Creator Toolkit- A Guide For Brands To Leverage Creators

The marketing landscape has always been an evolving one. One of the key marketing trends for 2022 is the increasing focus on creators. India’s creator ecosystem has grown exponentially and is projected to be 10 Cr+ strong. Brands are always on a lookout for newer ways to engage with their audiences and earn their love. Creators are a sure fire way to do so. Consumers tend to have a better relationship with creators, given their authenticity and relatability.

However, a creator strategy that delivers on a brand’s marketing objectives needs careful consideration on multiple fronts.

The 3-Step Framework for Effective Creator Collaborations

Selecting the right creator

The success of any creator-led campaign rides heavily on being strategic about picking the right creator for your campaigns. Several factors contribute to making the correct choice:

• Mapping audiences with similar interests: Given that each creator has a distinct tribe, aligning the brand's target audience to the creator's audience base is critical. Brands may reach the most relevant consumers that resonate with their ideals and are receptive to their messaging by overlapping target groups. A brand selling beauty products, for example, can enlist the help of a beauty influencer to market its products and build meaningful connections with similar audiences.

• Alignment of the brand’s and creator’s personality: While assessing the eligibility of an online creator, brands must also look for a personality that is in every way consistent with their message and presence. The brand's identity, tone, and messaging should intertwine with the creator's content style and niche for better cohesion. This will help to increase the impact on the intended audiences. For example, if the brand's personality is quirky and approachable, it would be more appropriate to collaborate with a creator that uses humour in their content.

• Bridging language, cultural and regional disparities: Indian audiences are culturally, regionally, and linguistically diverse. To tap into these diverse groups, marketers must collaborate with individuals who have a thorough awareness of the consumer’s language, cultural, and regional characteristics. The goal is to create content that resonates with the brand's target audiences and fosters a meaningful relationship with them.

Crafting communication that connects

The next step is to create communication that is appealing to the audience. This can be a deciding factor in the collaboration's success. Brands and creators must collaborate to ensure that communication is stylistically consistent with the personalities of the creators and brands.

• Incorporating cultural and behavioural nuance: 49% of urban active internet users prefer to consume content in Indic languages*. Brands need to factor in this behaviour while closing in on the communication strategy with the creators. Language-first creators tend to have an extremely high resonance with their target audience due to authenticity and reliability.

• Creating bespoke content-centric to the brand’s features: Brands must actively collaborate with creators to create narrative-style content that attracts consumers' attention while also driving excitement about the products. This includes videos of product unboxing, DIYs, product reviews, a day in the creator's life, and so on.

• Leveraging content across platforms: While creators tend to have a dedicated audience on specific platforms, brands should leverage the created content across their social and media handles. This will enable brands to narrate their story with authenticity and relatability across a wider audience.

• Creating content that is sensitive yet relatable to the masses: The sheer volume of content created and a strong feedback loop from audiences provide creators with a comprehensive insight into what resonates with the target audiences. Brands should take advantage of this knowledge and tailor their communications accordingly.

• Optimising tried-and-tested content formats: Brands must collaborate with content creators during the content planning and publishing stages to optimise content formats based on audience preferences. The goal is to strategically present content in order to maximise brand awareness and impact through relatable content and messaging. Some prominent content formats that have previously succeeded for brands include:

1. Picture-first content such as static content, standalone or product posts helps brands position their products upfront to their audiences. Coupled with the creator’s insight on the product can help add value to the brand’s campaign and influence consumers' purchase decisions.
2. Video-first content such as motion videos and graphics, lip sync videos and skits help brands create an immersive experience for audiences. Creators can help create and build video content centric to the brand’s products, with a relevant and relatable storyline with their audiences.
3. Layered content formats have been a massive success for brands and creators alike. By positioning a brand’s product within its content, creators can easily grab audiences' attention. Brands can also track quick conversions and direct sales driven through a call to action links embedded in these content formats.
4. Language-first content formats enable brands to reach potential consumers within a creator's audience base who were previously unattainable due to language barriers.

