In this guest post, Georgina Bitcon, Meltwater’s area director, enterprise solutions for ANZ, examines why content creators and social listening insights are perfect for driving performance, as well as helping in the creation of innovation marketing strategies and campaigns…
The epic rise of the creator economy has led to a shift in the way people become aware of products and services, and choose to buy them.
With the pandemic driving consumers online and the rising adoption of ad blockers, the power dynamic between brands and influencers is shifting in favour of content creators.
The result is that marketing and communications professionals are no longer the sole custodian of their brands. Influencers are gaining power, with companies paying hundreds of millions of dollars to influencers worldwide. The global creator economy market size was estimated at US$104.2 billion in 2021.
This decentralisation of content – and the appearance of new kinds of storytelling and a captive consumer audience – provides a chance for brands to work with creators to co-create a brand narrative. This can be a particularly lucrative opportunity as according to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2022, 58 per cent of consumers buy from or advocate for brands who share their beliefs and values.
Impact of content creators
In Australia the creator economy is thriving. Meltwater research identifies more than 400,000 social media creators and influencers in Australia. One in five Australian internet users follow influencers and experts online. Influencers are particularly powerful among younger generations, with 18-24 year olds much more likely to be influenced by social media and online ads than brand names or product utility.
Creators represent a range of advantages to brands. They’re an authentic way to deliver word-of-mouth endorsements through a trusted third party, and offer two-way communication and engagement with their audience.
Creators can also generate up to five times the engagement on social media compared to a brand sharing the same content, delivering a much higher ROI for campaigns. Brand messages can be reinterpreted in a more creative way to provide more cultural credence. Neuroscience research from Whalar also found that influencer posts turbocharge advertising on other channels. When consumers are exposed to an influencer ad before seeing a TV, Facebook, or YouTube ad from the same campaign, they are 58 per cent more likely to feel positive towards the ad and 47 per cent more likely to remember it.
It’s no wonder that many Australian businesses are taking notice. In 2021, they increased spend on influencer marketing solutions by 73 per cent and branded posts have increased year-on-year by 27 per cent.
It is also worth noting that the biggest influencers may not always necessarily be the most effective for a specific campaign. Meltwater analysis shows that in 2021 micro-influencers (5-30k followers) represented 91 per cent of all sponsored post engagements — including likes, shares and comments, within APAC. Micro-influencers on TikTok in particular are an untapped opportunity for many brands. On TikTok they experience 32x and 4x greater engagement than on Facebook and Instagram, respectively.
Leverage AI-powered social listening tools
To create innovative and impactful marketing strategies, marketers must also have a comprehensive understanding of their target audience. This means leveraging social listening insights to keep across emerging trends and collaborate with the right creators who align with the target brand and region. Many creators work across a variety of media and channels, including multiple social media platforms which helps in reaching increasingly fragmented audiences.
The insights in the recent report “The Fashion Industry’s New Era” illustrate the value of social listening and analytics. Using AI-powered social listening and analytics, Meltwater analysed more than 310 million tweets to better understand the Twitter fashion community, sifting through billions of data points each day. This kind of market research enables brands to ensure their marketing strategies remain both forward-thinking and customer-centric.
But one challenge is how incredibly short the lifecycle of social has become. Immediacy is more important than scale, which favours content creators who can deliver in-the-moment content to their audiences. As such it becomes all the more critical to continually monitor the social landscape to identify on what channels and with what influencers brands should work with.
This can be a lengthy and intense process for marketing teams. It involves reading content and manually picking stats from influencers’ social media platforms, while trying to determine whether the audience is aligned on values. This is where audience segmentation and social influencer discovery tools, which leverage AI to analyse millions of topics and profiles, play a vital role. Marketers can listen in real time and identify new opportunities through changes in mindsets and emerging behaviours.
The creator economy is now a real force for commercial success. Using content creators and social listening insights is a powerful way to drive effective and innovative marketing strategies and campaigns.
