Five Steps To Build Creator Marketing Programs That Work

Dave Rosen is a marketer at BCKR, former CEO of WIMO Games, and has 22 years of leadership experience in gaming, digital media and sports.

Influencer marketing has gone from the fringes of the “Mommy Blogger” era of the early 2000s to one of the dominant platforms for product and brand marketing today. From product launches to elections, the impact of influencers (AKA creators) led global communications firm Edelman to call 2024 “the year of the creator.” Yet, for all the recognition the primacy of influencer marketing is receiving, companies still struggle with building effective influencer-based marketing strategies. Here are five practical steps that will help marketers deliver successful creator partnerships.

Know Your Audience

An effective influencer-based marketing strategy begins with a deep understanding of your audience. It’s not enough to identify your category; you need to consider what kind of consumer will be interested in your product. When working on the EA SPORTS Active 2 fitness products for Wii, PlayStation and Xbox, we couldn’t think of our audience as just gamers, console owners, or even sports fans. We zeroed in on busy moms, with kids living at home, who wanted to exercise but didn’t have time to drive to the gym. So when we went looking for influencers to work with, we could grade their potential by the relevance of their content to the interests of a mom who fit that profile.

Relevance > Scale

It’s easy to become enamored by the idea of working with someone who has a huge follower count. But a larger following doesn’t mean a more effective campaign. At BCKR, we make collegiate-licensed high-performance outerwear. Our initial products are for the University of Texas, Ohio State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Oregon. As we’ve built our influencer marketing strategy, we aren’t looking for creators with the largest sports audience, college sports audience, or even college football audience. We want to work with people making content specifically for the fans of each of those universities. A partnership with an Oregon Ducks football fan account that has twenty thousand followers will be far more effective than a partnership with a broader sports creator who might have hundreds of thousands of followers. The bonus is that the more niche a creator is, the lower your cost of entry to work with them will be. Don’t pay to reach beyond the audience you need.

Content Alignment

A creator’s singular focus will always be to create content that resonates with their audience. If they stop doing that, they lose their relevance and quickly fade away. That means their level of interest and engagement with your brand will be driven by the degree to which your product will interest their audience. While you may be able to buy your way into a sponsored post or one-off call-out, you won’t get authentic content if the creator doesn’t see the fit (and they may turn you down at any price). Take the time to review the creator’s content and think about how your brand could fit in. If they can sample the product or service, let them do that. And ultimately give them creative control of the content they create because something authentic that hits only a few of your key messages will be more effective than a boring video that covers every one of your talking points.

Win-Win Relationships

Analysis by the Harvard Business Review has shown that influencer marketing can have a positive ROI when done right. To give your campaign the best chance of success, you need to ensure it is a win for the creator. One simple way we did this at GREE was to use our advertising spend to amplify creator content. For us, it meant hearing from someone that audiences would find far more credible than a traditional ad. For the creators, it meant we were helping get their videos in front of new potential audience members and grow their channels. With their following growing and those new users coming in based on interest in GREE games, it initiated a positive reinforcement loop for everyone involved.

Test And Learn

Influencer marketing may be a relatively new area of focus, but that doesn’t mean you should approach it any differently than the rest of your marketing mix. In building your strategy, include both an early test and learning phase and target metrics you will use to assess the performance of your ongoing partnerships. Like any marketing program, you can start small with only a few partners and use those projects to learn what does and doesn’t work for reaching your audience. Only once you are clear on what kinds of creators and content will deliver results should you start to scale. Putting the wrong type of content in front of more people will only burn through your marketing budget faster.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?