How Marketers Can Win The Creator-Style Content Game

With audiences consuming ever larger helpings of content on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, it should be boom times for social media marketing.

With audiences consuming ever larger helpings of content on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, it should be boom times for social media marketing. Yet instead, marketers are finding many of their previously successful strategies falling flat as consumers more assiduously ignore, skip and block their ads.

In response, brands are rotating more effort into their own native social content. The challenge? Matching the energy of the creator economy within legacy marketing structures more geared to producing 30-second spots than competing with Mr. Beast.

Succeeding in this new content layer requires a different approach, and for many marketers that’s manifesting in the form of purpose-built content practices with a new type of team, tech and vision to match. Here are four steps for getting the formula right.

It starts with the scope.

Traditional scopes between marketers and agencies are optimized for producing traditional work: You give me X amount of dollars and I will deliver Y amount of work.

But when it comes to building a social-first content practice that can navigate our fast-changing world, marketers should look beyond simply requiring a preset number of deliverables and focus instead on incentivizing specific business outcomes.

Whether it’s a metric like sales or follower growth, outcomes targets incentivize the best activity for the here-and-now rather than mandating a possibly out-of-date deliverable agreed upon six months ago.

Look to a new type of talent for a new type of assignment.

Winning in this new environment means having people who aren’t compartmentalized into roles like copywriter or art director, but can do a little bit of everything. These “creator creatives” might come from the ranks of the traditional creative department, or they might be influencers or actors who’ve mastered the language of social and can apply their expertise to the brand space.

Bringing this broader vision to the creative team not only makes for better content, it enables marketers to cast a wider hiring net, allowing candidates from nontraditional backgrounds to get a foot in the door.

Creative production, not creative and production.

For social-first content, having a combined creative and production capability is critical for getting from idea to execution as quickly as possible.

Increasingly, the line between the two can be bridged by AI, which has made it easier than ever for creatives to take what’s in their heads and make it a reality. For example, we’ve had creatives on our team build video clones, craft basic video games and create digital versions of client products -- all using AI.

While AI can’t replace a full-on production team, it can often get you close -- particularly for social content designed to provide a quick hit of entertainment before moving aside for the next fun, easily digestible item.

Changing the process and embracing imperfection.

Large marketers proceed at a measured pace, which doesn’t generally translate well to producing content at the velocity required to succeed in native social.

Instead, marketers must adopt a new mindset and structure geared to speed and authenticity: speed in the sense of making changes like pushing approvals down to the individual level, and authenticity in being able to embrace some brand variability and imperfection.

It’s a big shift. But at a time when real rules, content that isn’t optimized into an inch of its life isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- and can help marketers succeed as legit creators in a world with an insatiable appetite for digital content.