Running UGC campaigns without data-backed briefs is like sending a football team onto the field with no playbook.
The talent’s there, the energy’s there—but without strategy, you’re relying on luck, not plays that win. Data turns the brief into a playbook creators can run with—over and over again.
Data-backed briefs reduce revisions, speed up production, and improve performance metrics through an iterative process.
This guide will show you practical steps for creating UGC briefs that consistently deliver winning creator content for your business.
To build effective UGC campaigns, you need a defined UGC briefing process.
UGC briefs serve as the roadmap for creators to deliver content that achieves your business objectives. The brief is a single document that:
These briefs can offer several measurable impacts, like:
On the latter point—using previous UGC performance data, like thumbstop ratio, click-through rates, and conversion rates, creates a feedback loop that strengthens each subsequent brief. Motion's visual dashboards make it easy to find patterns in successful UGC campaigns:
If you need more info on why data-driven briefs are better, here's a comparison between them and standard creative briefs:
Creating UGC briefs manually and on the fly isn't a good start. Instead, build a systematic approach that integrates performance data and expert recommendations from UGC Buddy. Here's how:
Start with your existing creator performance data. If you don't have any, skip to step 2 (you'll iterate later).
You can find high-performing UGC content using Motion's Creative Analytics Dashboard. If you watched the video above, you'll know Motion can create comparison or summary reports showing performance based on metrics like:
If you didn't watch the video, just open the left panel to show "Reports," click "Create Report," and select either "Comparative Analysis" or "Top Performing" based on the info you want.
The key element to keep in mind is the naming conventions. If you use both influencers and UGC creators, keep them separate in the data by giving them specific naming conventions like "influencer" and "creator".
The insights from these reports will help form an effective brief by replacing subjective preferences with actual performance data.
Before briefing a creator, clarify your objectives (e.g., drive conversions, boost awareness) and define your target audience.
These objectives are important because they can change brief requirements.
Using creative analytics data helps review past performance, audience insights, and successful ad elements to establish realistic benchmarks—whatever your objective.
If you've worked with UGC creators before and have performance data, use the comparative reports to see which creators consistently perform well. If one delivers high performance for your campaign type, you don't need to look further.
But what if you do need new creators?
Finding the right creator is crucial for authenticity and resonance. With UGC Buddy, choose the "Find a UGC Creator for your next campaign" AI task.
Just specify your ideal creator profile, like "women over 40 with health and wellness background." UGC Buddy will search a database of vetted creators and return a shortlist with rates, portfolios, bios, and rationale for each recommendation.
After shortlisting creators, you can share the rationale UGC Buddy surfaced about their fit for your campaign.
Some standardized briefs go for a generic "make it authentic" approach—putting pressure on the creator to guess what you want.
An effective brief includes logistics, strategic context, hooks, and successful angles. It moves beyond subjective direction to specific, data-backed guidance (e.g., use a problem-solution format with the product revealed in the first 3 seconds).
Using UGC Buddy to generate a UGC script and strategy, describe your campaign and objectives to the agent, and you’ll get multiple creative angles, hooks, and even full AV scripts tailored to your goals and data.
If you're more of a visual learner, here's a quick demo where Shane, UGC Pro’s co-founder, unveils UGC Buddy and shows how it works inside Motion:
With the outputs from all the steps above, you’ll be able to assemble your data-backed UGC creator brief. The brief should be clear, actionable, and tailored to both your goals and creator’s style.
So, combine your previous outputs:
Based on this information, build your brief with the following sections:
This information offers a detailed data-backed brief—not subjective opinions or preferences.
You can also quality check the assembled brief with UGC Buddy for objective feedback on clarity, creative strategy, and success likelihood.
Choose the “Get Expert Feedback” or “QC Ads Before They Go Live” (works for briefs and/or draft videos) AI task in UGC Buddy to do one last round of QA before sending your brief to the creator.
Once the first draft is in, use Motion’s analytics and UGC Buddy’s feedback/reporting tools to optimize and provide actionable feedback to the creator.
In the immediate short-term, you can use Motion's creative analytics dashboard to create performance reports and share them with the creators for specific, performance-based feedback.
Here's a quick look at building and sharing reports in Motion:
Sharing these visuals helps clarify expectations and speeds up the improvement process when creators know what needs to improve.
This process also builds up understanding of performance drivers over time, reducing the need for revisions in the future.
However, UGC Buddy is also shortly (at the time of writing) releasing its post-mortem analysis tasks which will offer prescriptive analyses, help you revive "dead" ad concepts, and predict future results based on past performance.
Check out the update video:
Beyond following the step-by-step approach above, there are some other best practices to keep in mind for building the best UGC briefs.
While you can implement the following tips with native social media platform tools, Motion's dashboards and UGC Buddy help streamline these practices efficiently and at scale.
When you've got a campaign with multiple UGC ads or ad variants, you'll be able to use Motion to analyze them for repeatable, top-performing patterns like hook types, CTA placements, pacing, etc.
Using creative reports, you can then document and categorize those top-performing patterns to create a library of proven creative directions to inform future briefs (or let UGC Buddy automatically apply performance data to new campaigns).
Quick tip: Using the Top Performing reports, you can check which creative elements drive results by visualizing the Hook Score, Watch Score, Click Score, and Convert Score.
With this data, you can annotate and embed them as examples in your creator briefs.
We mentioned creating shareable performance reports in Step 6 above to create feedback loops, but you can also make them creator-specific. Here's how to do that:
This process creates transparency and improves creator buy-in, motivation, and output quality.
Being a little too prescriptive with your briefs can put your ads in too small a box. Instead, recommend small-scale creative tests in your briefs like A/B hook variations or CTA placements.
UGC Buddy surfaces these suggestions automatically with the "Generate UGC script" task to help you identify which elements are worth testing in each given brief.
This performance-based testing helped MUD/WTR save 70% on vendor and freelance costs and 240 hours of creative reporting:
"We went from around 50-60% of ad spend going to external vendors to roughly 5-10%. That's all linked to Motion helping us produce better creative in-house, knowing which creative to scale, and doubling down on that creative a lot quicker." - Justin Blakey, Media Buyer at MUD\WTR
When you create UGC briefs, it can be easy to make a couple of key mistakes, like:
As you've seen throughout this guide, Motion and UGC Buddy can help prevent these mistakes by centralizing creative knowledge, aligning briefs to performance outcomes, and providing built-in briefing templates with annotated examples.
Plus, with a defined, templatized approach to UGC briefing, you can be sure you're never likely to make any of these mistakes.
If you'd like to cut UGC briefing, scripting, and sourcing time in half, get started with UGC Buddy today.
A UGC brief instructs creators on what content to make and why. Effective briefs also contain performance data to prove creative direction and as benchmarks or iteration opportunities.
An effective UGC creator brief should include:
Specific, creator-level data from performance reports such as Spend/ROAS, and creative scores like Hook, Watch, Click, and Convert helps to inform you which creative elements work more than others—which gives you opportunities to iterate and improve.
Metrics you can track to evaluate UGC performance include:
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