Your Weekly Creator Marketing Update 🚀
02.06.2024
Happy Sunday & welcome to your weekly Creator Marketing Update. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so below and feel free to share this with your friends & colleagues.
📌a guide to full-funnel creator strategies: Tactics and insights for creator partnerships, engagement and ROI*
*Despite this being a sponsored piece of content - I think there are quite a few interesting take aways within this article that we can dive into.
TL;DR
Read this if you’d like some examples of how brands are utilising creators to adapt to an increasingly non-linear purchasing funnel
HEADLINE QUOTE
“As luxury fashion moves online in a much bigger way, it has allowed us to evolve our approach to digital marketing,” said Cathy Chen, vice president of growth marketing at Saks. “We’ve been more focused on investing toward the bottom of the funnel in digital marketing in years past. As the customer journey has evolved, we’re much more focused on the full marketing funnel and addressing every point in that infinity loop.”
OUR TAKE
We’ll be reviewing some of the most interesting points and quotes from the article below, with less of a focus on the sponsored segment within it.
1. How creators drive full-funnel engagement
[creators play a role in] bridging advertiser-to-audience connections and influencing audiences in journeys that resemble an infinity loop.
I really like this quote and how it looks as creator audiences in something they call an “infinity loop” taking a step back and reviewing creator/brand partnerships, we all know that creators provide direct access to a tapped in audience that can indeed be switched on or off when required. However, if we apply the infinity loop mentality, it forces us to look at these brand/creator partnerships in a less linear, and less direct perspective. This perspective offers more flexibility when we think about what it means to drive value from a longer-term perspective.
I would argue that in general (exceptions will always be there) a linear purchasing funnel puts pressure on creator/brand relationships, but also has a roll on effect in regards to content quality, as well as how audience perceive brands that are unwilling to build a relationship with audiences.
I believe that there is an overall expectation/misconception that audiences are at all times ready to receive (and convert to) any brand that the creator decides to endorse; I would argue that it costs time to build trust, and longer-term relationships will ultimately lead to an improved ROI. The infinity loop offers a route towards this.
How trust and creativity fuel collaborations
We won’t spend too much time on this one as our POV is clear - but it’s positive to see how brands are changing their approach over time.
“We provide direction and guidance to our creator partners, but we’ve learned through direct feedback and testing to give creators more leeway in what they feature and how they talk about it to their audiences,” Chen said. “We see the impact in our campaign results. It’s a very different approach to how we work with creators today versus how we did when we started”
Measuring partnership success
“As we move up the funnel in the creator marketing space, measurement has to be very different in terms of what we’re looking at,” as opposed to traditional marketing modeling and incremental ROI, explained Chen. “Given these newer goals of ours, these brand lift studies allow us to look at these upper-funnel KPIs that help us understand if we’re moving the needle when it comes to brand perception and consideration.”
It is clear that for all business utilising creator marketing, a balance has to exist between short-and long term success - but the employment of brand-lift studies might alleviate the pressure on short-term performance led metrics
“You want to make sure that you’re investing in creators over time so that brands can leverage their evolving influence in their evolving audience to maintain continuity in their marketing efforts,” Jerutis said. “We recommend empowering creators, nurturing those long-term relationships and making them an integral part of your strategic plans.”
According to the article, it takes about a year to start seeing brand loyalty from an audience perspective - which adds to the above quote. Creating impact takes time, and audiences need to be exposed to (positive) content in order to change their perception. Even if short-term goals are met (the creator helped to sell out a set of jeans she featured in her content) - there has to be continuation; the brand now knows that her audience to purchase (at an approximate 25% discount) - what does the rest of their partnership journey look like? I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.
🏭 This week’s must-reads
📈Creators are pioneering a new way of brand-building: Audience-orientation
This model favoured by creators has a distinct focus; one that is aligned to a market-oriented approach but which focuses on one aspect – the audience. The simple fact is the creators built their audience, and brands, first and might add products into the mix later. For creators, their value chain might look a bit like this:
Find an audience > create brand > create content > sell products.
✍️ Read the pitch decks from these creator-economy startups that helped them raise millions of dollars
These startups have captured the attention and wallets of influential venture capitalists and angel investors over the last several years, giving rise to several unicorn valuations in the space, such as the link-in-bio service Linktree (valued at $1.3 billion in 2022) and the affiliate-marketing platform LTK (valued at $2 billion in late 2021).
📲Research Briefing: Publisher events and influencer partnerships offer key brand marketing opportunities
Posts featuring influencers getting ready for a brand event or posts made from the brand events themselves garnered significant attention from their audiences. On average, posts about brand events on Instagram had a higher engagement rate than all other types of sponsored posts — at 5.6% versus the average at 4.0%. The same results occurred on YouTube, where videos about brand events had a higher average engagement rate than other types of sponsored videos.
🎙️DTC Briefing: As influencer marketing gets more expensive, brands test out new approaches
In turn, younger brands have to find scrappy ways to connect with influencers, while facing pressure from agencies to shell out a lot of money to work with influencers. Some smaller brands are finding success with directly gifting influencers products in exchange for reviews, but admit the tactic is harder to scale as the business gets bigger. At some point, bigger brands often find they have to turn to talent agencies to be matched with the most effective types of influencers based on their brand needs. While this process helps streamline influencer relationships and campaigns, it also means longer timelines and higher monthly fees.