2024 Preview: Crucial Perspectives on the Creator Economy Directly from its Overseer
As we approach the end of another year, it's a perfect time to reflect on the booming creator economy. Trends may shift, but our valuable lessons endure eternally. We're dedicating thought to what we bring into 2025 and what we leave behind in 2024.
In my role of advising top-tier brands during their transformative journey, utilizing creators as the focal point, several noteworthy insights have emerged. Let's dive into these insights that shape a pivotal blueprint for brands seeking inspiration.
Here are this year's practical takeaways, filtered and unfiltered, derived from the creator economy.
Wins
Permanent Collaborations
Did you know that an astounding 60% of creators now generally maintain ongoing/continuous relationships with brands? More and more companies are branching out from one-off deals and investing in a select few creator partnerships. Why's that? What does this mean? Like an employee, investing in honing their skills to match your brand and product over time improves the creator's confidence in promoting your product and understanding its value proposition. This leads to authenticity and resonance. Plus, it results in earned media and stronger negotiation power for partnerships.
Presence Pervasive Everywhere
Creator content is everywhere, and 39% of consumers are consuming more creator content than a year ago. It's essential to think beyond the feed and prepare for multi-channel impact with creator content.
Even when faced with the constant task of doing more with the same or fewer resources, utilizing creator content in various ways, such as social posts, is a cost-effective method to generate an abundance of content with your allocated budget. Creators crave opportunities for growth, just as employees seek promotions. Offering these additional opportunities can provide creators with better exposure, as well as granting brands usage rights to the content, fostering aligned messaging and results measurement.
Shoppable Content
The world of traditional shopping has evolved into creator storefronts. Adding shoppable links to creator content significantly shortens the trip from discovery to purchase. With social shopping becoming a popular digital behavior, taking advantage of shoppable opportunities wherever possible ensures a better shopping experience, particularly for first-time buyers.
Losses
Single-Transaction Relationships
Earlier, I discussed the advantages of long-term creator partnerships. While one-off collaborations with creators can yield short-term gains, forming lasting relationships supplies the most significant benefits for marketers, especially as more marketers are seeking to integrate influencer breakouts into their media mix modeling (MMM) reporting. The longer the relationship, the more reliable and statistically significant the data gathered.
Reined-In Creativity
This loss is related to limiting creators' creative freedom. By minimizing unnecessary mandates in your influencer briefs and prioritizing partnerships over forcing unnecessary information, you can unlock greater potential for successful collaborations.
Underdeveloped Measurement
We miss out on potential revenue by neglecting to track accurate KPIs and settling for suboptimal measurements. Recent data reveals that 30% of brands have yet to measure influencer marketing ROI, and brands typically get a $5.78 return on every $1 investment in influencer marketing. Innovation is key in 2025 to improve influencer marketing ROI and avoid missing out on opportunities to gain accurate insights.
Predictions
Now that we've covered our bases, it's time to share three possible predictions for 2025:
Creators as Consultants and Creative Directors for Brands
Assuming brands continue to establish longer-term collaborations with creators, they can provide value beyond a few posts here and there. Brands can engage creators in developing cross-departmental content strategies, co-creating products, or offering limited-edition drops, to name a few possibilities.
Enhancing the Consumer Experience with Creators
As stronger partnerships lead to improved outcomes, envision using collaborative data and creators to elevate the customer experience (CX), such as custom landing page experiences, sequential messaging, and increasingly immersive experiences.
Creator Content as a Currency
Think about a potential future where creator content is formalized, monetizable, and transformed into transactional programming for brands and streaming platforms to bid on. With platforms like Netflix investing more in live content and creator lives also increasing, a creator content marketplace could emerge, making it both possible and profitable for content creators to monetize their content.
Happy New Year, dear readers! May we all innovate and create in 2025!
Our Website Business Development Council is an exclusive, invitation-only community for sales and business development professionals. Do I qualify?
In the exclusive community of the Website Business Development Council, Kristen Dolan, a top-tier advisor, shares her insights on the creator economy, guiding brands in harnessing the power of creators for their transformative journeys.
The creator economy continues to shape marketing strategies, with 60% of creators now maintaining ongoing relationships with brands, a trend that Kristen Dolan has observed in her role at the council.
