Key Podcast Highlights
What Do Small Business Owners Need To Know About Working With Content Creators?
1. Understand what the content creator does: There’s a trade off between branding and lead generation. If the content creator you’re working with can provide valuable information to your community, it can bring a positive brand impression. The content creator should be able to reflect your brand as a trustworthy source to your community and potential customers.
2. Be prepared to spend: Content creators expect to be paid for the services they provide. Often times content creators are doing this as their full time job. Depending on their audience and how popular they are, they may expect to be paid more. Think of this as an investment in your company’s brand.
3. Take time to find the right person: There’s many content creators out there to choose from. You’ll want to take the time to find the right fit for your company and your audience. Depending on your needs, you may find a content creator that has a larger following, or someone with a smaller following but with great engagement.
4. Identify your goals: It’s hard to measure branding success, so be sure to be specific about your goals. If you want to generate leads, make sure your website or landing page is updated, so you can easily track traffic coming to you once your content creator posts about your business.
5. Think long-term: A strong relationship with a content creator will be long-term if you’re reaching your goals. It’s important that you get the most out of that relationship if you’re investing a significant amount of money into it.
Transcript
The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are for informational purposes only, and solely those of the podcast participants, contributors, and guests, and do not constitute an endorsement by or necessarily represent the views of The Hartford or its affiliates.
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Gene (00:01):
Hey everybody, it’s Gene Marks, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. This week I wanna talk to you a little bit about content creators. And if you’re a business, regardless of your size, maybe you’ve had an interest in working with content creators. These are people that write blogs, do YouTube videos, may be active on social media for you. You think like, “maybe if I engage with a content creator, they can expand the reach of my product or engage my community more, or basically help me sell more products and services to their audience.” So what do you need to know about working with a content creator? And by the way, I’m a content creator, right? I’ve got my own business outside of Philly, but you know, for those of you guys who have known me, I’ve worked with The Hartford for years.
Gene (00:49):
And not only do I do a lot of writing of content for The Hartford, but obviously I host this podcast where I not only do these weekly podcasts, but I also interview guests as well. So why does Hartford wanna work with a content creator like me? Well, they have different goals, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but it is something that you need to be considering yourself, what do you expect to get out of the relationship. So let me start by saying that there are five things that you should consider when working with a content creator. Okay? The first is knowing what the content creator does. Okay? This gets back to my relationship with The Hartford. I mean, there’s a trade off between brand and lead generation. It is very uncommon for content creators to generate leads for you.
Gene (01:37):
I mean, nobody really listens to a podcast or watches a video or even reads a blog and is like, “I wanna buy that company’s product.” Most of the time people… they want education. They want information. And if you have a content creator that can provide really great information to your audience, to your community, to your customers, something really specialized, it brings you closer to that community. It makes your customers think better about you and your brand. Hopefully if you do it with the right kind of cadence, they start thinking about use in such a positive way that when it comes time to buy services that you offer, or products that you offer, they think of you first because they’re getting good information from you. You know? So with The Hartford podcast, I mean, yeah, we would like more people to be signing up to buy Hartford insurance, of course, but really, it’s all a matter of providing great content for Hartford’s community.
Gene (02:29):
So people wanna be part of that community. So there’s a branding thing is really what the main thing that content creators do. Sometimes they can create leads, but I don’t know, you better be careful about that. I mean, you’ve heard of like, the Kim Kardashians of the world, charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single tweet. I don’t know what happens when you click on that tweet. How many people are actually buying products from the people that hire somebody like that to be a content creator? Maybe they do if you’re working with a massive celebrity, but that comes with a massive cost, which gets me to number two. Number one being knowing what your creator does. Branding versus lead gen. But number two is you gotta be prepared to spend on your content creators.
Gene (03:11):
Many creators have spent a lot of time building up their audience. In some cases, this is their livelihood. It’s not mine, but it’s certainly a part of my livelihood. And people do expect to be paid for the services that they provide. You’re not gonna be paying 20 bucks or 50 bucks for a content creator to work with you for a month. And also, content creators are loathed to a guarantee engagement and results and leads and whatever. So you’re really gonna be like spending with them. I mean, you could be spending a few thousand dollars a month with a content creator, and depending on their audience and how good they are and your relationship with them, it could be somewhat more than that. It’s a long-term thing. And again, I’ll get to that with my fifth piece of advice.
Gene (03:50):
But you’re gonna have to spend, and a good content creator, easily can cost a business anywhere from $10 to $200,000, depending on the relationship that you want to have with them, the amount of content they’re creating, how often they’re doing, and the quality of their content as well. So know the… what the content creator does, right? Is it branding for you or lead gen? Be prepared to spend and make that investment. Which gets me to number three, which is taking time to search for the right person. You can search on YouTube for content creators. You can search for bloggers, you can search throughout social media, you see people that have big audiences, but there’s different trade offs. Some people have big audiences, but not great engagement.
