Businesses sell products…duh. That product could be a song, an eyeliner or even an immersive experience. Collaborating with content creators not only allows you to sell your product but colloquialises it and infiltrates it into the cultural norm.
Naturally, a brand’s main goal when collaborating with content creators is to go viral. If someone with 500k followers uses your song, it’s more likely to get used. If someone with 1 million followers uses your eyeliner and gives it a review, you’re more likely to make profit and sell out.
Creators charge different rates. I have a friend based in Paris who is a major fashion influencer with close to 500k followers on TikTok. Her OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) videos have seen up to 2.2 million views and she is thus able to charge $1000 for one 30 second video which highlights a fashion product (from Birkenstocks to skin tints to smaller colourful clothing brands).
When partnering with content creators there are definitely certain things to avoid. When brands get wrapped up in promoting their product or their service or themselves and not making it about the community – that’s where they go completely wrong. There are exceptions, like with the brand RXBAR, the protein bar that has a cult following, where if you post anything other than pictures of the product, people don’t want to know about it. But, generally, on a platform like TikTok, there’s a zero tolerance [of] brands coming on and flashing their product.
In terms of knowing which content creators are the best ones for your brand, work with creators in a niche community that’s relevant to your brand. If you’re a black owned skincare business, find a black skincare guru on TikTok, if you sell crocheted handbags, find a girl known for crocheting on TikTok. Find out who the lead creators are. Then, find out how popular they are. That’s measured by the virality of their content, their views and engagement on their posts. TikTok works on an interest graph where you could have zero followers, but your content could still go viral.
Finally, in order to ensure top quality content the brand should make the user feel cared for and connected with. It’s rarely a case of ‘here’s some money, make a video’ but rather the brand should get on an initial call with them, discuss the brief together and come up with a creative way to deliver the specific message. We call our briefs love letters. They’re very beautiful design decks that are meant to get the creative excited about a potential collaboration. And then once they’ve come to us with their ideas, we iterate on it, build on it together and then they go ahead and produce the content.
