Creator Discovery 101
How to find the perfect creator for your next campaign
Welcome to Creator Campaigns, a deep dive on Paid Partnership into a specific aspect of building a creator marketing campaign.
Paid Partnership HQ has been hectic this week. Between a trip to LA with the Stanley Cup to activate with creators and flying to Denver to speak at the Gondola Sports Summit , it’s a busy time of year for the PP Editor-in-Chief but the show must go on…
Bringing you a bit of a different styled newsletter this week - More of a tactical guide than guest interview, enjoy.
What’s the most fun but most challenging part of creator marketing?
Watching TikToks all day Discovery
As the algorithms continue to finely tune on our interests, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to find new talent to collaborate with, host at an experiential activation, etc. I’m a 31-year-old male who likes snowboarding and photography - Quite difficult for my feeds nowadays to show me what say a younger, female demo may be watching if that’s my target audience for a campaign.
In my experience, no singular tool can provide a one-stop-shop for all your needs, but rather it’s necessary to pull a number of the levers below to achieve the best results.
Presenting 5 tools to improve your creator discovery:
Creator marketing software + agencies
Social media platform tools
Referrals and recommendations
Competitive analysis
Manual scroll/check in
*Disclaimer: Paid Partnership has not (yet) been paid billions of dollars to promote any brand/product/service, but I do use a number of the tools listed as part of my full-time role.
Creator Marketing Software + Agencies
Software example: Creator IQ, Captiv8, #paid
Agency example: Influential, Wasserman, Whalar, Later, HYDP, Kyra
Offering: Search all social media platforms to present creators you could work with, whether in DIY software form or in a full white-glove, hands off service.
The creator marketing software and agency landscape continues to grow, with many competitors vying for their piece of the ever-growing ecosystem.
On the software front, the search tools developed by these companies can be robust - allowing you enter keywords to cull all of social media to find creators that match your desired criteria (total followers, location, engagement rate, etc.). While filtering enables you to narrow the results, I’ve found that these tools sometimes struggle to nail the query on first ask but can become powerful upon understanding what parameters you need to input to avoid brands/celebrities/etc on social. With the introduction of AI-powered search, many platforms are building even more capable tools to assist with discovery as we speak.
Beyond providing software for campaign managers to utilize themselves, many agencies offer a hands-off extension where they’ll discover and select creators for you as part of their service (often continuing on to run the entire campaign for you at the brand). While the pricier option of the two, turning this task over to seasoned professionals that know how to not only use their own search tools but also may be more familiar with individual creators/the creator economy on the whole can be advantageous depending on your level of familiarity in the space.
Social Media Platform Tools
Example: TikTok One (Formerly named “TikTok Creator Marketplace”)
Offering: Search library of TikTok creators who have opted into the platform’s “Creator Marketplace” using keywords and criteria + have visibility to first-party platform data/demos/creator-entered rate cards
Beyond the For You Page lies a powerful creator marketing search tool which can be extremely powerful in yielding relevant results for its own platform (only).
In my experience, the TikTok Creator Marketplace returns a higher volume of relevant candidates via its search tool than the above, however with great power comes great responsibility- all the results can present challenges culling but do tend to have a higher hit-rate.
Additional resources: Social Media Listening Tools (Brandwatch, Sprout, Sprinklr, etc.)
Another great vertical of discovery that falls under this umbrella is social listening, analyzing who is already talking about your brand on social in order to identify potential creators to partner with. These services can help you uncovered some hidden gems, while displaying the top voices in your space.
Referrals and Recommendations
Example: Agents/agencies, friends, colleagues, focus groups, other creators
Offering: Personalized creator recommendations by those who are on the front lines of social on a daily basis.
When beginning your creator discovery, it can be extremely beneficial to put out a call-to-action to industry professionals and regular citizens as an initial heat check. These groups will have intimate knowledge of the creators they follow and/or work with oftentimes in verticals, demos and communities you would never get served on your own. Combine that with the fact that these folks are 99% of the time eager to share their selections/curation/tastemaking with you (whether it’s their job or not), you’ll have a trove of recommendations coming back to you without having to spend hours endless scrolling your feeds (more on that below).
Breaking down the example categories:
Agents: Paid to make referrals, this group is always eager to pitch and promote their roster of talent.
Friends/family: As silly as it may seem, this group can be an incredible resource given the large amount of screen time (and percentage spent outside of your area of business). Your sibling in high school likely follows a couple creators very closely and can make recommendations that you would never stumble upon organically.
Colleagues: Similar to friends, your colleagues (both inside of social and beyond) have interests and affinities that extend well beyond your brand and can provide detailed background and insight on their favorite creators.
Focus Groups: If you have the bandwidth/resources, more formal collections of eager citizens can prove to be a gold mine for creator recs. Take the NHL’s Power Players Youth Advisory Committee, a group of 13-17 year olds that I often tap for a Gen Z perspective on potential creators.
Other Creators: This one can be more delicate, but if you have a great relationship with a certain creator (and they’re already participating in the campaign or understanding that they are not moving this time around) you can ask select talent if they have any relationships with fellow creators they would nominate. I’ve found the creator economy to be generally supportive, open to elevating their peers.
Competitive Analysis
Example: Other brands, teams, etc.
Offering: Analyze the social media feeds of adjacent brands to discover talent which your competitors may have collaborated with.
Time to study the film! Whether trying to find new creators or more generally studying how other brands are activating successfully in the space, take 15-20mins daily to check the feeds of brands in your industry to see who they have tapped for a campaign. While your goal will unlikely be to simply copy and paste a competitor’s strategy, this assessment can provide valuable feedback on the size/type/vertical of creators looking to activate in your industry, as well as spark creative content ideas for your next collaboration.
This can be challenging because a majority of the creator content lives on their own channels (vs. the brand’s owned and operated) but IG Collabs can provide insight, displaying more readily which brands have collaborated with which creators.
Manual Scroll/Check In
Example: Instagram, TikTok
Offering: Roll up your sleeves and dive into the social platforms to discover new creators on your own.
The Final Boss of Discovery aka manually scrolling your feeds will forever hold its place as the most fun but least efficient way to source creators for a campaign. An endless game of roulette where you never know what might turn up next - each video embodying the potential to hold that singular creator that’s the perfect fit for your collaboration. While it may be cool to flex on your friends that you “get paid to watch TikTok,” the truth is much more nuanced as scrolling for work can be an increasingly frustrating experience.
With that being said, I’ve discovered a handful of my favorite creators through this method - spinning the wheel and landing on a talented individual who perfectly meets my desired criteria. I don’t want to discourage you from attempting this technique - more understand its time and place within the many layers of creator discovery.
Note: Beyond discovery, I believe it important to perform routine “maintenance” check-ins on your entire Rolodex of potential creator candidates. I often refer to this as “checking in on my Sims” - watching the last month of a handful of creators’ content to see what they’ve been up to since the last time we collaborated. These check-ins prove valuable touch points when communicating with creators which we’ll discuss in an upcoming article.
