With over 300 million creators worldwide, the creator economy is growing exponentially—as is its impact on brands’ ROI. Brands with advanced creator-led marketing programs see long-term business gains, and even 3-5x boosted brand health.
It’s obvious that your brand needs a robust creator-led marketing strategy—but how can you scale and track this strategy effectively?
By monitoring creators’ impact on revenue, and figuring out how creators drive consumer affinities, your brand can move from vanity metrics to transformative business results.
We’ve put together a simple checklist of actionable takeaways from our latest webinar, featuring leading research organization Forrester and powerhouse beauty conglomerate Estée Lauder Companies. All the advice below comes from the incredible team of Doug Jensen, SVP of GTM Analytics & Activation and Learning Center of Excellence at Estée Lauder Companies, and Kelsey Chickering, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Together, they boast decades of experience in the Creator Economy, and offer valuable wisdom to help your brand succeed.
Here’s where to start, according to Doug and Kelsey:
- Embed Your Brand in New Communities
Put yourself in the shoes of your consumers. From beauty to engineering, there’s a community for each and every industry. Focus on a layered partnership strategy by incorporating micro- and nano-creators just as much as powerhouse and celebrity status creators. If connecting with your consumers is the goal, invest in the creators that already do just that.
- Fuel Your Brand’s Content Engine
Build partnerships with creators who will promote your brand and products on their own social channels. Because consumers tend to trust creators more than brands, your brand can leverage creator content on your owned and paid media channels to reach your consumers via more authentic content. Go beyond #ad content by getting creative with your partnerships—whether that’s building affiliate programs, launching gifting initiatives, bringing creators to live events, or more.
- Create Genuine Relationships, Not One-Time Transactions
When a brand and creator genuinely get to know each other, authentic content comes as a result. Send a creator’s favorite product as a restock, invite them to be part of the product development process, sponsor content they’re passionate about creating—and watch your creator-led marketing program drive positive ROI for your organization.
- Focus on Collaboration and Trust
Remember that content creation is where creators excel. Resist the temptation to overdirect, and let creators do what they do best. The best partnerships yield more than just social media posts, and can serve multiple purposes for both the brand and the creator. Be aware that not every creator is suited to your goals—and that's okay! Having fewer creators with the right audience and aligned aesthetic is more important than building a large but dispassionate community.
- Don’t Be Afraid to (Marketing) Mix It Up
To measure creator-led content effectively and thoroughly, it’s best to deploy a multi-state marketing mix model. This will help your organization gauge the impact of both offline and online media investments, and see how creator content fuels brand desirability, consideration, and conversion. Like the creator economy itself, success metrics for creator marketing are an interconnected ecosystem, and need to be tracked as such.
Overall, both Estée Lauder Companies and Forrester Research agree that creator-led marketing efforts are dramatically outperforming the traditional methods. The brands that lean in and truly embrace content creators with relevant, compelling products will be the same brands that most effectively win over consumers. While these strategies may be a long game, and it’s important to remember that progress and sales are incremental, brands that fail to measure the impact of creator-led efforts across the funnel risk being left behind.
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