Influencer marketing is broken. Content creation is the way forward.
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We developed the ‘Online Narrative’; a process to help brands and creators produce fantastic content together.
As brands continue to approach us wanting to collaborate with influencers, we have acknowledged their importance as content creators with stories to tell and brand love to drive. This is why we developed the ‘Online Narrative’; a process to help brands and creators produce fantastic content together.
Having already established why BRND WGN feels influencers should be referred to and treated as ‘content creators’, with great potential to enhance a brand’s story on social media, we needed to go a step further.
We asked ourselves what we can offer our clients, i.e. the brands looking to collaborate with creators, that is different from what’s already out there.
How do we develop our own version of ‘influencer marketing’ that content creators themselves would want to get on board with? What can give these individuals more creative leeway, whilst adding more purpose and substance to their brand collaboration endeavours?
Before sharing what BRND WGN has developed to answer all this when connecting brands with creators through digital storytelling, here’s a reminder of why such collaborations can be extremely beneficial for any business.
Why work with content creators?
Word of mouth marketing has become even more relevant and effective in today’s crowded advertising world.
Through what is essentially word of mouth marketing, but with the use of social media, content creators authentically promoting their favourite brands can generate strong engagement if their followers feel that the creator is a trustworthy source they can relate to. But that’s not all there is to it.
Brands can reap the benefits of partnering with creators almost instantly, but only if they identify the creators who are the right fit for them based on the target audience they attract and the content they produce.
When a brand takes genuine interest in a content creator’s professional growth, a mutually beneficial and successful long-term relationship can be built.
For some brands, the primary motivation behind working with content creators might simply be to transfer social media attention from the creators’ audience to the brand itself. But there are a number of other reasons why brands should seriously consider investing in such collaborations:
- Build credibility — increase brand awareness and enhance brand reputation
- Become a trendsetter — access millennials and Gen Z where they spend most of their time
- Beat advertising blindness — reduce a brand’s chances of being perceived as having solely promotional aims
- Obtain original content — creators will have a unique perspective of a brand, which can lead them to produce equally unique content
Brands that lean into the knowledge and experience of creators are more likely to produce content that is sufficiently engaging. In a healthy collaborative scenario, creators can help brands tell a digital story that their common target audience would truly appreciate and could be inspired by.
Our content creator objectives
When activating any sort of content creator marketing for our clients, we’re prioritising two main goals:
- Facilitating communication — Both sides should be heard and respected. By facilitating ongoing communication and mutual creative input between brands and creators, we ensure that both sides can benefit from the collaboration. This way, a positive working relationship could eventually become a fruitful ambassador agreement.
- Creating meaningful content — To be able to create unique and engaging content for brands, creators need to be given the opportunity to be completely creative. We believe brands should empower creators to freely explore content opportunities, because this is how they can truly influence their audiences to support the collaboration. As a result, brands will benefit from original content they can’t obtain anywhere else.
In this way, it really wouldn’t be about the number of content creators a brand engages, or how many followers they each have.
So when helping clients develop a social media narrative with content creators, we will be driving the process with one principal question to answer: Who fits best with your brand? Meaning, who possesses the ideal style, passions and values that match the brand, in a way that would make the storytelling they collaborate on easier to execute?
The Online Narrative
This brings us to the BRND WGN process that we’ve developed as a team, informed by the insights gathered from several focus group sessions with local content creators.
Aside from our internal process of identifying ideal creators for brands, we want to involve the creators themselves throughout the strategy and planning stages.
The ‘Online Narrative’ is an important aspect of the process that comes in early on, when we first get the brand and the individual creators together in one room to kick everything off.
In a nutshell, this is what the BRND WGN content creator process looks like:
STRATEGY
- Determine the brand’s content creator marketing needs
- Identify the ideal creators that fit with those brand needs
- Contact the shortlist, narrowing it down to the creators who are actually interested in collaborating with the brand or in learning more
PLANNING
- Initial group brainstorm with us, the brand and the individual creators
- Develop the ‘Online Narrative’ with each interested creator
- Set down an agreement for the way forward that both the brand and creator are happy with
- Start producing content!
Giveaways or beautiful photos alone just don’t cut it. We want to empower creators to tell their story in line with the brand’s own story.
While the above process aims to facilitate communication first and foremost, the ‘Online Narrative’ coming up later satisfies our second objective; to create meaningful content.
Although a brand would need to make the necessary effort to drive the content creator collaboration, the creator’s own fuel into the whole strategic and creative process is essential.
Rather than instructing the creator on exactly what to do to satisfy the brand, or leaving everything from ideas to execution up to the creator for the brand to then simply judge the final result, we want to encourage mutual collaboration.
By sitting down with the brand and each content creator to develop the narrative that they both want to showcase online, we can ensure that whatever is produced has substance, authenticity and vision.
The ‘Online Narrative’ consists of four parts that can be followed consecutively by the brand together with the creator in producing their collaborative content:
- Discovery — the creator introduces the brand to their audience or teases the collaboration
- Experience — the creator initiates the brand journey by experiencing it at first hand, showing their audience what their own customer journey could be like
- Engagement — the creator engages their followers in a way that makes sense for both the creator and the brand (e.g. review, giveaway, competition, etc.)
- Loyalty — the narrative closes with the creator focusing on how the brand impacted them overall, possibly allowing for the collaboration to be taken the next level of an ambassadorial partnership
Developing a narrative calendar or timeline with these four stages in mind, and with both the brand and creator involved at all stages of developing it, can solidify a more cohesive and powerful collaboration.
If as a brand owner or a content creator you would like to explore how BRND WGN can help you capture online collaborations and stories in an impactful way, get in touch!
