What Should an Influencer Campaign Brief Ask the Client? A Copy-Paste Intake Template for Agencies

What is in this article

1. The ten-field intake brief, ready to copy
2. Fields 1–3 decide whether the search can be run at all
3. Fields 4–5 turn a vague quality demand into a defensible number
4. Fields 6–7 keep size and reach from being confused with engagement
5. Field 8 sets the proof you will accept on audience quality
6. Fields 9–10 tie the brief to the seat you are paying for
7. Three answers that should make you send the brief back

The ten-field intake brief, ready to copy

The brief that kills a campaign does not fail at the creative stage. It fails at intake, when the client writes "Europe", "micro-influencers" and "high engagement", and nobody notices that none of those three answers can be typed into a filter. infloo.io's ranking and search coverage is 14 named countries — Spain, United States, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy, Germany, India, France, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia — broken into 138 Instagram cities. "Europe" is not one of them. Here is the intake brief that forces answers you can actually search on.

1. Market(s) — Name every country in scope, one per line. Not a region.
2. City focus — Name the cities, or write "national, no city filter".
3. Platform — Instagram, TikTok, or both with separate criteria per platform.
4. Category — The niche the creator publishes in, not the client's product category.
5. Engagement floor — One number per platform, with the market and category it was derived from.
6. Audience size band — Follower range per platform, with the reason for the range.
7. Reach expectation — Average views required on TikTok; state explicitly if there is none.
8. Audience-quality gate — The evidence required per profile and the pass mark.
9. Shortlist volume and deadline — How many profiles, delivered by what date.
10. Named approver — One person, with the authority to sign the shortlist.

How long should an influencer campaign brief be?

One page. Ten fields. One answer per field. Length is not the quality signal — the test is whether every field converts into a filter setting or a pass/fail check. A four-page brief with "engagement: strong" in it is worse than a half-page brief with "Instagram, Mexico, Entertainment, floor 0.75%". Refuse to start the search while any field still reads "TBC". A field marked TBC is not a small gap; it is a search you will run twice.

File the completed brief with the shortlist itself. Six weeks later the client will ask why a particular creator is on the list, or why a favourite is not. The brief is your answer: the country was named, the category was recorded, the floor was derived from a stated sample, and the approver signed it.

The template filled in

• Market: Mexico. City focus: national, no city filter.
• Platform: Instagram only.
• Category: Entertainment.
• Engagement floor: 0.75% on Instagram — the median for the 191 Entertainment accounts in the infloo.io sample; Mexico's Instagram median in the same sample is 0.93%.
• Audience size band: 1M+. Noted in the brief: no size-versus-engagement rule is being applied on Instagram.
• Reach expectation: none set for Instagram.
• Audience-quality gate: quality score and real-audience percentage supplied per profile; agreed pass mark 70/100.
• Shortlist volume and deadline: 25 profiles, 14 days.
• Named approver: one client-side marketing lead.

Fields 1–3 decide whether the search can be run at all

These three fields are not preferences. They are the axes of the search, and a wrong answer here does not degrade the shortlist — it prevents one from existing.

Market. The answer must resolve to one or more of the 14 covered countries. "LATAM" and "DACH" are not answers; they are homework. "DACH" specifically hides the fact that Germany's Instagram median in the sample is 0.22% while Austria and Switzerland are not covered at all in the rankings.

City focus. Instagram rankings break those 14 countries into 138 cities, so a city-level shortlist is a legitimate ask — provided the client names the cities. "Major urban centres" is not a filter value. Check the requested city against the Instagram influencer rankings by country and city before you agree to deliver against it.

Platform. The worst answer in the whole brief is "both, same criteria". Every threshold downstream changes between Instagram and TikTok, starting with engagement: the sampled Instagram median is 0.51% and the TikTok median is 9.05%. One set of criteria across both platforms guarantees that one of the two searches is wrong.

Fields 1–3 map one-to-one onto the country, city and niche filters in infloo.io's influencer search, which is the fastest way to show a client why the region-level answer cannot be entered.

What if the client only says "Europe" or "LATAM"?