Measuring success

Launching a creator campaign is not enough. It’s critical to measure the campaign's success across awareness, engagement and conversion metrics.

1. Brand awareness: Brands can quickly get a pulse on awareness of creator-led campaigns by measuring the campaign’s impressions, clicks and CTR metrics. This displays how well the creator campaign enhanced the brand’s awareness among the targeted audiences.
2. Brand engagement: Brands can get a sense check and immediate feedback on how well the creator-led campaign is faring through likes, comments and shares. Shares can be a good indicator of traction in the target audience.
3. Brand conversions: Tracking the use of special promotions and discount codes by consumers customised for creators on the brand’s check-out page can indicate direct sales and conversions generated by the creator-led campaign. Based on this, brands can gauge the success of creator collaborations and make tweaks in the campaign as required.

The success of any marketing initiative depends on the core strategy deployed. By following this 3-step framework, brands can create and execute effective creator strategies to achieve their business and marketing objectives.

Connecting with Bharat through creators

49% of urban active internet users prefer to consume online content in Indic languages. These users who we collectively refer to as Bharat are a strong frontier for growth for brands and need a language-first creator strategy.

ShareChat: Connecting Brands with Bharat

With over 18 crore monthly active users that spend an average of 31 minutes daily on the platform and a creator community of 32 Million, ShareChat is a must-have in the creator strategy of brands looking to connect with Bharat. ShareChat offers a wide choice of creator base with heavy linguistic and geographic diversities.

Collaborations made easy with ShareChat

With ShareChat, creator collaborations are effortless. From devotion to humour & fun, ShareChat creators curate and create content across 20 categories.

Selecting the right creator
Through ShareChat’s Creator Badge accreditation, brands can evaluate and select creators based on their popularity, quality and consistency:

• Purple badge creators: Curate Content from all Sources
• Golden badge creator: Create Original Content

Crafting an impactful communication

Brands can also choose from across 20 content categories creators use to craft communications that match their brand personality.

In addition to a diverse range of categories, brands engage with Bharat through a vast catalogue of ad formats:

• Picture and text-based content: Create static content based on motivational quotes, messages, portraits, selfies and pictures with partners
• Video-based content: Create content and posts using motion videos, slideshows with background music, lip sync videos, narrated poems and skits

Branded Hashtag Challenge

Branded hashtags are a unique and engaging ad format that enables brands to go viral by tapping into recent trends. Brands can generate mass exposure and traction by inviting users to create a large volume of user-generated content with branded filters.

Creator Ads

Creator ads are unique ad solutions through which brands can build cultural relevance through ads created in house by the ShareChat team in collaboration with creators. These are branded video ads that align with a user’s native language and culture. Leading brands have leveraged creator ads successfully to create awareness and drive resonance.

For their Expert Rich Crème campaign, Godrej used creator ads in Bengali for its Durga Pujo campaign to promote contextual communication through informative videos about hair colouring. The brand successfully enhanced its awareness in Bharat with over 6 million impressions.

Wild Stone leveraged creator ads to create awareness and excitement about its latest product, ‘Legend’. The campaign reached over 9.33 Lakh users and garnered 19 Lakh impressions in a short time.

Fanta collaborated with ShareChat’s top 30 creators to leverage the hype around Holi, using a customised Fanta lens on user-generated videos with the hashtag #YeHoliFantaWali. The brand was able to drive high engagement and reach among young Indian users with over 330K+ UGC videos that garnered 60 Cr views.

With the growing popularity of creators, it’s safe to conclude that creators will be an integral part of any brand’s marketing strategy. Brands must select the right creators, craft communications that resonate and measure success to drive deeper inroads with their audiences.

To tap into the ever-growing creator community of ShareChat, contact us at: [email protected]

Data Source:

https://www.financialexpress.com/brandwagon/how-the-creator-economy-boomed-in-2021/2381815/

Bharat - The Neo India

Kantar ICUBE