In 2024, Creator Content Breaks Free from the Feed

By now, I’m guessing you’ve read (or at least downloaded) our 2024 Influencer Marketing Trends Report, where we broke down the main influencer marketing activities that drive content creation. 

In a webinar recently hosted by myself and CreatorIQ’s Sr. Director of Product Design, Kris Lipka, we connected the dots between the most impactful ways that organizations are using creator content to successfully drive ROI, and how to think of these activities when implementing and executing influencer strategies in the new year. 

Here’s what we covered.

Why Invest in Creator Content?

The 2024 Trends Report showed that creator content works better. Here’s why:

1.  It’s efficient. With rising costs of traditional brand or ad creative, it can be hard to source enough quality content for everything you need to do. Because creator content production costs are holding steady, this method provides plenty of high-quality, efficient content. As we put it in the report: “If you could get more bang for your buck, why wouldn’t you?”
2. It drives ROI. Overall, all major cohorts surveyed in the report—brands, agencies, and industry leaders—found that creator content drove more ROI than traditional digital advertising practices. In particular, 83% of industry leaders—defined as companies whose highest ROI program over the past year was the result of influencer marketing, and who contributed $1.0M or greater annually to influencer marketing—found that creators outpaced traditional ads.  
3. It’s effective.  There are numerous ways to generate and deploy creator content to meet your goals. According to our report, sponsored posts, the bread and butter of influencer marketing, proved a bit more popular than affiliate marketing and UGC on owned media. These three activities are fairly different when it comes to strategy and practical program execution, which indicates how diverse influencer marketing practices have become. 

How Can You Maximize Creator Content Everywhere? 

What is UGC anyway, and why is it so popular?

According to our 2024 Trends Report, UGC, or user-generated content, was the most frequently used influencer marketing activity among brands, the third-most effective activity, and respondents reported it’s on the rise in 2024.

For brands, leveraging creator content as UGC within owned media channels has proven to be a winning strategy. For brands that want to tap into a large library of high-quality, authentic content, the possibilities are endless. If you negotiate and obtain the proper usage rights, creator-produced content can be used for: 

• Email newsletters 
• Resharing on owned social media channels
• Website product feeds
• Ratings and reviews 

In fact, the prevalence of creators partnering with brands to produce UGC is a fast-growing activity in the creator economy. Brands need aesthetic, on-trend, authentic content that has lower time commitments, approval processes, and budgets than traditional creative, and creators are the perfect solution.

Don’t put baby in a corner, or a social post in a box. 

In another recent webinar hosted by CreatorIQ, a panel of industry leaders, including Riley Cronin, President & Co-Founder of ZeroTo1, highlighted affiliate marketing as an example of how to view creator content as more than a means to fulfill just one objective or use case.  

The content produced by an affiliate creator community can be leveraged for far more than the initial intent to drive a commission sale. Cronin discussed how affiliate marketing can be used to not only drive direct sales, but also increase brand awareness, improve ad performance, and identify opportunities for content production.

Affiliate marketing strategies often employ micro-creators, who create as much branded content as they prefer in order to promote products and drive conversions. With thousands of posts promoting a brand, this productivity helps affiliate content serve as sponsored content at scale. What’s more, an affiliate community can build not just a pipeline of content, but serve as a roster of creators who truly understand your product and your brand. Since they’re paid on commission, they work hard to create content that converts. Why not use this content to drive paid ad performance and develop UGC?

We find this is a better way to take creative that’s performing well organically in terms of sales and traffic, then use that content and extend it onto your paid social strategy. We’ve seen that if a piece of content is performing well organically, there’s a high likelihood that it’s going to perform well on the paid side. 

And with that roster of creators, what better way to partner with them to create content? Because they know your product, they love your product, and there’s less risk involved by partnering with a community that knows and loves your brand than going to someone cold.