Resolve it against the covered list before searching, then get the shortened list re-approved in writing. For Europe that means Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Turkey. For LATAM it means Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. The re-approval matters because the shortened list changes the expected engagement: an "Europe" brief resolved to Argentina sits against an Instagram median of 1.72%, and the same brief resolved to Germany sits against 0.22%. Same continent, an eightfold difference in what a good result looks like.

Fields 4–5 turn a vague quality demand into a defensible number

Category first, threshold second. The category field carries as much weight as the country field. In the infloo.io sample of large Instagram accounts, medians run 0.23% for Fashion, 0.33% for Fashion Trends and for Shopping & Fashion Travel, and 0.41% for Love & Intimacy — against 0.89% for Football & Soccer, Volleyball and Handball, 1% for Rugby and 1.04% for Sports. A 0.8% floor is generous in Fashion and below par in Sports. Agreeing a number before recording the category is guesswork with a decimal point on it.

Then derive the floor from platform plus market plus category, not from habit. Instagram country medians in the sample run from 1.72% in Argentina down to 0.07% in Indonesia; TikTok from 13.94% in Mexico down to 3.91% in Indonesia. Those spreads are wider than most agencies' internal rules of thumb.

The classic bad answer is "minimum 3% engagement". On Instagram, where the sampled median is 0.51%, that rules out almost the entire large-account sample. On TikTok, median 9.05%, it screens nothing out at all — every account clears it by default and the client believes a quality control has been applied. Write into the brief which sample the floor came from, and carry the caveat with it: these figures come from the 1,337 largest Instagram and TikTok accounts across 14 locations as of 17 August 2026, they are not the full platform population, and smaller accounts will differ.

For the arithmetic of setting the number itself, use the step-by-step method for deriving an engagement floor rather than reproducing benchmark tables inside every brief.

Should the brief specify one engagement rate for both Instagram and TikTok?

No. In the sampled large accounts Instagram medians 0.51% and TikTok 9.05%. A shared number is either impossible to hit on one platform or meaningless on the other. Two fields, two numbers, each labelled with its platform.

Fields 6–7 keep size and reach from being confused with engagement

Audience size band. On TikTok the sample supports a size-linked expectation: under 10K medians 5.87%, 10K–100K 6.96%, 100K–1M 6.79%, and 1M+ 10.45%. Because size and engagement move together there, a size band and an engagement floor have to be agreed in the same breath — a 1M+ TikTok band with a 6% floor is a filter that does nothing.

On Instagram the same move is not available. All 700 sampled Instagram accounts sit in the 1M+ tier, because the rankings quote top-ranked accounts per country. That sample cannot support any rule about how engagement varies with follower count, so the brief should say plainly that no size-versus-engagement rule is being applied on Instagram.

Reach expectation. On TikTok, ask for a views figure rather than a follower figure. The sample medians 327,058 average views and 17.41% views per follower against a median 2,300,000 followers — which is exactly why followers alone do not tell you what a post will deliver. The TikTok influencer rankings are the reference point when a client wants to see what those numbers look like in their market. The bad answer here is "as big as possible within budget": it converts the brief into a follower league table and imports the reach-index problem straight into your shortlist.

Can I let the client set a follower minimum instead of an engagement floor?

Only with a reach field attached. On TikTok, size and engagement move together in this sample, so a follower minimum at least correlates with something. On Instagram the sample is entirely 1M+ accounts, so a follower minimum tells you nothing about performance — you are filtering on fame and calling it quality.

Field 8 sets the proof you will accept on audience quality

This field names evidence, not sentiment. Three artefacts per shortlisted profile: a quality score, an audience-type breakdown, and a growth chart. Write the pass mark next to them.

It belongs in the client brief rather than your internal checklist for one reason: if the client has not agreed in advance that a low-quality profile is disqualified, the disqualification becomes a negotiation — usually with the profile the client's CEO already follows. "No fake followers" with no threshold and no source is not a gate. The audit output gives a percentage of real audience and a score out of 100, and both can be written into the brief as a number the client signed.

Run candidates through the free influencer audit before spending a paid profile view on them. Anonymous visitors get 3 free lookups per 24 hours across the free tools combined, which is enough to pre-check a handful of client-suggested names during the intake call itself.

