You don’t have to work with celebrity influencers to get big results. A fine-tuned creator marketing strategy is capable of sourcing lesser-known ‘hidden gems’, that perform way beyond the expected outcome.
It’s understandable why working with celebrity influencers might make sense, especially in terms of boosting brand value. However, relying solely on one or a select few influencers is also highly risky.
The influencer may not stick to the pre-agreed schedule, or run into unforeseeable circumstances (like an accident or a scandal). Such factors could lead the post to not do as well as expected, heavily impacting the ROI as a result.
Many advertisers like to hire an influencer who only plays a certain game, or wears a certain brand of makeup, since their audience might be interested in the competing product.
However these specificities, combined with using influencers who only have large followings, can be quite limiting.
As we see above, the engagement rate of micro to mid-tier creators is significantly higher than celebrity influencers. This means the impact of big stars can overall be relatively tame.
There are also less of these mega and celebrity influencers than you might think. Therefore the not-so-endless stream of people to work with runs out quite quickly when trying to expand into larger-scale campaigns.
Scalable campaigns
Creator marketing’s raison d’être, is that it allows for scalable, data-backed campaigns. A scalable creator marketing strategy advocates working with tens or hundreds of nano to mid-tier creators rather than a select few.
If someone falls sick and cannot make the pre-agreed schedule, then the impact on the campaign as a whole is a lot less. If a single post doesn’t perform well, the campaign is still more likely to be a success overall.
However, working with smaller creators doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice the prospect of achieving exceptional results. If anything, a good creator marketing strategy will succeed in fostering this outcome.
Finding hidden gems
The more creators that you work with, the more predictable your campaigns will be as we explain here. This strategy also heightens your chance of discovering ‘hidden gems’, since there is a larger pool of creators contributing to the campaign.
These ‘home run’ deals can outperform massively and alone cover a vast proportion of the campaign costs.
As seen here in our case study with games developer Social Point, one creator managed to cover over 60% of the campaign costs.
It’s also worth noting that the minimum ROI in such a campaign is 0%. This means that a single deal that performs at its worst, can only make you lose the money that you put into it (which is not the whole budget).
Meanwhile, there is no maximum ROI, so it’s possible that a single deal could cover the whole of the campaign costs and more. As we see below, in one such case, a single creator achieved exceptional results, hitting 6000% ROI.
Even more importantly, the amount of these breakaway hits will increase with campaign size, increasing the campaign’s overall ROI.
It could be possible to carry out such a campaign manually. However, realistically, you’ll need automation as the campaign grows. This means no selecting specific people based on their hair colour or favourite ice cream flavour. Through this creator marketing strategy, we automatically target according to demographic and formulate the cost model using quantitative data.
The more that we run the campaigns, then the more we can fine-tune the strategy, optimising results round-after-round.
Our software makes creator marketing simple, effective and scalable. It’s lower in risk than traditional influencer marketing, using data-backed formulas that improve performance and predictability.
Find out how we can help you improve your creator marketing strategy by looking at services for advertisers or schedule a walkthrough with us to get started.