Don’t try to change creators. Just pick the right ones from the start.

We all know the value that online content creators wield. Forrester studies tell us that creator content receives, on average, eight times more engagement on social media than content created by brands. In addition, creators have the power to increase brand affinity by almost twice as much as user reviews. Working with creators also typically means faster turnarounds and better cost-efficiency than traditional campaigns. Even with all those advantages, we still see two main stumbling blocks that are keeping marketers from unlocking the true value of creators: picking the wrong influencers and not trusting them fully.

It seems everyone is an influencer these days. Marketers may be tempted to just work with the most popular influencers with massive audiences. This instinct is understandable, but incorrect. First it’s hard for consumers to take mega-influencers seriously when on Monday they’re shilling for a beauty company and on Wednesday they’re telling their audience about a tech product. Secondly, mega-influencers generally charge a hefty premium and while they can help build general brand awareness, their ROI is much less than a creator whose audience is more hyper-focused around a specific interest category or community.

Here’s an illustrative example. Take these 2 creators, representing the exact same brand in the same campaign:

Clearly, content from the creator with a larger audience resulted in more visibility for the brand but the smaller creator, who happens to be hyper-focused with her content on the brand’s category, resulted in far higher conversion rates and overall better ROI. Creators tapped into these niches also understand the right amount of content per day to post, the right timing and angle and also take into account factors you may not think of (weather, other news or events, etc…). The more embedded in a community a creator is, the more likely they are to successfully guide you on how to make yourself relevant in it.

At Humanz, we believe this so strongly that we created an in-depth discovery tool that looks far beyond just audience size, to create the perfect match between brands and creators. Our tool uses AI and over 50 filters for brands to determine which creators from a database of 600 million makes the most sense for them. More importantly, our analytics engine allows marketers to see where their conversions (sales) are coming from, so they know they’re spending their budget in the right place.

Of course, picking the right influencer is only half the battle. The other half is empowering them to do their jobs. Where we see marketers stumble is by treating creators as billboards or 30 second commercials with a cheaper budget. As TikTok famously says, “Don’t make ads, make TikToks.” Tiktok is a highly creative, formatted space whose audience has little patience for traditional ad formats. But for brands that play the game, both engagement and conversion rates are consistently two to three times higher than on other platforms. And that holds across all social media platforms; each has their own etiquette and language and the best creators know how to speak them fluently. Putting words in their mouth just reduces their credibility to their audience.

Of course, trusting a creator with your precious brand is easier said than done. Our solve for that was simple, yet powerful: create transparency so creators can understand the marketer’s investment, as well as their impact and earnings in real time. This simple act has resulted in a number of companies that use Humanz ranging from megabrands like L’Oreal or Zara to smaller D2C companies increasing the content they get from creators by a factor of 10 and creators that work for them more than tripling their earnings.

That transparency goes both ways as well, as we made sure to give brands some of the most powerful, real time data tools in the business so they can see their influencers results straight away.

We know it can sound trite: choosing the right people and letting them do their job are two of the oldest cliches in business. But the data bears it out; when you avoid the above stumbling blocks, you see better results. That’s why we made sure that our platform makes it as easy as possible to do just that; choose the right influencers and let them work for you.