Navigating the Creator Economy
Shidush Contractor offers valuable insights that empower brands to navigate the influencer marketing landscape strategically, fostering lasting connections and building enduring value.
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Navigating the dynamic realm of influencer marketing requires a deep understanding of the intricacies involved in selecting the right creators and measuring campaign success. Shidush Contractor, Business Head – MENA at Qoruz.com, sheds light on these crucial aspects in an insightful interview. In a landscape buzzing with possibilities, Qoruz.com employs a refined, scientific process to assist brands in choosing influencers that authentically align with their ethos.
As the influencer marketing landscape evolves, Contractor delves into the changing trends, emphasising the rise of niche creators and the shift from meager budgets to more professional partnerships. Beyond the digital realm, brands are turning to local creators to connect with regional audiences, signaling a departure from traditional celebrity endorsements.
Discover the nuanced approach Qoruz.com adopts to measure the success of influencer campaigns, emphasising that success is relative to campaign objectives. Contractor also addresses both the positive trends propelling the creator economy forward and the challenges, cautioning against the bottom-funnel fever and underscoring the importance of long-term brand building over immediate sales conversion.
Excerpts from the interview;
What are the factors to consider when choosing influencers that match a brand’s ethos?
A brand’s ethos communicates how the product will be placed in the market. Therefore, a huge part of picking creators for the campaign has to do with understanding what the creators stand for: their lifestyle choices, their favourite brands, their go-to destinations, their cultural backgrounds, their preference of aesthetics, their unique content styles. These are indicators brands look at when establishing the haloed marketing term “brand fit”.
It’s good to see brands indulge in these intangibles, though. A few years ago, creators would be picked based on the usual parameters like demographics and content categories. But when brands dive deeper into selecting their ambassadors, it paves the way for more creators to create more niches and explore more filtered and authentic opportunities with brands, not just digitally but also offline. At Qoruz, we take our clients through the refined, scientific process of finding the right creators for the brand and the campaign objective.
How can brands measure the success of their efforts with influencers?
As cliché as it sounds, success is relative to the campaign objective. Some campaigns are aimed at generating brand awareness, so how many views, likes and pertinent comments the content gets is important to the brand. Some campaigns are run to generate sales, so the number of clicks and conversions attributed to the content indicates campaign success. Either way, what’s paramount is how much cost is incurred in trying to achieve the campaign objective. And so, metrics like cost-per-view (CPV) and cost-per-engagement (CPE) are closely monitored throughout the campaign.
What are the trends driving the creator landscape?
There are some great trends and some not-so-great trends that are currently ruling the creator landscape. The number of creators within every niche is rising drastically; the percentage of digital spending allocated to creator-based marketing is improving yearly; qualitatively, brands are becoming more conscious about representation.
We are doing away with measly budgets and barter collaborations, thus indicating that the creator economy is seemingly being taken more seriously. This encourages individuals to take up their freelance creator careers far more seriously, thus creating a broader, vaster, more extensive ecosystem of creators in the GCC for brands to choose from.
We are doing away with the inclination of getting Hollywood stars and NBA players to endorse products in the GCC that can and are currently being pushed digitally and offline by local, home-grown talent. The bad news is bottom-funnel fever! Optimising sales through bottom-funnel activation often has a science to it. But we see branding-specific marketing arenas that are now trying oh-so-hard to pose or advertise as a cost-per-sale solution.
My advice is to assess the reality: can someone guarantee a sale? We can improve the sales figures and make the campaign more effective. But how accurately can someone predict ROI? Long-term sales solutions for tomorrow are those that incite customer pull today. No amount of cost-per-sale fever is going to result in active brand building. Think of every successful brand in any realm, and they all built brands before optimising their ecommerce revenue.
