More than a decade after creator marketing first emerged as a vital component of marketing transformation, and even now that the creator economy has evolved into a $156 billion industry with no signs of slowing down, some of the world’s biggest brands are still figuring out how to measure the impact of creators. To this day, a lot of smart, sophisticated brands get it wrong.
That might seem unexpected, but over my thirty-five year career in marketing measurement and analytics at Nielsen, IRI (now part of Circana), Avon, and The Estée Lauder Companies, I’ve seen this sort of dynamic play out time and again. Everyone knows that a particular marketing strategy is important, but no one is sure how to gauge its impact. All too often, industry leaders take a counter-productive view on how to evaluate an emerging marketing channel.
In the case of creator marketing, which I’ve been measuring for a decade, too many executives and data analysts are still deciding whether to invest in it by searching for a direct correlation between creator marketing activity and sales (or market share). And when they don’t find that correlation, they’re unable to show why they should be doing it at all. That’s a dangerous question to leave unanswered, because based on my experience, creator marketing is one of most effective tactics for connecting with consumers, and brands who aren’t engaging in the strategy are being left behind.
Think about the household-name enterprise brands that you know and love. Those brands aren’t trying to solve for awareness with creator marketing, either—they don’t need creators to tell people that they exist. So pointing to top of funnel metrics like impressions and views, or even brand recall, doesn’t do enough to show the true power of creator marketing.
Instead, brands should evaluate creator marketing based on how it impacts desirability—a phase in the consumer decision funnel that I believe is more relevant. In the traditional marketing funnel, awareness is followed by the consideration phase. However, in my analytics experience, desirability is best understood as the top-of-funnel stage immediately after awareness. And typically the upper-funnel metric that most brands are wrestling with improving.
Desirability is a proxy for how much people are talking about your brand, and how much interest there is in your brand. If people aren’t just aware of your brand, but are actively searching to learn what the buzz is about, that’s a strong signal that should be quantified and accounted for in marketing decisions. What’s more, desirability can be effectively measured via branded search volume, and is further reflected by a brand’s creator content Earned Media Value (EMV), which will be discussed later in the article.
Brands that attempt to measure creator marketing’s impact on conversion, instead of desirability, are confusing different inputs within the funnel, reigniting a longstanding (and misguided) debate between brand and performance marketing.
For brands looking to measure the impact of their creator marketing programs via desirability, there’s a solution: Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). While many analytic modeling firms apply MMM to sales, in my experience, building a multi-stage MMM to measure marketing
performance at each stage of the consumer journey, showing incremental impacts of offline and online media investments on desirability, consideration, and conversion, has transformed measurement of tactics like creator marketing.
Eight or nine years ago, as the creator economy was heating up, at my company, we were struggling to prove it. While Earned Media Value (EMV) is a key KPI many brands track for creator marketing, in my experience, we found a weak correlation or no correlation between EMV and sales.
When we considered other ways of measuring creator marketing, we realized that at its core, creator marketing is all about fostering and promoting brand desirability. After all, that feeling of desirability—coolness, trendiness, intrigue, FOMO, everything that’s wrapped up in the notion of wanting to learn more about a brand—lies at the core of what creators can achieve.
That was a real “a-ha” moment when we discovered that sales-based models for measuring the impact of creator marketing were wrong.
Ekimetrics, an agency we have been working with for a decade, proposed a different framework, and together we created a new, multi-stage approach that placed creator marketing in the desirability stage of the funnel. When we used Google search as a proxy for desirability (the upper funnel model), we found a very strong correlation between increased Earned Media Value from creator marketing and increased Google search for the specific brand. In fact, it was the highest correlation among the marketing activities we tracked.
Once we made that link, we could see how the impact of creator marketing cascaded further down the funnel. If desirability can be gauged by Google searches at the top of the funnel, you can then see how the impacts of creator marketing flowed down to consideration (site traffic) and finally conversion (sales, in both offline and online channels).
MMM allows brands to evaluate all marketing tactics side by side by measuring how much each tactic affects its respective set of KPIs (e.g., search, traffic, sales). On this equal playing field, brands can look at the full picture and see, for example, which top-of-funnel activities are driving results and should be optimized, and which should be deprioritized. Using this approach, brands almost always determine that increasing spend on creator marketing is a wise strategy.