Gene (04:36):
I’m one of ’em, like, I have like 130,000 followers on Twitter because I post a lot of small business information, but in all honesty, I don’t really have that great engagement. I know my reach is really big and my followers see my stuff, but it’s newsy stuff. And it’s not like they’re, we’re going back and forth about it on Twitter at least. LinkedIn is a little bit more. So, if you find a brand, a content creator that you know has a big following and you know that a lot of people will see what they’re writing or they’re producing great ’cause that might be good exposure for your product, or it might be somebody that just has good engagement. So even it’s a smaller community, there’s a lot of click-throughs and a lot of back and forth.
Gene (05:19):
And that might be good for your brand as well. You’ve gotta decide, and by the way, you wanna make sure you’re working with somebody that’s a nice person and good to work with, and not a jerk, obviously, right? Number four, identify your goals and be specific with metrics. It’s very hard to measure branding success. I mean, Coca-Cola spends hundreds of millions of dollars on their brand. I mean, it’s very tough for them to tie that back to one Super Bowl ad, generating more people drinking Coke so it’s tough to do that. You have to play it off. But if you do have like a lead gen campaign or something your content creator wants you to… you’re hiring them to get more clicks to your website or to download a white paper, or to go to a product site, make sure that you’ve got the landing pages set up and make sure that you are measuring, if a content creator is doing something with a URL or a click through or an asset that you’ll want them to provide, make sure that you are measuring the clicks to it or the downloads to it so you can just see how good the content creator is doing.
Gene (06:17):
Again, when it comes to branding, that’s a much tougher thing to measure. Finally, it’s thinking long term. I mentioned this earlier when you’re talking about the limitations and the spend that you’re gonna make. I mean, again, with The Hartford, just speaking about this personally, I’ve been working with The Hartford for years. I mean, eight years, nine years, I even forget and I’ve been creating a lot of content for them. I’ve been engaging with a ton of people in their community. Yeah, I feel like I’ve done a good job as a content creator for The Hartford, and they’re a great company to work with, but there’s gotta be value there. And the one thing that The Hartford gets is it’s a long-term thing. I mean, they hire somebody to represent them or to be part of their community.
Gene (07:00):
It’s not a one-off deal. One-off deals never seem to really provide a lot. It gets back to that Kim Kardashian tweet. It’s more of a long-term relationship with your content creators. So you wanna find somebody again that you like that, that is providing good content, that’s got a good community that they’re reaching out to, but represents your brand well and look at them long term. And yeah, that might mean you’re spending $15, $30, $200,000 a year. I mean, it depends on what you decide to do with them, but you want to consider a long-term relationship. I think it’s very, very important to really get the most out of a content creator relationship. So, okay, let’s recap. So there are five things I want you to know about content creators. If you’re thinking of using one. Number one, know what they do.
Gene (07:42):
It’s either branding or lead gen. Branding is tough to measure. Lead gen is easier to measure, but again, it’s probably a combination of the two. But just know what you’re hiring your content creator to do because those are two very different things. And most content creators do stuff with branding over lead gen. It’s much harder to generate leads from, again, a video or a podcast or even a blog. Number two, prepare to spend. Content creators will cost. I mean, the big celebrities charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single tweet. But you can expect, for a content creator, you could be spending $5, $10, $15,000 a month over the course of a year, two years, three years. So that might very well be worth it. It’s all about the return on investment, but you have to be prepared to spend. Number three, when it comes time to picking that person, that content creator, you need to balance their audience versus their engagement and their reach.
Gene (08:39):
Some content creators like myself have big audiences, but not as much engagement. Their other content creators that have small audiences, but a lot of engagement. You have to determine what you think is best for you. And also work with a good person as well. Okay? Personality does matter. Number four, make sure you identify those goals and be specific with metrics. It’s very challenging to come up with whether or not a branding objective is reaching its objectives. It’s tough to measure, but it is lead gen, like reach or clicks or downloads, those are things you can measure. And if that’s why you’re hiring your content creator, which is a lot tougher by the way, but if that’s why you’re hiring them, then you wanna make sure that you’ve got good resources in place to measure that. And finally, think long term, okay?
Gene (09:22):
If you’re gonna get involved with the content creator, it shouldn’t be a one-off thing. It should be a long-term thing, years, multiple years. It takes time for your community to not only build up trust in you, but anybody representing your brand. So those are my five pieces of advice for dealing with a content creator for your business, and I hope it helps. My name is Gene Marks, and you’ve been listening to the Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. If you need any advice or tips or help in running your business, please visit us at SmallBizAhead.com. Thanks for listening, and hopefully you’ll have a good rest of the week. We will see you again next week with another piece of advice to help you run your business. Take care.
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