All things creator marketing with Tiffany Rivers

Tiffany Rivers is VP of emerging media and influencer marketing at Media Cause. She’s set to speak at Marketing Brew’s upcoming event, The Next Phase of Social and Creator Marketing, on May 12.

Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear how she is advising her nonprofit clients, including the University of Florida, Parkinson’s Foundation, and Partnership for Public Service, about their creator strategy.

US creator ad spend is growing four times faster than the rest of the media industry. What do you think is the biggest reason for this growth? I think it’s probably overstated, but people are looking for authenticity. In the age of artificial intelligence, they’re looking for human touch and connection with real individual people. I think that creators have the ability to connect with niche audiences, and media traditionally has targeted more mass or generalized audiences. Creators have that unique ability to tap into a very specific audience type, whether it’s a certain demographic, gender, race, or a set of beliefs.

What signals do you evaluate to determine whether creator partnerships are successful? There’s kind of two ways that we think about it. We think about it from an awareness perspective, like just raising awareness of the overall brand and driving engagement, whether that’s likes, comments, things of that nature. But then we also look at conversions, and we look on our side, for nonprofits, [at] their ability to drive actions like registrations, donations, adding their names to email lists, asking others to support the cause or brand.

Are you spending more on scale or on experimentation? How do you balance those two musts? For the nonprofit sector, we’re still spending on experimentation. There are some advanced nonprofits who’ve been in this space for four to five years and have really established some baselines and feel really comfortable with creator marketing. But most of our clients are still in the experimentation phase, and they may spend anywhere between 5% to 10% of their traditional paid social, paid media budgets on creators.

How are you adjusting internal marketing structures to position creator efforts? We don’t necessarily advise our clients on their internal structure, but what we try to do is put really tight systems in place so that those systems and protocols can be easily transferable to our clients, and that means the technology that we use. We want to make sure that there’s a high level of visibility for our clients to be able to go in and review creator lists, be able to go in and make comments, and give feedback on deliverables. We try to put in more of an infrastructure so that it’s easily translatable for our clients.

Which upcoming platforms, formats, or creator niches are you most excited about? From a creator perspective, I’m most excited about the platforms that help save practitioners like me time and help us create efficiencies with this very heavy human touch sector. I don’t want to take away that human touch. 

I think relationships with creators, relationships with managers [and] relationships with talent agencies, are really important, but it’s, like, how we create those efficiencies to get to an agreement and to get to that content that we deliver that is aligned with a brand’s goals, as well as the creator still being able to add their flair and really develop content that resonates with their audiences.