3 C's for Building Brand With a Creator Partnership

Everyone's doing creator partnerships, but almost nobody is measuring whether those partnerships are building brand equity.

Two-thirds of marketers are already working with creators. Whether it’s a top-of-funnel play to build cultural relevance and feed the content engine, or a genuine move to convert new audiences into customers, creators are a mainstay in the marketer media mix.

But does that mean every creator you work with is building lasting effects for your brand? Annoyingly, it depends.

Even the most viral of viral videos doesn’t guarantee lasting gains in awareness, consideration or preference. The harder job, and the one that most brands skip, is turning that attention into something people remember and associate with you specifically.

This is your official invitation to stop obsessing over reach, engagement and short-term performance, and start paying attention to three C's: caliber, credibility and consistency.

Caliber

A creator can generate millions of views and major spikes in website traffic and still do absolutely nothing for your brand. Even though the numbers look great in a spreadsheet, your job as a marketer isn’t to introduce your brand to every human on planet earth. It’s to build equity with the people who will actually buy your product. So how can you spot the difference?

Start with the caliber of the audience. Is the creator actually in front of the consumers your brand needs to win? How much overlap is there with your target customer, really — not the vibes-based version, the actual data? And what do those people already think about your category and your brand before the creator even shows up?

Then look at what the creator brings. The good ones have a distinct point of view, sharp judgement, and a relationship with their audience built by showing up consistently, not by chasing whatever's trending that week. Turn a creator into a mouthpiece reading your approved talking points, and congratulations, you've paid a premium to remove the one thing that made them worth hiring.

Measurement needs to go further than engagement, too. Awareness, consideration, preference and relevance tell you whether the partnership actually moved someone closer to your brand, not just whether they watched or double-tapped the like button.

Credibility

People can smell a transactional partnership instantly. The collaborations that actually land have a believable connection between creator, product and audience that’s rooted in real expertise, genuine use, or an existing interest, not a brief that landed in someone's inbox on a random Tuesday.

Here's the stat that should make every brand a little queasy: 93 percent of marketers believe creator campaigns work best when creators use their own voice. Only 7 percent actually let that happen. That 86-point gap is exactly where credibility goes to die. Creator marketing means handing over some control because the creator already knows what their audience watches, shares and immediately scrolls past.

Give creators a strong strategic brief and room to say it their way. Set the parameters, make sure they understand the brand and what the work needs to achieve, then physically resist the urge to script every line.

Credibility also takes time. One viral post might garner you attention, but committing budget to repeated, long-term partnerships give people more chances to believe the fit is real instead of wondering who's paying whom.

Consistency

Repetition stops working the moment your brand changes with every post. Creators need freedom over how they tell the story, but the messages and associations underneath need to carry from one activation to the next. Otherwise people remember the creator and forget you were ever involved.

That means thinking beyond a single post. The strongest creator relationships stretch across content, events, product feedback and community with each appearance telling a different story without the brand having to reinvent itself every single time.

This longer view matters because creators can build demand well before someone's ready to buy. Most of a category's future buyers aren't in-market yet, at any given moment. Different stories and formats give you repeated chances to become familiar and memorable, instead of betting the entire budget on one campaign breaking through.

Decide what job you're actually hiring a creator to do before you sign anything, then measure against that job specifically. Some partnerships exist to drive discovery, others should lift consideration, demonstrate the product, or build an association you actually want to own.

Reach, engagement and conversions tell you how the content performed. Brand measurement answers the harder question: Did any of it change how people think and feel about you?

Creator marketing falls apart when attention gets mistaken for preference, and activity for impact. Stop asking "did it go viral?" Start asking "is the brand stronger because of it?"

Taylor Shanks is the global brand manager at Tracksuit, an always-on brand tracking platform.