Building a creator community is much like building a customer community.
You need to have a specific strategy to pull in new creators and earn their awareness. Then identify who your top advocates are and keep them engaged. And finally, understand who has “churned,” or stopped mentioning your brand, and needs to be re-engaged.
In this two part series, we will be recapping some insights from an event that we held with L’Oréal’s Luxe Canada’s Head of Advocacy and Influencer Marketing, Shari Nowroozi, and mega content creator, Tara Sighari.
During our session with them, they shared their point of view — from both a marketer and creator perspective — on how brands can find new creator partners that are a good fit for their influencer marketing program. More specifically, they offered three specific actionable tips for how brands can find new creator partners by tuning in to their natural advocates. Keep reading to learn more!
How to Find New Creator Partners
Start With Your Advocates
What’s marketers’ biggest challenge when it comes to managing creator communities?
According to Traackr’s 2024 State of Creator Relationships report, finding new creator partners for sponsored campaigns was ranked as the top challenge among marketers. Coming in at a close second was finding completely new creators for organic content.
Any marketer who has gone through the process of finding and vetting creators won’t find this too surprising. That being said, there are some tried and true methods. After 8 years in influencer marketing, Shari has led many successful campaigns as the head of advocacy and influencer at L'Oréal Luxe Canada. Here are three tips that she said worked for her teams when finding new creator partners.
Finding New Creator Partners Tip #1: Identify Advocates Through Social Listening
“We always tell our creators to tag and mention us because that’s really the most efficient way to get our attention.” - Shari Nowroozi, Head of Advocacy & Influencer Marketing at L’Oréal Canada
Organic brand affinity is a win-win. Creators want to affiliate themselves with brands that they already love and use, and brands should want to prioritize working with creators who show them organic love.
With influencer marketing platforms, like Traackr, you can automatically track mentions of your brand or top keywords and hashtags.
The result of locking in identifying creators that mention your brand and developing relationships with them? Engaged audiences, unique storytelling, and true creativity. If creators are already enthusiastic about your products, their audiences likely share the same sentiment. After all, a lot of the best influencer partnerships are based on organic love!
“To create trust and engagement with my audience, I need to mention a brand on a consistent basis. This is why I dedicate 70% of my partnerships to brands who I’ve already worked with. I know the product, my audience knows the product, and it doesn’t feel like an ad.” - Tara Sighari, content creator @tarasigari
Finding New Creator Partners Tip #2: Search For Creators Who Align To Your Brand
When finding new creator partners that are the right fit for your brand, you should always evaluate the creator’s audience makeup as well as the content they create. Ensure you’re reaching your brand’s target audience by reviewing:
- Audience demographics - age, gender, location, interests, etc.
- Brand affinity - check to see if the influencer mentioned your brand before
- Performance metrics - engagement rates, video view rates, and more
- Audience insights - see how many influencer’s followers are spam or bot accounts
- Past content - check to see if the influencer mentioned products similar to yours, or themes that are relevant to your brand
Follow up by conducting a brand safety check to verify that influencers align with your brand’s values.
Remember, you don’t always need to stick to your specific niche. If you’re a beauty brand, don’t be afraid to venture past working with just beauty content creators. Shari explained that the skincare brand, BioTherm, had a very fruitful partnership with a professional free diver. But what does a free diver and skincare brand have in common? Well, the brand’s core mission is to create products that take care of your skin and the planet, specifically creating formulats that respect the ocean. BioTherm found a strong commonality between their mission and partnering with a professional diver, whose job is to dive into the open ocean.
The key to this successful partnership was two-fold:
- The brand did “their homework” in researching the creator before even entering a conversation. This probably meant that they were able to develop a personalized approach to reaching out to the creator, and discussing their partnership.
- The brand turned its collaboration with this creator into a long-term partnership that went beyond just creating content. They showed their commitment to their common mission by attending diving practices in order to build a stronger relationship.
Finding New Creator Partners Tip #3: Expand Your Community With Similar Creators
With an influencer marketing platform like Traackr, you can grow your community with recommendations of new influencers who are talking about your brand, competitors, and key topics of interest. You can also discover influencers who have similar audience demographics or content to your top creator partners.
For example, Traackr’s Influencer Lookalike Recommendations feature provides you with specialized lists of creators that have similar attributes to your top creators, like:
- Audiences: Traackr recommends profiles of creators who have similar audience demographics.
- Content: Traackr recommends profiles of creators with similar content.
You can also get deeper insights into how influencers are connected to each other. For example, you can browse unique influencer lists that show you:
- Notable Followers: Traackr shows you people who are influential (have a big audience) that follow the influencer you are interested in.
- Notable Likers: Traackr shows you influential people who follow the influencer you are interested in, and engage with their content.
For the team at L’Oréal this becomes really important when you start to seed product to your creators. After all, product seeding is the most effective when you are sending to folks who organically love your products, or folks who are well aligned with your brand and current partners.
“One of the key tenets of our strategy is to seed at scale. Especially in beauty and when you are a brand looking to create a big impact, you need to have everyone talking about you at the same time.” - Shari Nowroozi, Head of Advocacy & Influencer Marketing at L’Oréal Canada
For more tips on how to effectively seed product to creators, check out Shari and Tara’s tips here.