Insights for Creators & Marketers

Does this sound familiar? Explaining to your accountant what you do for a living feels like you’re speaking in a foriegn language. When you applied for a mortgage, the loan officer couldn’t understand why you didn’t have a W2. Or when you try to explain to your credit card company that you need a bigger limit, they ask why you don’t have three months of recurring pay stubs.

Social media sponsorship opportunities can be and are extremely exciting for both the brand and the creator. But with that being said, it is extremely easy to get caught up in the numbers aspect of sponsorships, constantly thinking: How much can I charge? What is the increase from last time? How much time will it take to do this sponsorship? How many pieces of content do I need?

Within the past decade, we have seen a huge shift in the commercial advertising arena. As social media continues to grow at an exponential rate, many brands are transforming their marketing strategies by collaborating with creators.

We’ve all seen videos, stories, and posts that promote products and services that seemingly come out of left field. Now, these are impressive in their own right, but there certainly is something refreshing, engaging, and impression-making when seeing promotions that fit seamlessly within the content and existing branding of the creator.

The most obvious answer to this question would be, “that depends on the brand.” It’s the right answer, though, because each brand is different. Each brand has different goals, different values, a different mission, a different target demographic for advertising, a different advertising budget and strategy, and different unit economics. Those are a lot of variables at play that all help determine what a brand looks for in an influencer. 

If you have been doing sponsored integrations with brands long enough, you’ve probably been through at least one round of unfair edit requests from a brand. Brand managers aren’t content creators, so they often do not know how much work it can be to edit a video or reshoot an element.

It is becoming increasingly popular for brands to leverage influencer generated content for Facebook ads. The trust of an influencer and the distribution of Facebook create a powerful combination that can result in massive sales volume.

The FTC has done an excellent job helping influencers, brands and agencies better understand how to safely promote on social media. However, many brands have yet to rigorously follow these disclosure guidelines as closely as they should.

A few months ago I published an article entitled, “Three Ways to Show Brands You Care.” Having worked with thousands of content creators, I pinpointed three common traits of the content creators that take brand partnerships the most seriously and consistently prove they care about the success of their sponsors.