Every other week, beauty brands are in dire need of more creative assets for social media. Traditional photoshoots and hiring models can get extremely expensive for indie beauty brands, so user-generated content has been a lifesaver. However, working with some creators can also be hit or miss. There’s nothing worse than when assets come back, and half of them are unusable.
The barrier to becoming a creator has lowered significantly, leading to diverse content quality. Anyone with a smartphone can create content, but that doesn't mean it's all good. The sheer volume of UGC Creators can make it challenging to identify and collaborate with creators who genuinely understand and resonate with your brand. Here are some considerations to help make the process a little less painful.
1. Less is More
Many indie beauty brands are transitioning to work with a smaller group of brand creators in order to shift to a focus on quality over quantity when it comes to creator partnerships. They’re choosing creators aligned with their brand values, for longer-term content partnerships, to better ensure the outcomes are more authentic and impactful.
Could this approach work for your brand too?
2. Elevate Creators to Beauty Brand Storytellers
When building brand awareness through content marketing, using influencers for testimonials alone is no longer enough. Instead, try a more strategic approach to UGC, using creators as storytellers who can tell their own brand-related creative narratives in a way that aligns with elements of your brand mission, story, or values and ethos to enhance your brand identity. When developing your next creator brief, think about what prompts could you provide to creators to elicit new types of storytelling content? What should they know about our mission that could help them put a fresh spin on their content?
3. Start Briefing Differently
Navigating collaborations with creators to boost brand exposure is truly a delicate balance. On one side, it's essential to empower them with the creative freedom they need to produce content that genuinely reflects who they are. On the flip side, it's equally important to ensure they fully grasp your brand's messaging and positioning strategy when they're representing your brand. Crafting a more robust creator brief that also provides references to elements of your brand positioning strategy and brand values will be key.
Reflecting on the past, it's crucial to document earlier UGC errors and moments of brand misrepresentation. Leverage this to shape a UGC guide of dos and donts for your marketing team and partners. This quick guide needs to easily points out what went wrong and why, and also highlight when creators have knocked the ball out of the park and why.
4. Give Inspiration from Insights
Have you every considered how much more impactful a creator's output could be, if they were schooled on the ins and outs of the world of your customers? While it's best for beauty creators to take the lead when it comes to putting their own creative spin on your brief. It could be invaluable if they were clued up on your customer profiles and customer personas. Creativity coming from a place of insights can be unparalleled. That's why creators recruited from those who already use your products and love your brand are known to create content that gets better results.
5. Why Work with Creators Already Using Your Products
At a recent CEW State of Beauty Industry Presentation Event, data highlighted how creator marketing can significantly uplift a beauty brand’s engagement when there's a real and existing connection between the influencer and the product. Influencers who genuinely use and stand behind your product offer an irreplaceable level of authenticity that naturally sparks higher levels of engagement on the content. Authenticity is intuitively picked up by others.
By teaming up with the right influencers, those who genuinely get what your brand stands for, you can cut through the noise and directly reach people who'll love what you're about. It's about finding those authentic voices that can genuinely amplify your message, ensuring your brand doesn't just get seen—it gets remembered and preferred. You're welcome to reach out and get in touch.
Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty and fashion businesses get more fanatics in love with their brands, by refining their brand strategy, messaging, branding, content storytelling, and community-building strategy. Read more about Effie here. Follow her on Linkedin.
