More and more brands are using creator marketing — and it’s paying off

Brand development should be taken more seriously… And not just because we say so.

In fact, more and more brands are using creator marketing as a valuable component of their growth strategy — reaching new markets, audiences, and powering up their brand awareness efforts.

Today’s insight article will walk you through why creator marketing is an essential element in the brand development process and how your brand can leverage its power.

What is creator marketing?

In a nutshell, creator marketing implies brands partnering up with content creators to produce relatable and relevant content for their products, services, or brand development strategy.

This turns particularly effective when both brands and content creators share a dedicated audience, just like the Influencers Club says:

“Creators provide content that they usually post and receive compensation for their work. On the other hand, brands get exposure in front of their most relevant audience. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.”

This way of sharing content also positively impacts the market, helping audiences find what they are looking for in a natural, not-pushy way… While brands enjoy the benefits of leveraging a creator’s reach in their favor.

Why do brands use creator marketing?

Essentially, brands use creator marketing to reach new audiences and promote their services through one of this century’s most powerful marketing strategies.

But, not only because we’re Curastory and we say so…

It’s because numbers don’t lie.

For example — over 66% of brands spent more on Creator Marketing in 2021 than their entire lifespan (according to Social Media Today). Those are huge numbers.

However, there are other powerful reasons why brands are, more often, using creator marketing to get a valuable ROI.

Just like Forbes says, there are at least 4 different vital reasons why brands are using creator marketing as a general rule:

1. Because customers are more involved at the outset
2. Because it allows creators to customize the brand message and experience
3. Because conversion rates are higher than traditional marketing methods
4. Because it targets Gen Z and Millennials

With customer involvement, more and more brands are investing in creator marketing because their targeted customers have a more enjoyable journey through the use of relatable content. And no wonder why.

It’s a creative (no pun intended) way to monetize marketing efforts while still nurturing a positive relationship with potential buyers. This is due to the fact that creator marketing focuses on valuable experiences above all else, making potential clients see the benefits in a digestible or snackable piece of content. Genius, if you ask us.

The second reason is the customization. Possibilities are endless when you provide a personalized approach. And it doesn’t matter the context — customers will value tailor-made applications to capture their attention, because we all love to feel special… This is exactly what creator marketing is all about for brands, anyways.

Conversion rates! And this could be considered more of like a 2.2 reason why… But you get it. Conversion rates are a significant KPI or metric, particularly for your brand development purposes. This will allow you to determine if your efforts are worth the cost — which, speaking about creator marketing, totally is.

See, when your market approach is 100% tailored to a specific audience, chances are that the volume will decrease… But the quality of those leads will be extremely valuable.

Less quantity, more quality. That’s creator marketing’s goal in a nutshell.

And, finally, we have Gen Z and Millennial target audiences… Which are most brands’ most sought out masses. And they loooooove content. Which means… If your brand wants to stay ‘in trend’, it must consider creator marketing. Now.

How to use creator marketing as a business strategy

Creator marketing is a blue ocean of strategies coming together for a greater good: Higher personalization for brands, and a more benefit-focused outcome for potential customers, making sense for more and more brands to hop on the creator bandwagon.

Let’s travel back to 2011 real quick to explain this further.

In that time, as The Atlantic says, YouTube was going through an awkward moment. They needed more high-quality advertisers, and they saw how other platforms such as Vine were making the most out of user generated content to build a fan base… So they knew where to start.

But they didn’t have a catchy name for those “stars”. They tried naming them “YouTube Stars”… And you probably don’t remember this because it didn’t last long enough to be relevant.

After some time, they came up with a term that made total sense for them at the moment, and for the entire marketing industry… They just created the “creators” term (again, no pun intended).

Interestingly enough, these new creators were all about engaging with their fan base and creating content that resonates with the hearts and minds of them… Making sense for brands to pay attention to them as a marketing partner.

And it all led us to 2022, where the creator economy is the internet’s most prominent and powerful engagement tool… Driving millions of dollars in revenue for brands around the world. A heartwarming story, definitely.

Now, let’s go back to what concerns us the most: How your brand can start using creator marketing right now to leverage all its power.

Hint — it starts with a ‘C’ and ends with ‘urastory’. That’s just what we do!

We pair up purposeful brands with videos in our platform from engaging creators with just a couple of clicks, allowing both parties to make the most out of what we call Creator Ad Reads™ in those videos to take their ROAS to new heights when posted to social media.

And it all starts with a quick application to get to know each other and start setting up your way up to success.

Just click here to learn more about this subject.

Some examples of great creator marketing as a business

Hats off for these great creator marketing efforts.

To finalize this article, we want to give you some examples on how successful businesses are using creator marketing to drive massive growth, engagement, and support of their brand development strategy with digestible content.

Just like Subaru did here in a campaign with Davin Graham in 2017.

Some context around this: Davin is a YouTube content creator with around 6 million subscribers, and his content revolves around sports, gaming, and lifestyle for Millennials.

This campaign was intended to show the new Subaru Impreza in a new way… And they nailed it.

Another great example of a successful creator marketing campaign was Audible’s campaign with Jesse Driftwood, proving that you don’t need extremely large audiences to make a huge impact.

Jesse is a photographer and content creator with roughly 150K followers, which isn’t that small… But not massive. Yet, his campaign with Audible, a podcast and audio books platform owned by Amazon, was a major success given his loyal and extremely engaged audience.

It’s not the size of the audience, but what you can do with it.

And Curastory can help you make the most out of your desired audience too!

At Curastory we’re all about powering brands, like yours, supercharging their ROAS.

So, if you have any questions around this topic and could use some help, just reach out. We’ll be more than happy to answer your questions.

Until next time,

The Curastory Team