Happy Monday! Hope everyone has had a great long weekend. I'm flying home from California where I was here speaking at CreatorIQ conference and then chilling for a few days in CA. The Creator IQ conference was excellent, so I wanted to share a few of my big takeaways. Creator/influencer is going to be a bigger focus for us next year so that was one of the reasons we went. Lets dive in.
Creator vs Brand Content
On a whole, creator content is on the rise and branded content is trending down. I'm not just talking about little DTC brands, but large consumer brands on the whole. Traditional media like TV, OOH, etc is on the decline, and as you know digital spend has been going up and up, but there's a trend to shift more spend to creators or influencer advertising. Subjectively, it's just more engaging, authentic, and what people are used to engaging with on social.
I think brands love how their branded creative looks, and there still is a time and a place for it . But you can't argue with data, and if putting money into influencer is more effective then that is what we should be doing.
Types Of Creator Marketing
There are a few ways to work with creators. One thing that stood out to me is that no two brands work with creators in the same exact way. Some of it will depend on your industry and product, some on your goals, and also budget.
Most brands should start with an organic gifting program. This works especially well if you have a smaller product you can affordably send out. The goal is Earned Media Value (EMV) and community size, which is how many people are talking about you. More people talking about you online is a good thing. Don't be too precious about who is on brand and who is not, it will all be earned media. Retention is the name of the game here; once you send to someone and they start posting about you, you want to do everything you can to incentivize them to keep talking about you. Don't be too transactional here; lead with relationship building. Send these people all new products, and keep them stocked as long as they keep talking about you online.
There is also paid influencer marketing, where you pay someone and brief them for a very specific set of deliverables. I think this is what most people think of when they are talking about influencer or creator marketing. However, I don't think most brands should start here. To be honest, we've done very little of it but plan to start doing a bigger test in January.
Then there is content you use on your channels, usually paid social ads. You can work with micro-creators who may not have a huge audience but they make great content. In my experience, they will be cheaper but the performance will be hit or miss. Then there are larger, macro creators who you can work with in both paid capacities for earned media and paid social ads. What I recommend is doing on contract that has an option to buy the rights to the content for ads at your choosing. There is not a 1 to 1 correlation between who does well on earned vs ads, but there is some correlation so if someone's eared post does well, it may be worth it to test inside of your ad account.
How To Measure Creator Marketing
There were a few talks about this, including mine. The reality is there is no perfect way. We heard from someone who us using MMMs to measure EMV's impact on consideration outcomes. But most brands won't have the ability to do so. But you should be able to find some anecdotal correlations between EMV and desire metrics like brand search/ google search trends.
If you are doing paid influencer marketing, it depends whether you are looking to improve your awareness or if you are looking for a direct response outcome. If awareness, you may get some sales but it won't be a direct ROI. You likely want to measure EMV ROAS, if you have a tool like Tribe to measure EMV.
We're also gonna test some Youtube paid stuff with a platform called Agentio, which we'll be able to measure with our MMM Prescient.AI. Regardless of the method you use, you should consider paid placements upper funnel and you need a way to validate the halo effect as most of the value won't come from people directly clicking on links.
Influencer's Role In Product Development
We heard from Mariana Hewitt, co-founder of Summer Fridays and a well-known influencer herself. One interesting thing she shared is that they think of their influencer program starting at product development. The type of packing, the color, and what they send it out in all gets thought about with the lens of what is going to look best on social, capture attention, and make people want to post about it. Just like successful retail brands have to think about how their product looks on shelves, successful creator led brands need to think about how their product is going to get them earned media on social.
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Hope you enjoyed this. Influencer or creator marketing is not always as fun and sexy as ads, and it's also not an immediate ROI like Meta ads so you've got to be willing to be patient and stay the course. But the rewards can be there if you do it right. I'm off to watch the Jets game now. Have a great week.
-Cody
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