Customer Story How a Leading Consumer Electronics Company Unifies Global Teams and Maximizes Creator Marketing Impact With a Central System of Record
This leading global consumer electronics company is dedicated to enhancing the way people work, create, and connect. The company disrupted the technology space with groundbreaking innovations in personal computing accessories. Today, it has grown into a global operation, offering a diverse portfolio of software-enabled products that empower people in work and play.
In recent years, content creators have become integral to the company’s marketing strategy. According to the company’s global lead of creator partnerships, “Creators are table stakes. They're mission-critical, especially if you're a brand that wants to build a real, authentic connection with your audience.”
At a Glance
Learn how a leading global consumer electronics company leverages CreatorIQ to:
- Discover the right creators for partnerships and campaigns
- Centralize creator and program data to make informed decisions quickly
- Maintain security and compliance for a global creator marketing program within a highly matrixed, cross-functional organization
Background Authentic, Safe Creator Partnerships at Scale
When managing a global creator marketing program, maintaining brand integrity during creator-led activations is critical. To ensure a unified approach to working with creators across the company’s different markets and business groups, the senior leader and his team create and enforce governance and guidelines for their global teams to follow, so that “everybody is playing by the same rules, and understands what we're trying to achieve.” These guidelines include creator content standards, best practices for product integration, strategies and KPIs for each social platform, as well as tips for playing into topical trends.
When it comes to selecting creators for its campaigns, the company prioritizes a few key factors: quality content, an engaged community, and most importantly, an existing affinity for the brand. The global lead notes that “it's difficult to make partnerships successful with creators when there isn't that natural affinity for who we are as a brand, the products that we make, and the purpose that they serve.”
The global lead knows that effective creator marketing goes beyond one-off, transactional posts. While some organizations tend to look at creators as vendors, this company sees them as true partners, and prioritizes long-term, mutually beneficial relationships when scaling its creator program.
“The need to have a centralized platform is super important. Whether or not you have a global team, it's so important to have one source of truth and one platform to funnel everything through—from creator discovery, to reporting, to how you manage these contracts. If you're not centralized, you're not necessarily maximizing the impact of what these partnerships are meant to do.”
Challenges Balancing Fast-Paced Campaigns with the Need for Strategic Data
A primary challenge for the company was ensuring that the team was effectively gathering, storing, and leveraging all relevant data and information. Decision-making around creators, campaigns, and channels relies heavily on having accurate and timely data. “You're only as good as the information that you have in front of you, and a large part of that is dictated by the people and resources you have in place to input that data. So that's something that is constantly a challenge,” says the senior leader.
Collecting and evaluating creator, campaign, and program data is time consuming when done manually across disparate systems. The company needed a comprehensive yet centralized view of its global creator community and program efforts in order to understand their impact and make informed decisions quickly. “It's not enough to have a great creator partnership. It's not enough to have what you feel is a great piece of content,” notes the global lead. “All of that has to live in some central place so that we can spend the time to understand if something has worked or not, take those learnings, and improve moving forward.”
Having one central platform that could facilitate everything from creator relationship management to end-to-end program management and measurement was critical to scaling the company’s creator marketing efforts safely and efficiently.
Solutions Centralized, Data-Driven Strategies for Successful Creator Partnerships and Program Management
The company leverages CreatorIQ’s comprehensive database as its single source of truth when defining KPIs, benchmarks, and performance expectations on the creator, campaign, and program level.
“We use CreatorIQ across the board,” says the global lead. “It’s the first thing we look at and the last thing we look at.” From creator discovery and campaign management, to program reporting and budget allocation, the company leverages CreatorIQ to make better, faster, and safer decisions every step of the way.
CreatorIQ’s centralized platform makes the unmanageable manageable and opens the door to effortless collaboration on a global scale. The senior leader’s team educates and empowers the global organization to leverage CreatorIQ effectively in order to optimize efforts and maximize impact.
With CreatorIQ, the company is able to unify its global teams under a standardized, streamlined approach, while still keeping brand-specific work customized.
Impact How Centralized Data Inspires Creativity and Business Results
The company’s efficiency and effectiveness soared once it was able to unify its data operations and seamlessly coordinate with creators, stakeholders, and external team members through CreatorIQ. The platform’s comprehensive database gave the company the insights and confidence to make quick, yet informed, decisions about investments, content strategy, and the creator partnerships.
Creators can turn simple products into engaging content and stories. By investing in the power of creators, while remaining compliant with brand guidelines, the company is able to extend its reach and connect more authentically with its audience.
Leaning into the content-first, creator-led future, the company has begun leveraging creator content on owned and paid channels to drive even more engagement and impact throughout the entire funnel.
Fast Questions with the company's Global Lead of Creator Partnerships
- What do you love most about what you do?I've always had a passion for the intersection of data and art and figuring out how to tell stories from that. And I believe that there is no better vessel to do that than through creators. Every day I get to meet and work with these amazingly creative people who are able to take the slightest direction and turn it into something amazing. We have tangible products: keyboards, webcams, mice. You would think that there are some limitations, but with creators, there aren't.
- How do you maximize the impact of creator content on your business?We're maximizing creator content because we understand and focus on building that path throughout the funnel. It's not just relying on organic creator content. Paid has become a really big part of what we do. If you're briefing creators the right way, and if they're executing based on that, there isn't any reason that you can’t maximize that content beyond a creator channel. Whereas before, the focus was, how does this content perform on a creator channel? Now we’re thinking beyond that to, how do we maximize this investment in creator across the board?
- How do you use CreatorIQ?We use CreatorIQ across the board. It really is the first thing we look at and it's the last thing we look at. We use it for creator discovery, we use it for KPI setting, we even use it for budget allocation—understanding what we paid creators in the past, making sure that everybody has insight into how something works and whether something's within a certain fee rate.
