Influencers are no longer just pretty faces hawking products on Instagram. They’re becoming the brains behind the brands. 

Linqia, an influencer marketing company, is changing how companies collaborate with influencers with its new Creator Council. 

The initiative transforms influencers from mere content producers into strategic partners for brands, leveraging their intimate knowledge of audience preferences to shape everything from product development to marketing strategies.

Heading the Creator Council efforts, Linqia’s Chief Operating Officer, Daniel Schotland, brings extensive ad and marketing tech experience overseeing the company’s go-to-market strategies, product development, and engineering. 

According to the industry vet, this shift is crucial as brands seek authentic connections with consumers in an increasingly saturated marketplace.

“Brands are beginning to see the critical role creators play across all of their marketing initiatives, given the unique authenticity creators bring to the brand conversation,” Daniel says, “however, some brands still only use creators at specific points in the marketing funnel, or for PR tactics.”

Daniel believes creator marketing can serve multiple functions, “from upper funnel awareness to actual conversion and the delivery of product into the hands of a customer.” 

In this space, Linqia tailors creator solutions to meet specific brand needs, and the Creator Council does just that.

Daniel unveils how the Creator Council is revamping influencer marketing, balancing brand needs with creator autonomy, and paving the way for a future where creators drive marketing strategies across all channels.

Transforming Influencers into Strategic Partners

The Creator Council aims to elevate creators from mere content producers to strategic consultants, recognizing their deep understanding of audience preferences and market trends.

“Creator Council is, at its essence, having an in-house consultant who is an expert in matching the brand’s needs to the current market,” Daniel explains.

This shift in perspective allows brands to tap into the invaluable insights creators possess about their followers, turning them into “the world’s best customer research tool.”

The Creator Council operates on three levels of engagement. 

At its most basic, it involves surveying creators to gather market research. 

A more in-depth approach brings creators into the campaign development process, where they contribute to strategy, content aesthetics, and messaging. 

The most comprehensive level establishes long-term relationships with creators, analogous to a test kitchen for product development.

Daniel highlights the multifaceted value creators bring to the table: “Creators have so much to offer around what will drive real impact with the audiences that they reach.” 

By involving creators in the early stages of marketing and product development, brands can ensure their efforts resonate authentically with target audiences.

The Creator Council provides a pathway for content creators to evolve into professional consultants, which Daniel sees as a natural progression in the creator economy. 

“They’re building their brand, their enterprise, if you will, and producing content is a step towards that. But Creators can do so much more,” he states.

Balancing Data, Creativity, and Brand Alignment

The Creator Council’s modus operandi is data-driven yet creatively flexible. The initiative intertwines gut instincts and measurable outcomes in influencer marketing campaigns.

Daniel emphasizes leveraging qualitative and quantitative data to inform marketing strategies: “We all have gut instincts about what’s right, but increasingly, data needs to drive more of our decision-making.” 

By conducting A/B tests, Linqia demonstrates the tangible benefits of creator collaboration to brands, showing “how much better that content is, how much better it performs, and how much closer they are to achieving or exceeding the results that they want.”

A key challenge in influencer marketing has been balancing creative autonomy with brand messaging. 

“For many brands, they wanted complete control over everything and anything the creator did,” Daniel notes. However, data shows that overly controlled sponsored content often underperforms with creators’ organic posts.

To address this, Linqia advocates for a “content-to-feed match” approach, allowing for more authentic engagement with the creator’s audience. 

“The closer you get to a perfect content-to-feed match, where the creator has more flexibility and the sponsored post is aligned with their usual content – the better it performs,” Daniel explains. 

This strategy involves providing guidelines for critical brand elements while allowing creators to incorporate messages in a way native to their style.

When curating creators for the Council, Linqia employs a sophisticated selection process. The essential questions are, “Who’s the audience the brand wants to reach?” and “Who are the right creators who represent that audience?” 

The company analyzes creators’ content using its proprietary platform, Resonate, to ensure brand affinity and audience alignment.

Mitigating Risks and Shaping Creator-Led Marketing

As brands increasingly adopt creator-led strategies, Daniel sees the Creator Council as a low-risk avenue for collaboration. 

“We’re not handing the keys to the castle to creators,” he explains. “We’re bringing creators into the castle so they can add tapestries and artwork.”

As Daniel shares, early feedback on the Creator Council has been overwhelmingly positive. “Creators were thrilled to have a way to build their brands beyond content production, and brands appreciated the demonstrable difference in results between Creator-informed and non-informed strategies.

Daniel anticipates increased creator involvement based on brand needs. “As brands begin to use it more, the question will be ‘What else do they want creators to be involved with, and what does that look like?’” he notes.

Reimagining Creator Partnerships

Daniel advocates for a change in how brands approach creator partnerships. 

“I’d love to see brands leverage creator content for every channel – paid social, programmatic display and video, connected TV, digital out of home, and even owned and operated,” he says. 

Daniel believes this would allow brands to “drive massive efficiency and better performance that resonates with their target audience across their media buys .”

Regarding future developments, Linqia is working on innovative solutions to address the industry’s top challenges. 

“We are building something new to address how a brand thinks about their Creator, how they value their Creators, whom they like working with, and why they like working with them,” Daniel reveals. 

Furthermore, Linqia is leveraging its data and new models to enhance creator sourcing. “That  understanding enables us to source and find new creators with a higher propensity to be the best-performing creators for [the brands].”

Addressing these core industry challenges and expanding the role of creators, Daniel predicts that this approach will become the new standard in brand-creator partnerships.

“Fast-forward five years, and this is exactly how brands will work,” he concludes.