Your brand isn’t the loudest voice in the room. According to CreatorIQ research on top Fortune 500 brands, creators posted about them 33 times as often as brands posted themselves. By volume, a consumer is more likely to hear from creators posting about a brand than the brand directly. This gap produces a couple dilemmas: how do you ensure that creators who post about you reflect your brand image and values, and how do you make sure that consumers feel an affinity to those creators?
These are some of the guiding questions that shape TikTok and CreatorIQ’s latest report, The Creator Trust Standard: Working With Creators on TikTok. The report dives into how new standards are needed to improve brand safety, relevance, and suitability via creator partnerships.
When you ask brands what they use to determine what creators they want to work with, the most common responses are factors like suitability or content performance. For over two years of asking brands this question in market research, follower count has come last.
However, in tracking how creators are commonly paid, CreatorIQ research found that creator pay was more closely associated with follower count, and found no association for engagement rate.
There are a couple reasons for this. First, engagement rate tends to fall as creators gain a higher following, because engagements are divided by a much larger audience. Second, engagement rate doesn’t actually measure trust.
According to TikTok’s Creator Effectiveness Playbook with System1 and WPP Media, across 231 TikTok brand lift studies and 129.6 million engagements, engagement rate didn’t show a significant relationship to whether people remembered the brand. That’s because engagement rate doesn’t actually show the nature of a consumer’s affinity to the creator.
If engagement rate can’t tell you whether a creator is trusted, what can?
Brand awareness, emotional response & attention, and how relevant a creator is for the brand are better measures of what a brand should pay attention to when seeking a creator partnership. These are all factors that lead to trust between a consumer and creator, and, by extension, the creator’s brand partners. That’s because trust is the most valuable thing a creator can offer a brand.
TikTok looked at 239 creator ads across 35,850 TikTok users. Ads with low relevance and low fame (meaning creators who are not well-known) set the baseline index of 100 for brand memory (modeled awareness and recall).
Adding fame lifted the score to 110, 10% above the baseline. Relevance alone lifted it to 135, and the two together reached 189. Above-average relevance also drove 58% more emotion.
A creator with a huge following can still be a poor fit if the people watching don’t see the connection between the creator and the brand.
Overall, how well-known a creator is does boost brand memory, but relevance does more of that work. The strongest results come from creators who are relevant and well-known.
The report identifies suitability as a filtering function for relevance. Suitability funnels out creators who aren’t a match, whereas relevance–how well suited the creator is for the brand according to audiences–determines who gets to be on the shortlist.
Safety is integral to a marketer’s lifecycle. Here are TikTok’s seven steps for maximizing creator performance:
1. Plan
2. Select
3. Vet
4. Brief & contract
5. Activate
6. Monitor & enforce
7. Measure & learn
Suitability is the foundation for all of these steps, whereas relevance happens at the select stage, is enforced by the brief & contract state, and is proved out in the measure & learn stage.
We live in a world with nuance. Consumers are increasingly values-driven: how someone talks about your brand can be a sticky story. The best way to protect your brand is to make sure that the people who talk about you are trustworthy and suitable for your brand.
For a more in-depth look on how to maximize creator trust and your brand relevance, check out The Creator Trust Standard.