1. The 15 inputs of a successful influencer campaign brief

Getting a strong influencer brief right is tricky and requires a lot of upfront planning and thinking. Get it wrong and it’s going to cost you a lot of money and repeat back- and forths with creators. In order to get your campaign right, we look at 15 key inputs that we’ve highlighted below, that you should be thinking about every single time you work with creators.

Why is this so important? Because we’ve seen time and time again that good briefs attract 4x more creator applications than briefs that are poorly written or don’t address the necessary creative details adequately.

Fair compensation and pay is critical and also have a profound impact on your creator application rate, but there are many other pieces of information that, if left out, are absolutely critical to be added into your briefing templates.

‍

Say you want to have influencers producing and sharing content across Instagram, you need to take into consideration the below guidelines table that highlights all the required dimensions, resolution and ratios across the most popular IG content formats. It’s really important to share these in advance of your content creation efforts from influencers as these are the formats that are required to run paid social ads.

‍

2. Structured briefs produce high-performing influencer creative

Great briefs clearly speak towards your objective and capture one message that’s clearly defined in the creative. Great examples of these briefs are provided in the next section and follow the same structure, with a slightly different creative angle.

Examples of great creative as a result of a strong campaign brief are provided across the three examples below:

About You‍

‍Routinely

On that Ass

‍

For influencers to be producing high-performing creative assets requires investing time into writing a good creative brief, in addition to contracting the right creators and acquiring IP rights. Leveraging our Performance Dashboard's insights, you’ll unlock focus for your influencer efforts, to ensure they’re only producing and launching partnerships with the highest possible potential, leveraging more than a pretty picture or just vanity metrics.

3. Clear KPI’s drive great influencer creative

When you consider the enormous landscape of KPIs to manage across a company’s social channels, you quickly lose track of the ones that matter. This is especially true for influencer marketing. We become so obsessed with the creative itself that we forget to keep an active eye on the performance of the influencer. Also because most brand marketers are simply ill-equipped to look at the data.

As you see, we use a far more advanced measurement framework to assess paid influencer creative.

Some organizations are limited by the surface-level metrics available to them. Others struggle with a top-down mandate on KPIs that doesn’t adequately measure marketing performance. Most often, though, there’s not enough thought put behind how to measure what you’re trying to achieve. When you're turning organic influencer creative into creator powered ads, you start to uncover metrics that were never really available to you before. Paid influencer ads provide brands with the capability to put Facebook's, TikTok's and Youtube's entire measurement framework on the performance of your creative which is automatically pulled into The Cirqle's platform.

Again, keep in mind, organic influencer creative effectively reaches a small fraction (3-5%) of the follower base of the influencer you've partnered with.

4. Here's 10 Influencer Creative Brief templates

Together with our clients, our platform has processed well over 20.000 influencer campaign briefs over the course of 8 years. During this time, we’ve learned and started to recognize clear patterns in every single campaign brief clients have put forward. We also actively started to discover what creative briefs drive results, and more importantly which ones didn’t. Loads of brands hire expensive agencies to craft the most compelling briefs which seems like a necessity. In fact, our advice is to give more general pointers around what creative(s) drive performance and we encourage clients to give creative freedom to influencers, restricted to very clear guidelines that guarantee brand safety.

Our team has carefully analyzed thousands of data points and crafted influencer briefs that consistently drive home results, every single time. These briefs have been created with the purpose of driving home a single result: sales, app installs or conversions. We love to keep this focus in our briefs as 95% of our clients are ultimately looking for revenue as a key objective in their campaigns.

‍

5. Conclusion

We’ve created over 20.000+ influencer campaign briefs over 7 years. During this time, we’ve learned and started to recognize clear patterns in every briefing that clients have put forward. We've also actively discovered what creative briefs drive results and, more importantly, which ones don't. Loads of brands hire expensive agencies to craft the most compelling briefs, which may seem necessary but in reality, hardly ever deliver on the promise. Our advice is to give more general pointers around what creative(s) drive performance and we encourage clients to give creative freedom to influencers, restricted to unambiguous guidelines that guarantee brand safety.

We hope this post has provided examples and creative guidelines around the structure that you can follow leveraging our software to become successful in opening up "influencer" as a channel for your brand to drive performance.