Finding new creator partners can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. And, once you find them, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be aware of your brand or interested in joining your campaign.
So how can you put your best foot forward when earning awareness and engagement from your dream partners?
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 leveraging influencer product seeding strategies. Keep reading to learn more!
How to Find New Creator Partners
Be Top Of Mind Through Effective Product Seeding
All this being said, while it’s great to start with your advocates when trying to find new creator partners, that shouldn’t be your only strategy. And, if you’re a smaller brand that is still building up its awareness amongst creators and on social, it’s highly likely that you will need to branch out even further.
One of the best methods for building awareness amongst creators? Product seeding.
“Seeding is the best way to grab a creator’s attention, so you want to make it a good experience. If you’re sending them coupons or vouchers, that’s an extra step that your creator needs to take when they’re likely already receiving dozens of packages from your competitors every day.” - Shari Nowroozi, Head of Advocacy & Influencer Marketing at L’Oréal Canada
Once you’ve identified new creators that you want to work with (who don’t already know about you), the next step is to get them interested and aware of your brand. The top strategy to acquire new creators is to gift or seed free products to creators.
According to Shari, product seeding is the best way to get in front of a creator and it’s the most cost-effective type of activation compared to paid campaigns and events, thus making it a large part of L’Oréal’s influencer strategy.
Shari points out that there are three key strategies that help L’Oréal’s product seeding effort.
Product Seeding Strategy #1: Scale To The Right Creators
To create the feeling that everybody is talking about your brand at the same moment in time, you need to seed at scale. However, this does not mean that you send your product to every influencer you see on TikTok.
According to Traackr’s State of Product Seeding report, 38% of marketers say they send less than 100 total packages to influencers per year.
You can start with creators who are mentioning your brand or using influencer marketing platforms to zone in on creators by interest. Then you can start to build your list over time and scale to a greater number of engaged creators.
“I need to at least have some commonality with the brand for the partnership to be successful. Yes, it’s about authenticity but it’s also about how to create and produce the content. For example, I’m terrible at cooking, so if a cooking company asks me to do a paid partnership, it’s not going to turn out well because I’m not going to make a good video using their products and my audience will see right through it.” - Tara Sighari, content creator @tarasigari
Product Seeding Strategy #2: Frequently Gift Your Potential and New Creator Partners
Mega creators, like Tara, receive dozens of PR boxes a day, so you want to ensure you are being on the top of a creator’s mind by frequently sending them products. Shari mentions that it’s best to have a touchpoint at least once a quarter – 2-3 times if you can.
Now, every send doesn’t need to be a lavish gift. It can often be a product that you know the creator is using and will likely run out. Tara shared that she loves getting products that:
- She uses daily. This way she can skip the trip to the store, and it prevents her from using a competitors product once she’s run out.
- Are new or currently trending. For a creator like Tara who creates and capitalizes on beauty trends, she needs to be armed with the latest and greatest beauty products. Seeding is a relationship-building tactic but also an awareness play. If you’re providing your creators new product launches or saving viral products, they’ll be more inclined to share it to get the views on their content.
Timing is everything when it comes to product seeding campaigns, so put yourself in the influencer’s shoes and think about when it would be the perfect time to get your product. Do you have certain products that are great for specific seasons? Or do you have products that would align well with something you know is going on in the creator’s life (e.g. a wedding, birthday, holiday trip, etc)? This type of attention to detail is really what will turn heads and grab attention.
Product Seeding Strategy #3: Be Mindful of Waste
While product seeding is cost-effective, it can quickly become wasteful. In fact, Traackr’s State of Product Seeding report also found that 65% of marketers reported that their brand will keep sending products to influencers, even if they didn’t post after receiving a previous gift. This indicates that there could be lots of time and resources wasted if product seeding isn’t approached carefully.
Here are a few things to consider to be less wasteful:
- Minimum packaging: Can you cut areas of your packaging to make it still fit the same amount of products and be less bulky? Tara says that she prefers smaller packaging yet still contains the products she needs.
- Centralize as much as possible: There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to product seeding. From getting your products to your warehouse, to producing your box to having another shipper ship the whole package, it’s important to think though if there are ways to centralize the process.
- Identify who truly wants your gift: Again, it’s better to send products to 50 influencers who genuinely align with your brand and product versus 500 packages to any creator on social. With Traackr’s Creator Hub you can allow creators to opt into your product seeding campaigns and help manage inbound requests, ensuring that the influencers you’re working with are truly interested in your product.
Measuring the Success of New Creator Partners
Tapping into organic advocates and seeding/gifting product are great ways to build awareness and find new creator partners. However, no two brands are the same, which means that what works for one, may not work for another.
So how can you ensure that you are employing the right tactics for your brand?
You need a system to track their mentions and measure the results in one central and visible place.
For all seeding campaigns, Shari looks through their “master list” on Traackr to track the following metrics:
- Activated influencers - how many influencers mention your brand
- # of mentions - how many posts did the creators make about your brand
- # of engagements - how many engagements did each piece of content receive
- # of video views - if they created a video, how many eyeballs did that video receive
Shari’s team does this on a quarterly basis to understand which creators are frequently engaging with the brand. If a creator is posting about their brand month over month, then there’s a higher likelihood they’ll consider a paid partnership with the creator (if key performance metrics like engagements and video views are also high). On the flip side, if a creator has not mentioned your brand after 22 seeding campaigns, it’s time to look for another creator to send product to.
With Traackr’s new Creator Lifecycle feature, you can now track all of this data in one place. You can easily identify which creators you “acquire” (or mention your brand for the first time) month over month and which creators are “engaged” (or mention your brand month over month).
You can also see which creators are worth retaining or acquiring for your organic and paid strategies with in-depth performance metrics like engagement rate, video view, Brand Vitality Score (VIT) and more.
Learn more about Traackr’s new Creator Lifecycle Feature here.