Can the brief be shared with clients who do not work in English?

The site is published in six languages — English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian — so the reference pages you cite in the brief will resolve for most of those clients. Send the rankings and audit links alongside the brief; a client who can see the numbers in their own language argues less about the floor.

Fields 9–10 tie the brief to the seat you are paying for

Before you accept a shortlist volume and a deadline, convert them into searches, profile views, exports and data-refresh requests. Those four things are metered per plan, so an open-ended scope is a seat-limit problem, not just a planning one.

Feature	Free	Basic	Pro	Premium	Agency
Searches	10	50	200	Unlimited	Unlimited
Profile views	10	50	200	Unlimited	Unlimited
Monthly data exports	not included	10	100	Unlimited	Unlimited
Data update requests	1	15	75	200	Unlimited
Advanced filters	not included	15	75	Unlimited	Unlimited
Support	Support	Support	Priority	Priority	Priority

Prices for the record: Free 0, Basic 9.99, Pro 29.99, Premium 59.99 and Agency 149.99 per month, with annual billing at twelve months less 20% — 95.90, 287.90, 575.90 and 1,439.90. Keep the plan limits and pricing page open during the intake call; the volume conversation goes faster when the caps are on screen.

Which plan does an agency running client intakes actually need?

Map the brief's volume field to the meter. Pro covers 200 searches, 200 profile views and 100 exports a month with 75 advanced filters and 75 refresh requests — enough for a few briefs of the size in the worked example above. Premium removes the caps on searches, views, exports and filters and allows 200 refresh requests. Agency removes the cap on refresh requests too. All three of those tiers carry priority support. If you are running several client intakes a month with exports per shortlist, Pro's 100 exports is the number that runs out first.

Named approver. One person signs the shortlist. A brief with three approvers produces a fourth round of creator swaps, and every swap costs a profile view and a revised export.

Three answers that should make you send the brief back

A market or city outside coverage. If the requested country is not among the 14, or the city is not among the 138 covered on Instagram, say so before you promise a ranked shortlist. This is a one-sentence email at intake and a credibility problem at delivery.

An engagement floor with no platform and no category attached. The same number means opposite things on the two platforms — 3% is near-impossible against an Instagram median of 0.51% and invisible against a TikTok median of 9.05% — and it means different things across categories, from 0.23% in Fashion to 1.04% in Sports.

An unbounded shortlist volume on a metered plan, or a deadline built on refreshing creator data more times than the plan permits. "As many as you can find" is not a volume; on Pro it is 200 profile views and then a stop.

Keep one filled brief per campaign, filed with its shortlist. Last quarter's completed briefs are the fastest sanity check you have on a new client's expectations: pull the one from the closest market and category, and show them what a defensible floor looked like when someone actually had to hit it.

Frequently asked questions

How long should an influencer campaign brief be?

One page with ten fields and one answer per field. The test is whether every field converts into a filter setting or a pass/fail check. A four-page brief with vague language is worse than a half-page brief with specific market, category and engagement floor details.

What should you do if a client says "Europe" or "LATAM"?

Resolve it against the covered list before searching. For Europe that means Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ukraine and Turkey. For LATAM it means Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Get the shortened list re-approved in writing because expected engagement changes: an "Europe" brief resolved to Argentina sits against a 1.72% Instagram median versus 0.22% for Germany.

Should the brief specify one engagement rate for both Instagram and TikTok?

No. In the sampled large accounts Instagram medians 0.51% and TikTok 9.05%. A shared number is either impossible to hit on one platform or meaningless on the other. Write two fields with two numbers, each labelled with its platform.

Can you let the client set a follower minimum instead of an engagement floor?

Only with a reach field attached. On TikTok size and engagement move together, so a follower minimum correlates with something. On Instagram the sample is entirely 1M+ accounts, so a follower minimum tells you nothing about performance—you filter on fame and call it quality.

Which plan does an agency running client intakes actually need?

Pro covers 200 searches, 200 profile views and 100 exports per month with 75 advanced filters and 75 refresh requests. Premium removes caps on searches, views, exports and filters. If running several client intakes monthly with exports per shortlist, Pro's 100 exports is the number that runs out first.