How to Brief an Influencer Campaign: A One-Page Template

The five things a brief needs

Goal: one outcome, not three. Awareness, installs, store footfall or sales. Pick the one that decides success.

Audience: who should stop scrolling, in plain words. 'Health-conscious urban parents' beats 'age 25 to 45'.

Message: the one sentence you want remembered. Creators will tell it in their own voice, so keep it short enough to survive that.

Must-haves: product claims, hashtags and legal lines. Keep this list to what is genuinely required.

Deliverables and dates: how many posts, which formats, when they go live.

What to leave out

Scripts for every second. Creators know their audience better than a brand deck does. Give guardrails, not a screenplay.

A long list of dos and don'ts. If you need a page of rules, the idea is not clear yet.

Write the idea before you book anyone

Our house rule is to write the idea first. For the Paper Boat 10-year campaign the idea was nostalgia about childhood birthdays, and creators were cast around that, not the other way round.

A template you can copy

Goal. Audience. One-line message. Hero product or moment. Must-haves. Deliverables. Dates. Who approves. That is the whole brief.

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