Riley Cronin, President & Co-Founder, ZeroTo1

This idea doesn’t just apply to affiliate marketing content: it offers a compelling framework to think beyond the initial purpose or goal of creator content.

How to Leverage Content With Your Influencer Marketing Software

The traditional setup of end-to-end influencer marketing software starts with creator discovery, transitions to creator management, recruitment and running a campaign or activation, and ends with reporting on the results. Within this workflow, you’d have to go to individual campaigns to access your social content. Today, what’s needed is a single view of content from all your campaigns—a centralized hub for storing, managing, and viewing creator-generated content. 

For example, in order to find content for paid social ads from your affiliate community, as Riley detailed above, you would start by filtering via an affiliate tag, which helps you know what content has been created by your affiliate community. From there, filtering by highest performing content and choosing Instagram—where you want to run an ad—surfaces the top content to consider. After you check for usage rights, you’ll have the content that's best to leverage for an ad.

What do you need in your influencer marketing software to carry out these tasks?

• A robust filtering system to ensure that you can quickly find the specific content you need.
• Individual content management, plus the option to download influencer-generated content directly. This is particularly useful for repurposing content across different platforms, or for internal presentations.
• Metrics and campaign association to get insight into content performance and easily identify the campaign each piece of content belongs to.
• Content labeling and tagging to effectively organize and categorize content by theme, topic, campaign type, etc. This granular approach to tagging ensures that you can quickly retrieve the content you need, exactly when you need it.
• Rights management to understand every asset’s defined usage rights and permissions. This protects both creators and your brand, ensures compliance with copyright laws, and sets clear expectations about how, when, and where content can be used.

The Future of Creator Content Management

The future of managing content produced by your creator partners goes far beyond simple filtering and tagging management abilities. With the fast-emerging prominence and prevalence of AI technology, and industry-leading organizations pushing the envelope when it comes to using influencer marketing across their marketing channels, building solutions that make your content work smarter for you should be a top priority for every influencer marketing platform in 2024. 

Prioritize a partner whose roadmap considers the following:

• Creative collections. Grouping content dynamically any way you want—by themes, campaigns, or whatever suits your strategy—unlocks an entirely new way of working within a content-first mindset. Examples include collections with content following best practices as a reference for your team, or showcasing best-performing content from your long-lasting relationships with key brand ambassadors.
• Integrations. Creator-produced content should play nice with your favorite Digital Assets Management systems and storage solutions, guaranteeing smooth, hassle-free access to all your social content. 
• Smart tagging and scoring. AI-powered smart-tagging capabilities can help segment content automatically based on multiple attributes, like the color scheme of the image, or listed products. Ultimately, do you want to know which content will sell more products? AI technology can help you figure that out by scoring the content for propensity of specific outcomes, and making your content strategy sharper and more effective.
• Capturing content beyond campaigns. Don’t miss any valuable mentions or discussions about your brand or products just because a creator didn’t use your campaign keywords and hashtags. Perhaps they got the keywords wrong, or maybe you’re running a PR gifting campaign with no campaign requirements. You can even use this information to analyze organic content from creators in your CRM against your structured campaigns to gain a better understanding of earned and sponsored content.
• Managing content beyond social posts. Manage high-quality assets efficiently with an easily accessible database that helps you reuse and repurpose content across channels, platforms, and campaigns. Perfect for UGC that never publishes live on a creator’s social feed—but if it does, tie your HQ asset within your library to campaigns and live social posts to easily track cross-channel performance together.

If you’re still with me after all that, I hope you take away just one thing: influencer marketing strategy no longer ends with the post—it starts with it. A few questions to consider as you embark on your 2024 influencer marketing strategy can be:

• How can creator content be repurposed or amplified across channels? 
• How can it support owned and paid strategies? 
• Do I have a platform that supports a content-first view, and campaign-agnostic management of my creator marketing activities? 

If you’d like to learn how CreatorIQ is preparing for the rise in creator content amplification in 2024, contact us! We’d love to tell you all about it.