At CreatorIQ, we’re all about helping industry-leading organizations build successful creator marketing programs. More often than not, that comes down to advising on, and tracking the results of, creator-driven campaigns. The most common piece of advice we give is a simple one: making sure that participating creators—their needs, their voices, and their expertise—sit front-and-center in the strategic planning of these campaigns.
We’ve seen this approach analyzed by leading research company Forrester, which interviewed CreatorIQ for its recent report, entitled “Best Practices for Creator Marketing Campaigns: Circumvent 15 Creator Partnership Pitfalls to Avoid Self-Sabotage.” The report dives into the DNA of best practice campaigns, helping B2C marketing executives deploy online creator strategies that introduce their brands into new communities, fuels a sustainable content engine, and powers sales.
In addition to being interviewed by Forrester for this recent report, we previously hosted a webinar featuring Forrester on unified measurement for influencer marketing (which you can check out here), and been interviewed for one of Forrester’s previous creator marketing reports, “The State of the Creator Economy: Creators Displace the Traditional Advertising Paradigm” (read our takeaways here). But we’re especially excited for this campaigns-based report, which distills actionable takeaways into one intuitive guide.
Read on for some of our key takeaways from Forrester’s latest report:
Build Creator Partnerships Around a Consumer-First Mindset
Creators have a unique ability to reach consumers, crafting content that engages digital followers in a way that grips both the heart and the wallet. That’s why when a brand looks to build a partnership with a creator, it should think strategically about the particular consumer base that this creator can leverage. Additionally, brands should draw from creators who have already demonstrated an affinity—and ideally an obsession—with the brand itself.
Take a Data-Driven Approach to Creator Discovery
Forrester’s report cites how, in order to yield content that builds credibility with consumers, the CreatorIQ data science team helps brands identify promising creators from within these brands’ existing communities by using natural language processing and automation to find creators that are influential within a given category, as well as the creators who garner the most engagement from a brand’s social media audience. With our semantic model, brands can search for new partners in a targeted, systematic way, rather than feeling as though they have to comb through the entire internet.
Trust Creators for—What Else?—Their Creativity
No disrespect to all the innovative marketing teams out there, but when it comes to crafting content that resonates on social media, creators are pretty much the undisputed experts. However, creative overdirection is one of the most common pitfalls plaguing creator-led campaigns. As noted by CreatorIQ’s own Tim Sovay, our Chief Business Development and Partnerships Officer, taking a traditional-advertising approach to a creator campaign will “take the life out of the content.” And while we don’t have the stats to back it up, life is commonly understood as a major source of revenue.
For more insights from Forrester and other leaders in the creator marketing space, check out the full report. And for data-driven takeaways on how creator-led marketing fuels a range of positive business outcomes for brands across verticals, check out CreatorIQ’s recent report, “Unleashing the Power of Creators.”
