What is an Influencer Recruitment Strategy Playbook?

An influencer recruitment strategy playbook is a documented strategy for finding, negotiating, and working with influencers. It helps present your brand in a more professional and organized light and makes the influencer marketing process much simpler.

You’ll include information like your target audience, communication templates, brand assets, and more. This helps streamline the overall process, leaving no stone unturned.

Why Should You Have an Influencer Recruitment Strategy Playbook?

Having documented processes within your business is always a good idea. This way, if you expand your team or team members leave and you have to find replacements, there are parameters in place to ensure processes remain streamlined.

Other major benefits include:

• Influencers will enjoy working with your brand
• It makes your job easier
• It helps make processes more efficient
• It ensures your recruitment strategy is consistent

All in all, the more documented processes you keep, the more organized your team and business is as a whole. So let’s walk through how to get started creating your own playbook.

What Goes Into an Influencer Recruitment Strategy Playbook?

Ready to create your influencer recruitment strategy playbook? There are 10 essential elements that can help make your influencer marketing process much easier, streamlined, and efficient.

1. Your Target Audience

First, start out by inputting information about your brand’s target audience. The best way to go about this would be creating a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of the audience(s) most likely to be interested in your product or service. You can easily create one using a template like the one below:

If you have different audiences, you may even have more than one persona. For example, a company selling exercise equipment may target gyms buying equipment in bulk as well as fitness enthusiasts looking to build a home gym.

Your buyer persona will include information like:

• Basic demographics
• Online behavior
• Pain points
• What influences them into making a purchase
• How they search for products

Fill out as much information about your target audience as possible so that your team knows exactly which types of people will be most likely to buy your product or sign up for your service.

2. Influencers Who Fit Your Target Audience

The next section will include a list of influencers that fit your target audience. Or, in other words, influencers who appear to be targeting the same audience that you are.

Let’s go back to our exercise equipment example. They would likely build a list of fitness and health influencers. Putting together a list of food influencers—unless they were specifically healthy food influencers—likely wouldn’t make sense for their brand.

Having this ready-to-go list of influencers that match your target audience can be used as a jumping-off point when your team starts reaching out to and nurturing relationships with influencers you want to work with.

We’ve got plenty of tools here at Influencer Marketing Hub to help you as well—plus many different influencer directories.

Try running a simple Google search using the advanced command “site:influencermarketinghub.com” to find lists of influencers specific to your audience. For example, you can easily find a number of roundups of top beauty influencers you might want to add into your playbook.

You might also want to section out your influencer directory based on platforms as well. While some influencers might be popular on multiple platforms, others have a main platform they focus on. So you’ll want to know which influencers to use for a campaign on TikTok versus a campaign on Instagram.

3. Influencers You’ve Already Worked With

Next, you’ll want to create a list of influencers you’ve already worked with. This would be a living document that you update each time you run a new influencer campaign or work with a new batch of influencers.

Make sure you also include other information alongside this list. Some pertinent data to add in would be ratings or notes on if you’d want to work with each influencer again. Having this information on-hand can be extremely informative for building up a great batch of go-to influencers each time you want to run a new influencer marketing campaign.

4. Budgets

This section may also be regularly updated depending on how often your influencer budgets change. In fact, you may even want to update this section each time you run a new campaign so that you know exactly how much you have to spend.

However, having information on-hand for how much your company is willing and able to spend for each campaign can help you determine how many influencers and which influencers to work with.

Consider breaking your budgets section down by:

• Overall campaign budget info
• Per-influencer budget info
• Per-post budget info

And anything else that you think would be useful to someone referencing your influencer playbook.

Depending on what software you use to create this document, you may even want to add in tables that can be used to calculate how much budget you have left after each contract is signed.

5. Channels to Use

Which channels or platforms do you want your influencer campaigns to utilize? You’ll need to match them to your target audience. For example, why would you work with an influencer on a TikTok campaign if your target audience doesn’t actually use TikTok?

List out all of the channels that your target audience is on—this should match up with the channels that your brand has a presence on as well. These can be used as your go-to channels for campaigns as well as researching new influencers to add to the second section of your handbook.

6. Outreach Process

How will you reach out to the influencers you want to work with? Detail each step of an outreach process—especially a tried-and-true outreach process your team has used that works—in your document.

This is useful because it helps you start off a new campaign seamlessly, and it also helps new team members immediately get success reaching out to influencers, even if they’ve never done it before.

This might include information like:

• Which mode of communication to use for outreach
• How to find contact information
• How many times to follow up
• What to say in each message

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