visuals that you can use to introduce yourself, your brand and product include them here. Give your influencers your logo, website, social media, promos — anything you can think of that will show them exactly where you are coming from and what you are all about.

The more they understand about you and your business the better.

Explain what it is that you need — and how do you want it to look like

This is the most straightforward and tricky part of the brief at the same time. It seems nice, easy and simple to list a few things that you want to achieve. But you can very easily forget that since you know what kind of content you’d like to see, you have a clear vision of the potential result in your head.

It is not as obvious for everyone else.

When you dig deeper and provide a meaningful, descriptive brief, you will receive responses that are better quality and closer to your original idea.

Include:

1. Social media channels you’d like to target.

It’s not uncommon for influencers to have more than 2 or 3 channels that they are actively developing and maintaining. If you are not precise about where you’d like to see your content you may be in for a huge surprise.

2. The (very) specific type of content you’re looking for.

If you think that writing that you need a review or a photo with product placement is enough — it’s not even close. Go into the detail and put as much information as you can here.

Do you need your product to be the focus? Or would you prefer more natural content with the product acting as a part of the bigger picture?

Would you prefer an in-depth review of your product or quick unboxing?

Are you going for an unstructured, fun, spontaneous content? Or would you like something technical, analyzing different features of your product one by one with examples?

Do you want your brand mentioned in a specific way? Are there any keywords you’d like to use?

Is there a color palette that you would like to stick to?

How many images/videos/posts/streams do you need the influencers to produce?

The more details you include in this section, the closer the final content will be to what you want it to be.

3. A quick summary of what you need the campaign to do for you

Ideally, you will be able to make your influencers understand what you are planning to get out of the campaign they are helping you with. To be on the same page as you, they need to know if the content they are producing is meant to sell your product, educate people about its use, or get a lot of mentions of it in social media.

There are many angles that you may be getting at here and making it clear for everyone will help you hit the nail on the head.

The VERY IMPORTANT bits

In other words — the small print.

Things that you need to include here are for example the due date for any submissions, any websites or tags that the influencers have to add to their posts or videos, and the FTC/EFTA/advertising guidelines that they need to comply with.

You know that every bit of sponsored content needs to indicate that it’s in fact advertising, but since influencers come from all kinds of places around the globe they may not be 100% up to speed on that, and it’s up to you to let them know.

Also, if you are tracking the responses to your campaign, don’t forget to include a specific call to action, referral link or a UTM-tagged landing page that you are using.

When you get your brief together, remember to double-check it and add anything else that may spring to mind. It’s better to be specific, write everything down, and get it right the first time than be overly generic, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

How do you usually deal with your marketing briefs? Do you prefer in-depth guidelines or a simple and sweet approach?