Creator Marketplace: The Battle Between Instagram and TikTok
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The competition for consumer attention through social entertainment continues to spread across channels, making it a more challenging environment for brands to connect with consumers in engaging ways. In this new era, creators are at the center. Influencer marketing has been an integral part of brands' social marketing strategies for years, but finding the right influencers to represent your brand and connect with your audience can prove difficult.
Instagram recently launched a new Creator Marketplace, a hub where brands can find and reach out to creators for partnerships. Initially, the marketplace was available only by invitation, but brands may now request to join the program as of September 2022. Those who have previously used TikTok's Creator Marketplace - an in-house influencer marketing platform that enables brands to identify key creators for their campaigns - may be familiar with this effort to acknowledge the creator-first economy. No matter what your experience level with creator marketplaces is, this article can help you understand what they are and how they can benefit you.
Instagram Creator Marketplace Deep Dive
Online job boards are a familiar resource to us all, whether we are candidates seeking a new career or employers hiring new talent. After all, when we need something, it's common to advertise or search online. That is precisely what Instagram’s Creator Marketplace does, albeit for brands and creators.
In a nutshell, Instagram Creator Marketplace is a platform where brands can find creators, contact them, and pay them for specific marketing collaborations. In addition to allowing brands to find new talent that aligns with their Instagram marketing strategy and brand values, it streamlines the whole process for both parties, making working together much more effortless.
How Brands Can Use Instagram Creator Marketplace
How does the Instagram Marketplace work?
The platform allows brands to filter creators by a variety of factors, including gender, age, followers, and even their audience demographics. They'll also see creators who have shown interest in working with them, tagged them, or followed them.
Once potential partnerships have been identified, Creator Marketplace allows brands to share campaigns and projects with creators, detailing the campaign overview, the deliverables, and the fee. You can think of it as a job ad. Creators will receive messages from brands in a newly created inbox, enabling them to respond and coordinate with them directly.
Let's dive a little deeper into each of the four features that comprise the platform.
What are the features of Creator Marketplace?
After a brand's request to join the Creator Marketplace platform has been approved, the rest is relatively straightforward.
- Discovery
Here, brands can find creators who match their requirements, and creators can indicate their interests and topics related to their work. Make sure the creator can truly resonate with your target audience while also aligning with your brand values and ethos.
- Partnership Messaging
Some brands often miss opportunities to make contact with desirable creators because messages in their DMs may get lost. Creator Marketplace, however, has a dedicated inbox for Partnership Messages, where all new correspondence can be found at the top of the primary tab instead of ‘requests’. By doing this, you keep everything organized and increase your chances of creating a collaboration.
- Projects
Brands can use this dedicated inbox to send creators project outlines, including requirements, fees, and anything else they may need to know about your campaign in order to gauge their interest.
- Payments
Creator Marketplace also simplifies the transaction process by enabling brands to pay creators directly in the app, allowing them to track payments in the tools section of their dashboard.
Although the Creator Marketplace certainly opens up new opportunities for brands and creators to collaborate and create entertaining content for audiences, you must also have the right Instagram insights to measure the partnership's success. Dash Hudson’s Relationship feature can help you seamlessly measure the ROI of your creator campaigns, highlighting content that drives engagement and audience growth and making the most of your investment.
TikTok Creator Marketplace Deep Dive
In many ways, TikTok's Creator Marketplace is similar to Instagram's new platform. Essentially, it acts as a matchmaking service for brands and creators, facilitating relationships that drive brand awareness and growth. As TikTok has been offering this feature since 2019, they are also offering brands access to some insights and campaign reporting results. Brands like Benefit Cosmetics reported positive results from using the app’s Creator Marketplace, stating that a campaign generated 3,500+ hours of views and 1.4 million impressions from just 4.5 minutes of creator content.
How Brands Can Use TikTok Creator Marketplace
How does the TikTok Creator Marketplace work?
Businesses looking to reach a new audience are increasingly turning to TikTok Creator Marketplace as the platform grows in popularity and hosts over 1 billion active users. Through TikTok Creator Marketplace, marketers have access to a community of 8 million active creators who can produce videos to promote their brand. With your account set up, you can browse through creators by location and category, as well as by views, followers, and reach.
What are the features of Creator Marketplace?
To begin, you will need a TikTok Ads Manager account. This will allow you to login to the TikTok Creator Marketplace if you already have one, but if you don't, signing up is easy and takes minutes.
- Search
You will be presented with an advanced search function to find creators relevant to your campaign. You can use many variables to find creators, including audience demographics, video topics, performance metrics, and others.
- Review & Invite Creators
Having selected a few creators, you can view their profiles to see their most recent videos and performance over time and then drill down to their stats to determine if they meet your criteria, resulting in data-driven decision-making. Creator Marketplace then allows you to initiate direct contact and start the collaboration with ease.
- Results
Using the campaign reporting tool, you can track and analyze results once the campaign has been launched or completed.
If you need help creating a TikTok strategy, check out Dash Hudson's TikTok insights, which are designed to set marketers up for success. With it, you can analyze content performance, see trends and benchmarks, and even connect the dots between your videos and online revenue via shoppable and multi-link posts. With social commerce evolving and TikTok shopping becoming more popular, brands need to understand how to engage consumers and drive them to make purchases.
Final Thoughts
Both Creator Marketplaces offer clear benefits. Having the ability to conveniently find and connect with creators in an era where they are driving social entertainment and can help brands reach new audiences who can ultimately become consumers is a welcome opportunity.
The efforts to access and collaborate with creators are becoming increasingly challenging since other platforms are creating their own initiatives that will consume creators' time and efforts. Recently, YouTube announced it would turn on stable monetization for Shorts, its short-form video product, offering creators 45% of ad revenue. Through this feature, YouTube will establish itself as a worthwhile platform for short-form video creators looking to monetize their content consistently, which will give it an advantage over TikTok.
It is crucial to determine which platform suits a brand's strategies, as well as which creators are aligned with the brand's purpose and goals. After all, creator-first marketing has become a central part of most brands' social media strategies - a trend that will continue to thrive in this age of social entertainment.
FAQs
What is the creator marketplace?
Creator Marketplace is a platform that allows brands to discover and connect with creators for partnerships. As of now, Creator Marketplace is offered by Instagram and TikTok to marketers looking to take their marketing strategies to the next level and find influencers that align with their brand values and connect with their audiences.
Is the TikTok creator marketplace worth it?
Brands who value having a platform for identifying and reviewing creators for their campaigns are worth exploring the TikTok Creator Marketplace. Marketers can also track and analyze results after campaigns have been launched or completed using the platform's reporting tool, which helps them determine whether it's worth their time.
Does creator marketplace lower views?
It has been confirmed by TikTok that Creator Marketplace won't lower your views and that fluctuations within the app cause any drops in video views.
