Creators! Make brands your best friend
Content creator is not a full-time job title in brands. It is led by agencies and freelance creators. Creators want more upfront money, brands want more performance. How do we make it a win-win?
👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shan and I write about building businesses from scratch. Last year, same time, I closed my first company. My co-founder quit and there was no real business to save.
I was keen to be part of the global food trade. It’s huge, it’s ever growing and it has tons of problems to solve. Step 1 for us was building a marketplace to connect traders in India and Jakarta. Step 2 was building services - fulfilment and data services. Step 3 - I didn’t know, since step 1 itself would take years to achieve.
The company failed, and it pushed me towards a new field - direct to consumer brands. Now, I run two brands and I love my work. It is challenging and exciting. One part of this work is working with creators - they could be content creators, livestream creators, influencers and anyone who can talk about the brand. I am trying to build the secret recipe (not secret for you 🤩).
Before we move forward, let’s do a quick health check.
Today we will talk about these
Why do creators matter to us?
How do we work with creators?
What do we hate as a brand?
What would be a scalable content creation collaboration?
Let’s get going, wuhoo!
#1 Why are content creators important?
We are living in the attention economy. The more attention you have, the more results you can generate.
Content creators create content to capture attention of audiences across digital media. The purpose of attention could be education, sales or engagement.
Once you have the content, you can pay Big Tech (read FAANG and similar companies) to get more user time and expect to get more sales.
Anyway, that’s the background. We are new brand that sells health and beauty products to users in Singapore and USA. In the best world, we should just rely on User generated content. However, the sad truth is most consumers are shy to be on camera. They also do not care enough to share product benefits with the world.
Enter, content creators. They -
Share stories - They help share stories about product. It could also be narrative on the brand. The stories could be how to use a product, benefits of using the product and brand story. Some content could seem like an ad while others seem organic and relatable. The later performs the best.
Be a brand promoter - We are all promoters of a few brands. It could be the brand of T-shirt, shoes or watch. Creators can be promoters of a brand by consistently talking about the brand. People are digital natives now - ordering food, transport, accommodation and enjoyment online. It is important to have promoters in this digital space.
Reassure unconvinced and doubtful users - You will be surprised how many people are always on the fence. Average cart dropout rate is 70%+. That’s the potential audience that can be converted to purchasing customer. The reassurance can be in terms of benefits, usage or fit. For us, a supplements brands, users are wary of consuming something unproven. It is becomes crucial for us to showcase the proof and benefits at each stage.
#2 How do we engage with creators?
We engage with creators to drive advertising and sales for the brand. Let me list down all the engagements here -
Product UGC videos and images
Host and run livestream
Social media content
Generate advertising content
Run whitelisted and collaborative ads
Social media giveaway
#3 What do I dislike about creators?
Creators become transactional as they become an “influencer”. “Influencers” are creator accounts with following of 50K+. The amount of followers that are bots would be between 40-70%. We identify an account as good if the bot count is under 50% 🤯.
Here are three things that I don’t like about creators as a brand.
Too many one-time engagements - Such creators engage in too many brand deals. They post a new sponsored post few times a week.
Fake opinions that users can easily sense - This is simply bad content. They don’t understand the product. They say things on camera because they are paid.
Does not care about the brand - Good content can be created if you understand the brand and its goals. What are consumers unsure about? Who are the target users? What is goal - revenue or awareness? Creators who don’t bother asking these questions will struggle with brand engagements.
Low quality content - This is a cardinal sin. We have creators shoot in bad light, poor surrounding, products not in frame and inaudible audio.
#4 How should creators collaborate?
The goals of brands and creators need to match
Brands - Drive awareness about products and the brand.
Creators - Earn a wage, preferably as high as possible
Instead of working on one-time deals of paid posts and videos, I suggest that brands and creators should engage in long term partnership. The creator makes content, acts as promoter and drives sales (or traffic). The brand pays the creator for every measurable KPI. Some KPIs may not be trackable and the brand can decide to pay a “minimum retainer”. Essentially, let’s make creators our brand ambassadors.
Another engagement method would to become a content partner for the brand.
Creator - “Hey listen, I have got this great content idea for you.”
Creator - “I believe our values match. I can make something interesting for you.”
If someone can become a content partner for the brand, the compensation is limitless. A content partner would strive to make the best content that deliver results for the brand. The compensation can be as much as 10-20% of the results delivered.
Here is a great example of someone trying to be a content partner for the brand. The person has done the hard work of understanding the brand and what it needs.
Brands and creators have to be in symbiotic relationship instead of parasitic one. Both needs to survive and thrive.
That’s a close for this week.
Thanks again for reading till here. You are a rare gem 💎
Did you notice that I have own domain name now? 😎 It is now called outofsg.com instead of zaloom.substack.com.
I spent 2 days this week at the NAS Summit, a summit for creators. Here is quick breakdown of the financials of NAS Summit. NAS Company makes 800K USD to 1 Mn USD a month. The profit is approximately 200 to 250K USD each month. They could have easily paid for the shortfall of 33K SGD, which is about 25K USD.
Hahah, okay. I love a bit of maths. I have come to the realization that out of Singapore can be so much bigger than my own journey. I am working two new sections for the newsletter - Founder stories and Singapore businesses. You will get the details when I start doing these.
Okay, this was very long. I stop here. I will do the second giveaway next week.
I am thinking I should launch a WhatsApp community for Jisoo GIFs. 😂
Goodbye and have a great week ahead! Cheers 😎