5 Key Ingredients Any Creative Brief Should Include

Effective influencer marketing relies on finding the right creators to work with, and providing them with a set of guidelines to ensure the content they produce is fit for purpose, representing your brand appropriately.

It's important to share a clear and concise creative brief with the influencers working on your campaigns. A creative brief is a document that outlines the key elements of your influencer campaign, including objectives, target audience, and desired brand outcomes. 

A well-written creative brief can increase the chances of success for your influencer marketing campaign, so that you get the best possible return on your marketing spend.

What should your briefs include? Here are 5 key ingredients to consider when collaborating with social media influencers.

Ingredient #1. Clear campaign objectives

Key inputs

• What do you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign? For instance, are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive sales conversions, or generate leads? 

• What’s most important to your brand - reach (total views on your content) or engagement (having a high ratio of views to interactions, such as likes, shares and comments)? There will likely be a level of compromise, so clarify this upfront.

Define your campaign objectives clearly to make sure your chosen influencers fit the brief, and to help measure the outcomes of your campaign at the other end.

Ingredient #2. Well-defined target audience and niche

Key inputs

• Who’s your target audience for this campaign? Define this in as much depth as you can, using data to get a full understanding of the audience. This includes age, gender, location, culture, beliefs, interests, content preferences and behaviors.

• What’s your brand’s niche and sub-niche? Once more, the more precise you can be about this, the more tailored and relevant the influencers’ content can be. 

Understanding your audience's characteristics will help you choose relevant influencers who intersect with your audience, and it’ll make sure the content strategy reflects the audience needs and preferences. 

All the content as part of the campaign will need to be very relevant to viewers, so spending time honing in on your target user group cannot hurt. Likewise, your niche will influence the type of content the creators will need to post.

Ingredient #3. Message and tone of voice

Key inputs

• What message do you want to communicate to your audience through your influencer campaign? 

• How do you want your brand to come across to your audience? 

Sharing the above with influencers will help to align their content with your brand's values and tone of voice. 

Ideally, the creators’ content and styles will already align well to these, so they’re able to genuinely represent and promote your brand.

Ingredient #4. Explicit requirements and guidelines

Key inputs

• What are the specific requirements for your influencer campaign? This might include specific hashtags for the creators to use, calls-to-action (like signing up to a newsletter, clicking on a link that redirects viewers to your products, sharing the video with their friends, entering a contest for prizes, etc.), or content guidelines. 

Clearly outlining these requirements will help ensure that your influencers understand what’s expected of them, and that they’re able to deliver on your campaign objectives. 

The influencers should have no doubt as to what’s expected of them, and how they need to deliver it, so there’s no room for misunderstandings or miscommunications which could put the campaign at risk later on.

Ingredient #5. Budget and campaign or promotion timelines

Key inputs

• How much are you spending on this influencer marketing campaign?

• What’s the duration for the campaign?

• Specifically, how often and when should creators post branded content? Ideally, this will be coordinated across the various influencers your brand is working with, to maximize the overall effectiveness of the promotion.

Having a clear budget and timeline will help you manage your resources and ensure that your influencer campaign stays on track!

Conclusion

By including these key elements in your creative brief, you'll be well placed to create an effective influencer marketing campaign that helps your brand reach its goals, and engage with your target audience in an effective way.

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