Trust vs reach: the future of brand-creator partnerships

Since the dawn of influencer marketing (circa the early Noughties, for those who recall, eons ago in social media years) brand-creator relationships have followed a cookie-cutter formula: find someone with the biggest audience you can afford, negotiate a campaign fee for a few posts, publish the content, measure the results, and move on.

It worked at the time, when traditional media was still the king of the jungle, social platforms were still maturing and your feed showed you the updates from who you followed. But behaviours, both of consumers and the platforms, have moved rapidly away from that era. Today’s audiences are more selective and more sceptical, social media marketing is more highly regulated, algorithms are more complex, and social media isn’t just a nice-to-have add-on but has become a place where brands need to be seen to be successful. Yet the formula, and most brand behaviours, haven’t caught up.

Transactional influence and why smaller creators are winning

Historically, the brand-creator relationship has been vastly campaign-led. A brand has a message they want to get out, a beefy budget that needs spending on that campaign (use it or lose it, in a lot of scenarios), and metrics to hit to demonstrate the campaign ‘worked’ in the short term.

The brand, or their agency partner, picks creators with big follower counts, agrees a one-off commercial arrangement, delivers a brief (which rarely factors in the tone of voice and unique positioning of the creator) and measures performance against a set of short-term objectives. Awareness, engagement, clicks or sales. Then the partnership ends.

And it’s not that this doesn’t work anymore. It does. But it works far less effectively than brands expect, and the reality is, that trend in decreasing effectiveness will continue if brands keep following the same playbook.

Consumers are much savvier than a decade ago when it comes to sponsored content. While their favourite big-follower-count creators are promoting a new product each week, it may trigger awareness with the consumer but it won’t necessarily drive effective engagement, and it certainly doesn’t build trust. Big follower counts may be useful in the way that billboards and TV ads are, for broad visibility and awareness, but trust is often built through nano- and micro-influencer partnerships, and that’s where brands will win hearts, minds and Pounds.

The secret sauce

Brands are rapidly waking up to the fact that that creators with smaller, highly engaged communities can generate deeper connection between their audiences and the brand and more authentic conversations than larger influencers. Audience quality is starting to have more sway than audience size when it comes to meaningful brand outcomes.

But, for brand awareness, it’s not as simple as a choice between quality and quantity. Both are necessary and the real, imperative shift lies in changing the nature of the brand-creator relationship itself.

And that’s where United Influence comes in.

Trust is built through consistency. A brand that becomes part of a creator's lifestyle feels more authentic and trusted and less commercial. That might happen based on a campaign agreement, if the creator really loves the product. But it’s not guaranteed and most big creators know their value and won’t promote a product for free.

So brands and creators need to have conversations about longer-term ways of working.

In exactly the same way that brand building has always worked, campaigns can’t be done in isolation of always-on marketing, nor should brand-creator partnerships only be part of campaign thinking.

At United Influence, we’ve been on both sides of the table and we bridge the gap between brands and creators, speaking the language of creatives and delivering what marketers need to be able to communicate back to senior stakeholders to demonstrate success. In a rapidly evolving space, there’s certainty in consumer demand for authenticity. Let us help you supercharge the power of your creator relationships and marketing strategy today.