The best influencer briefs balance out creative freedom with brand guidelines and business goals. Giving too many requirements & restrictions to creators will make your collaboration appear forced and inauthentic.

The trick is to provide the maximum possible creative freedom, while also:

• Giving examples & inspiration to make content ideation easier
• Making sure campaign posts are on-brand
• Aligning everyone around the primary goal/KPI for the campaign

Preparing a brief template that checks those boxes is going to speed up your workflow drastically. Not to mention improving the creative output at the same time.

TL;DR? Here’s our template. Make a copy and customize it for your brand 😄.

What is an influencer brief

An influencer brief is a document that details everything a creator needs to know about working with a brand. A brief should contain direction & guidelines for content creation, plus business information like goals, company/product information, timelines and more.

Providing clear influencer briefs:

• Improves the quality of the content output
• Saves time on back-and-forth communications with each creator
• Shows that you're professional & organized
• Makes it easier for creators to work with you

7 things to include for an effective & concise influencer brief

1. Company & product overview

To keep your briefs concise, I’d recommend you write a very short introduction to your company and/or product. Instead of going into detail here, provide links to where the creator can learn more.

Consider sharing links to pages like About, Team, and Product pages that are relevant. David Hoos from Outloud Group (an influencer marketing agency) recommends sharing real product reviews:

We’ve found that including some example language pulled from real product reviews can help give creators a sense of the practical benefits that a brand’s product provides — and often provides language that resonates deeper with the creators audience.

You could also share (or link to) your media kit & logo here.

2. Campaign overview

Here’s where you’ll introduce the specific campaign you want to collaborate for. Include the most important details:

• What is the purpose of your campaign
• When will it begin
• Who are you trying to reach
• The offer (if relevant)

3. Objectives & KPIs

What does success look like? Make sure creators understand the goal of the campaign, and which metrics/KPIs you’ll be measuring to determine the success.

Keep in mind that not all creators are familiar with analytics & conversion tracking. Especially micro influencers. Depending on who you’re working with, it could be a good idea to keep the technical language & acronyms to a minimum.

Keep it simple for all parties. Choose one KPI that’s easy to understand & supports your goal. 

For example:

“Our goal is to sell monthly crab stick subscriptions. In order to track our success & ensure you’re credited for sales, we’ll give you a unique link & promo code. The primary KPI we’ll use to measure success is how many times your promo code is used.”

Even if you are personally tracking more influencer KPIs (e.g. clicks, adds to cart, social reach & engagement etc.), just sharing one KPI in your brief helps to increase clarity & focus.

If you can, add some extra tips. What can the creator do that helps them increase the KPI? It could be something basic like remembering to add their promo code & a clear CTA in captions.

Here's an example brief from Modash user WeFast.

In their briefing doc, it's abundantly clear that app installs is the singular objective. WeFast give clear guidance on which CTAs to use for different formats, with tips on what to do (and not to do) to maximize installs.

4. Deliverables & timeline (including review process)

Write down what you expect from creators, and when. That way, there are no surprises for either side. If relevant, specify the desired platforms and content formats.

If there’s a content review process, make sure that’s specified in your timeline.

For example:

• For this campaign, we’re asking creators to post 2 Reels and 2 Stories on Instagram
• All content should be posted between January 21st and January 30th 2022
• Please submit your content drafts to ambassadors@otterindustries.com for approval 1 week prior to posting

For videos, you could choose to be more specific. E.g. requesting a certain length, resolution, or other requirement.

5. Caption guidelines & inspiration

Add some direction for writing a post caption. Include the necessary hashtags, and remind creators about ad disclosure.

You could provide a few bullet points or key messages that a creator could use in their caption.

Here’s an example of a content brief for Veriff. The goal was to position Veriff as an attractive employer in Estonia. The writer used ‘fun facts’ like these to prompt caption ideas:

• Ashton Kutcher invested in Veriff. 

• Veriff was voted newcomer of the year by the #EstonianMafia. 

• They add on average 5 people per week to their team. 

