Beyond The Campaign: Creator Partnership Moments That Build Brand Buzz

By Lindsay Jerutis

We all know how powerful Creator Marketing campaigns are for generating brand awareness and driving sales. But the benefits of Creator Marketing don’t begin and end with a traditional content campaign; they extend far beyond it. 

Savvy brands understand that the most effective Creator Marketing strategies include a 360-degree, holistic approach that forges ongoing brand advocacy. By working with Creators on activations—from events to live-streaming—brands can foster deeper connections with Creators and meet their audiences at all stages of the funnel. 

These Creator tactics go beyond the campaign and encourage brands to embrace creative, bold, and impactful activations that the internet can’t stop talking about.

Gifting: The Organic Benefits of Genuine Product Passion

Creator gifting and product seeding continues to be an effective method to generate excitement and social buzz among their followers. The allure of exclusivity, combined with Creators’ organic endorsements, can help generate viral brand momentum and genuine brand love. We’ve all seen brands and products take off on platforms like TikTok because of Creators’ enthusiastic reviews.

Key to this strategy is the careful selection of Creators whose values align seamlessly with the brand’s ethos, ensuring the Creators’ audiences have a real interest in the brand and product. 

Collective Voice devised a gifting strategy for a luxury fashion brand partner that aimed to generate social media buzz by seeding gift cards to an influential, budding community of influencers. Collective Voice Creators were able to select their favorite product that resonated with them and their audience. Over half of the gifted Creators took the time to create and post beautiful editorial content across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok that demonstrated their legitimate love of the products.

The results speak for themselves; the sampling campaign made up 81% of total network sales for the brand during that period. And the content resulted in an engagement rate that was 3X the industry standard.

Events and Activations: Immersive Brand Experiences For IRL Content & Connections

Events and activations are exciting, immersive experiences that bring the brand to life. Many Creators enjoy the networking and content opportunities of attending exclusive brand events like product launches, pop-ups, and meet-and-greets.

Incorporating exciting activations and branded photo backgrounds into these events encourages Creators to share their genuine moments of brand interaction. Creators’ on-the-scene content translates to real-time social media coverage, heightened brand visibility, and engagement as audiences vicariously experience the event through their social media channels. 

Consider an event that Collective Voice orchestrated for a luxury skincare partner’s latest product launch. We created a unique experiential campaign for Creators at a prestigious cultural festival, strategically casting ambassadors to capture their experience and create engaging content all to promote this new product. 

The campaign effectively created significant buzz around the launch, and generated over 1M impressions pre, during, and post-event.

Live Streaming: The Benefits of Real-Time Engagement

Live streaming has emerged as a dynamic tool to bridge the gap between influencers and audiences, fostering real-time engagement and, often, driving sales. Brands can leverage this medium strategically, integrating Creators’ live streams into their brand narratives. This approach humanizes the brand and empowers influencers to connect with their followers on a personal level.

For another skincare client, Collective Voice employed a customized casting strategy to enhance the brand’s live shopping experience, which drove education, interest, and incremental sales. Using RSVP links and product sneak peeks, Creators produced engaging content to promote the live streaming event ahead of time.

During the livestream, Creators jumped on the opportunity to inform their followers about the products, generating more than 138K impressions and inspiring audiences to shop in real time. The live experience provided the opportunity to educate consumers on the brand and each Creator’s must-have skincare products, fostering conversations about the benefits of the products.

Interviews and Storytelling: Authentic Collaborations for Deeper Connections

Authentic storytelling lies at the core of social media. By crafting compelling narratives, brands can transform products into relatable protagonists, building memorable brand moments that inspire action and loyalty. And collaborative content, such as interviews, influencer-led tutorials, reviews, or behind-the-scenes videos, can help brands tell their stories and champion their brand mission.

Additionally, these storytelling collaborations allow a brand to tap into the Creator’s audience in new ways. Creator interviews, for example, can dive deeply into the Creator’s career journey and personal passions. Creators can tell their stories of how they organically discovered the brand’s products, building an emotional arc that resonates with audiences. 

Collective Voice employed this strategy for a brand partner during a recent rebrand. The brand tapped into Collective Voice’s community of Creators for their blog, interviewing Creators about their favorite products. Their editorial content helped elevate the brand during a pivotal moment, and drove impressions and engagement through multi-channel syndication.

In-Store Visits and Experiences: Bridging the Gap Between Online and Offline

In the digital age, the tangible experience of in-store shopping has gained renewed importance. With the surge in interest in offline experiences and the growing strength of brick-and-mortar businesses, it’s clear that customers are hungry for opportunities to see products up close and personal. By inviting Creators to exclusive in-store experiences, brands can drive foot traffic and enhance both their online and offline business.

For one retail partner, Collective Voice bridged the gap between their online and offline shopping experiences with a thoughtful Creator strategy. We worked closely with Creators to produce content that displayed a compelling in-store experience to generate buzz. Creators flocked to the brand’s newest stores to demonstrate the shopping experience, producing content that showed off the brand’s fun, cool shopping environment. Creators emphasized how only an in-store experience provides you with the opportunity to try on the products in real life, feel the fabrics, try trending outfits, and access the brand’s knowledgeable sales associates. 

By leveraging engaging, high-reaching social media platforms and formats, like Instagram Stories and short-form video, Creators seamlessly told an engaging story and took their audience along for a shopping journey. This made the content feel organic and in-the-moment, and gave it a behind-the-scenes component. The brand saw an increase in foot traffic, sales, impressions, increased social engagement, new customer acquisition, and elevated consumer sentiment. 

For Marketers seeking to leverage Creator Marketing beyond traditional content campaigns, the key lies in transcending transactional interactions and nurturing relationships that inspire genuine and lasting brand fervor. Brands should feel empowered to get creative and engage with Creators in all different ways; that creativity is often what generates the most impactful and memorable brand moments.