At CreatorIQ, we’re confident that creator marketing drives better results—and the industry agrees. According to our State of Creator Marketing 2024-2025 report, which surveyed more than 1,100 brands, agencies, and creators, 94% of organizations believe creator content drives more ROI than traditional digital advertising—a 20% increase since 2023. And with better performance comes greater investment: 74% of organizations increased their creator marketing investment year-over-year, with an average 143% increase over the past four years.
Despite these gains, proving creator marketing’s full business impact remains challenging. From board meetings to budget planning, there’s pressure to prove immediate results, and the myriad performance marketing acronyms that executives love (ROAS, CVR, CPM, CPA, etc.) don’t capture the complete, long-term value of brand-building through creators. In fact, our research shows that difficulty in measuring creator performance is now the top challenge for brands, surpassing concerns like budget and staffing. This indicates that as brands’ investment in creator marketing increases, so too does their need for nuanced, reliable measurement.
At this year’s CreatorIQ Connect event in LA, we hosted a panel of top industry leaders—including Ashton Wall, Founder of GateMaker Community, Preston Rutherford, Co-Founder of Chubbies and Loop Returns, Jenna Habayeb, CMO of Ruggable, and Cody Plofker, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer of Jones Road Beauty, to tackle this “multi-billion-dollar question” of how to best measure and maximize the ROI of creator marketing. Here are three key takeaways:
1. Measure Holistically: Balance Financial Metrics With Brand Health Indicators
While financial metrics like CPM, CPA, and revenue are essential, they’re only one part of a bigger picture. Creator marketing builds long-term brand affinity, which isn’t directly measurable by clicks and conversions. As Jenna Habayeb explains, many brands miss the “halo effect” of creator marketing: customers may discover a product through a creator but convert later, through a different (often untrackable) channel. Because of this, ROAS metrics should be seen as directional, rather than the absolute measure of creator marketing ROI. In fact, Jenna recommends applying a 2-2.5X “halo” factor to these metrics to better account for creators’ indirect impact on consumer purchase journeys.
Beyond traditional performance metrics, brand health indicators like branded search volume and site traffic can help illustrate creator marketing’s overall business impact. “At the end of the day,” Preston Rutherford said, “if we’re getting more people searching ‘Chubbies swim trunks’ versus ‘top 10 swim trunks,’ that is a fundamentally different shopping behavior and purchase behavior.” He noted that businesses often get too myopic and lose sight of the main goal: “We're trying to get people to choose us automatically when they come into the market for our category. So let's [focus on what] drives that, because it’s not always aligned with what drives one-day click ROAS.”
Other creator metrics such as community size, Earned Media Value (EMV), and retention can also be used to assess a brand’s community health and understand broader growth trends. Ashton Wall explains how “community size and the sheer volume of creators talking about your brand can absolutely plot against site traffic and conversion rate and AOV,” before revealing the “undeniable correlation” between community size and revenue that she and her co-founder Amelia Soohoo observed while running the influencer programs at ColourPop and Kylie Cosmetics: “As our community size grew, so did our revenue.”
Ultimately, these brand health indicators help reveal what creator marketing does best—build desirability. Desirability signals that a brand isn’t just noticed by consumers but genuinely sought after—which, according to marketing and data analytics veteran Doug Jensen, is a powerful driver for future conversions. Read Doug’s recent blog post with us to learn how you can effectively measure this desirability and prove creator marketing ROI through Marketing Mix Models.
Doug Jensen, Data & Analytics Expert
Recognizing these broader influences, and balancing them with other growth metrics across the business, allows for a more accurate, holistic assessment of creator marketing’s impact on your brand.
2. Invest in Brand Building to Improve Performance Marketing Outcomes
While some still believe in the (misguided) notion that brand and performance marketing are at odds with each other, there’s actually a critical interplay between the two. Paid media performs better when backed by brand awareness and affinity. When consumers know and trust a brand, performance ads achieve higher click-through and conversion rates, making each dollar spent more effective. Plus, customers acquired thanks to strong brand awareness tend to have higher lifetime value (LTV) because they feel a deeper connection to the brand.
Solely focusing on bottom-of-funnel conversions, without investing in top-of-funnel awareness and desirability, leads to diminishing returns over time. Cody Plofker shared that while Jones Road Beauty is very focused on efficient customer acquisition, “we can't just do bottom-of-funnel, last-click measurement, because that's going to dry up and be a very short-term focus for us.” In comparison, he revealed that launching TV ads to drive awareness brought a ton of new people into the brand’s funnel to target, emphasizing the importance of “finding that balance.”
So while performance marketing can help deliver quick wins, it’s critical to remember (and remind executives) that it’s brand marketing that builds the enduring foundation, driving desirability, trust, and consumer loyalty that make those quick wins easier to achieve. And who’s better at driving that brand awareness, desirability, and trust than creators? Which brings us to our final takeaway…
3. Leverage Creator Content Across All Owned & Operated Channels
As we know, creator marketing is a powerful way to drive brand awareness and affinity by tapping into the trust, reach, and engagement that creators have cultivated with their audiences. But here’s the real kicker: creator content doesn’t just supplement a brands’ owned efforts—it outperforms them. We looked into the performance of standout Fortune 100 brands and found that on average, creator content drove 12 times more impressions, 17 times more engagements, and 32 times more posts than the brands’ owned social content. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case the data: creator content allows a brand to be everywhere all at once—exponentially extending a brand's reach and amplifying engagement well beyond what a brand’s own content can achieve.
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Owned vs. Creator Content on TikTok and Instagram
In addition to embracing this earned content on creator channels, businesses should continue to share creator UGC on their owned brand channels like dot com and social. But it doesn’t—and shouldn’t—stop there: brands also see better returns when leveraging creator content on paid channels. “We could be spending $500 on [a creator post] that I could put $1 million of spend behind at a 5:1 ROI. I just spent $500 on someone who drove $5 million for the entire year, and the ad’s still running, and I can't beat it,” Jenna shared. “I think a lot of people just think about creator performance through direct UTM attribution, but the content itself is so meaty.” Cody echoed the value of leveraging creator content across other channels, and shared how Jones Road Beauty finds whitelisted and partnership ads that appear to come directly from a creator’s own profile more effective than traditional, polished ads.
Yet according to our research, brands are still underutilizing creator content, incorporating it into only 42% of their digital ads. The future of marketing is content-first and creator-led, and it’s time for brands looking to maximize the impact of creator content to recognize its value beyond creator-owned channels.
On a final note, as brands continue to unlock the full power of creator content across their marketing ecosystems, it’s important to remember why this content works better in the first place—it’s authentic and relatable in a way that builds trust and resonates with audiences. As Ashton puts it, “more people talking about you on the internet is a good thing.” While brand guidelines matter, controlling every aspect of a creator’s content risks diluting its authenticity, which ultimately weakens the content’s impact. Our panelists agree that when it comes to creator partnerships, giving the creators more freedom to bring the brand to life in their own unique style leads to greater audience engagement and, ultimately, stronger performance metrics for you to show off at the next board meeting.
To explore these insights further, check out the full session replay, and download the complete State of Creator Marketing report.