If you were just looking at a sales-based model, you’d lose all these valuable insights. That’s why MMM is such a game-changer: it allows you to assess the performance of all your marketing activities, laying everything side by side so that you can develop a forward-looking strategy based on what works best. At that point, different marketing activities can be grouped according to your organization’s future plans: increased spend, consistent spend, or divestment.
While MMM is doing something intuitive, it can get pretty complex. Correct attribution entails looking at 25 to 30 metrics across the whole range of the marketing funnel and tying them to relevant business outcomes. Within this more intricate framework, it can sometimes be difficult to isolate creator marketing from paid campaigns so that you can directly measure the impact of creators.
One requirement for consistent, precise creator marketing measurement is access to accurate data, and particularly an accurate understanding of EMV. While there are a range of other metrics to consider, it’s especially important to know what EMV does and doesn’t do. As I mentioned earlier, EMV is not a sales metric, which is why its impact—and the impact of creator marketing more broadly—is often misunderstood.
Think of EMV as a reflection of consumer engagement. The more creators talk about a brand, and the more those creators’ followers engage with that content, the more a brand’s desirability grows. Still, ‘more EMV’ in a vacuum isn’t the most helpful benchmark to aim for. Instead, consider your competitors, your market share, and set a targeted goal for how you want to improve your EMV: by a top 10 rank, or an increase in share of EMV (since EMV continues to grow, per CreatorIQ).
To do MMM correctly, you need the best data, and that’s where CreatorIQ can help. It has 10 years experience leading the industry in creator marketing measurement for enterprise brands, and CreatorIQ coined EMV as the currency that beauty and other verticals use to assess creator programs. In addition to claiming a decade of historical creator data, CreatorIQ can not only parse paid and unpaid creator content, but also track channels that are traditionally more difficult to get good data on: TikTok, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Reels. I’ve looked into other companies that claim to track these channels, but they don’t do it as effectively as CreatorIQ.
People often ask me whether MMM is sustainable in the long-term. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I believe MMM is here to stay—and that it proves creator marketing is, too.
Ten years ago, brands first began to see momentum from creator marketing, and started shifting more budgets away from traditional advertising and into creator programs. At that point, when we analyzed enterprise brands’ budgets, we found consistent placement of creator marketing in the ‘increase spend allocation’ bucket.
Every year since, A&P budget guidelines have been cascaded to the Finance organization, giving thousands of Finance professionals access to guidance to what performs as they assess budget submissions of brands in each market around the world. Creator marketing has never been removed from the ‘increase spend allocation’ bucket. Its profitability continues to be strong.. You might need an MMM strategy to gain a complete understanding of that profitability, but the ROI has been proven for years..
Still, some brand leaders can be skeptical. If sales are flat or declining, it’s natural for leadership to doubt the effectiveness of creator marketing. When those conversations occur, I make sure to reinforce the proper relationships in the marketing funnel: broadly speaking, pairing EMV with desirability (upper funnel), site traffic (mid funnel), and sales (bottom funnel).
Creator marketing as a marketing practice has expanded in the past 10 years. While creator marketing largely started first in beauty and fashion, other industries are taking note. I foresee creator marketing becoming even more prevalent in experiential categories like professional sports, food and beverage, hospitality, and travel, where many brands are already turning to partnering with creators.
These industries have a clear impetus to invest more in creator marketing. If you’re in a space that benefits from educating and entertaining consumers, then creators are a natural fit for evangelizing your message. Many long-time beauty creators have broadened into lifestyle content, and are emphasizing all sorts of educational and experiential posts.
Connecting with consumers with that educational-experiential blend is where a lot of industries are moving, so I only see creator marketing becoming more relevant over time. After all, desirability never goes out of style.
If there’s one thing you should know about creator marketing measurement, it’s this: you can’t use a sales-based model to capture the true impact of creator marketing. While creators and affiliates are sometimes used as part of specific sales campaigns, in general it’s best to use creators to drive desirability through education and entertainment. So it matters about your objectives in terms of how you measure business outcomes. Generally speaking, you need to start with whether creator marketing drives desirability and then cascades down the funnel. Bottom funnel metrics are fraught with so many inputs—distribution, market factors, competition, etc.—that you need to measure creators by what they do best: driving desirability at the top of the funnel. Everything else follows from that.
Sometimes assessing the marketing funnel, and creator marketing’s role in it, can feel like staring into a dark room. It’s hard to know what’s around you, or exactly where you stand. Marketing mix modeling serves as a lightbulb: now you can look around, see where you’re at, and confidently take your next big steps.