If you plan to prompt ideas in a similar way, remember not to simply list out your product features. Think about interesting angles, the pains you’re solving, or the benefits of your features. For example:

❌ Our crab sticks have 8g protein per stick

✅ 65% of otter pups are malnourished because they don’t get enough protein in their diet. Our crab sticks are an easy source of protein with 8g per stick.

6. Visual guidelines & inspiration

Think about providing guardrails. Like with the caption, you want to maintain that creative freedom, but you still need to make sure the campaign & content aligns with your goals.

Give as many examples as possible. Past content that you liked, and/or a moodboard showing the general style that fits your brand.

If you do have any specific creative requirements, mention them here. Here’s a few examples that a brief could include:

• Create a theme (e.g. ‘use confetti’)
• Request something specific (e.g. use our product)
• Prompt creators to end videos with a CTA
• Request that your logo is visible

7. Payment & contact details

Payment information is something you might already have discussed separately. It should be in your influencer contract, or at least agreed in writing via email. To reduce any potential questions from creators, you could reiterate this information at the end of the brief.

If rates vary based on negotiations with different influencers, you can still write down general information without specifying the exact rate. For example:

“All invoices should be submitted to ambassadors@otterindustries.com after the campaign is completed. Here’s our details to address your invoice.”

Use our free influencer brief template

There's lots of ways to prepare an influencer creative brief. Our template uses Google Slides, but that's not the only way. It can be a Google Doc, a PDF, a video, an email, or anything else. As long as you can find a way to communicate the most important points (above), you're good. Don't stress about the format, and don't overthink it.

To get started quickly, you can use our influencer brief template. Open it up, hit 'File', and make a copy. Customize it to suit your brand.

How to keep track of influencer content

You’ve sent your briefs, and content starts to go live. Great! What’s next?

Depending on how many creators you’re working with, it could start to get very cumbersome to keep track of content.

• Who has posted? How many times?
• Were their posts on-brand?
• Did they include the right hashtags & ad disclosures?
• How much reach & engagement did each influencer or post get?

Answering these questions manually is time consuming & painful. Screenshotting Stories every day before they disappear? No thanks.

Modash has an influencer content monitoring tool that automates this process. You simply need to tell the tool which influencers are in your campaign, and which hashtags to track. After that, you’ll automatically save all campaign posts in one place.

With that, you can very quickly check one place to spot any creatives that don’t meet your guidelines. Equally, you might catch an amazing creative that you want to share with your other ambassadors.

You can also get an overview per influencer, to simply see how many times they’ve posted (in which formats), and the reach achieved. That makes it very easy to see who’s doing well, and if you need to follow up & help anyone.

Monitoring content is a game changer for scaling up your influencer marketing channel. Get a free trial to try it out for 14 days.

Influencer brief examples

We've already seen a couple of example briefs from Veriff and WeFast, as well as our Google Slides template. Here's 3 more examples from our friends in the influencer marketing world to get inspired.

P.S. We're on the hunt for more examples! If you have a brief of your own that you're willing to share, please let us know! We'll publish it here with a backlink to your site. hello@modash.io.

1. Mobilfox rebrand (Instagram)

See the brief (PDF)

In this example, Mobilfox emphasize their brand, positioning, and values. They make the goal very clear (gain followers on a new IG account). They also provide content guidelines (what to post & when), without being overly restrictive. For example, they request that influencers post a 'haul' style Story set, but they leave it to the creator to choose which products they'll show & why according to their own style.

2. Nivea Men fresh gel (YouTube)

See the brief (Google Slides)

This brief is in Dutch, unfortunately (unless you speak Dutch, then you're golden!). We've translated the headings, and you can get the gist of the general layout & approach.

Nivea give ideas, but encourage creators to come up with their own creative hook. Specifically, they ask that creators convey their key messages in their own words.

3. SnR live stream (Twitch)

See the brief (PDF)

Something a little different for our last example. Here's a brief for Twitch influencers before a live stream.

To let the audience experience the emotions from this battle is the most essential goal.

There's a little more detail in this one, to explain the format of the game. That said, Gamesture still take care to make sure the creators understand their goals. In this case, to make the viewers feel enjoyment & excitement.