Why Creator Insights Are Essential in Influencer Marketing

In industries like social media and marketing, that keep changing constantly, brands need to stand out from their competitors in new and exciting ways, and creator insights are the way to go for any businesses out there.

You might have not heard much about creator insights until now, but it combines the best things of influencer marketing and research, and provides brands with amazing insights that can be used to build exciting campaigns.

In this episode, Dani Roberts, Purple Goat’s Campaign Director, and Steph Smith, Senior Performance Manager, talk all about creator insights, how valuable they are for brands and the best ways to use them.

Are you excited to use some creator insights for your next campaign or project? Contact us today!

[Transcript below]

Trailer (00:00):

Steph Smith:

At PG, we work with creators to do qualitative research, focus groups, conversations, that kind of thing, to then apply that to our client’s marketing strategies.

Dani Roberts:

And why do we use creators?

Steph Smith:

They understand their audiences like the best of anyone that we could get to speak to, so they give us really great insights.

Dani Roberts:

They also view things through a commercial lens as well, so it’s actually applicable for businesses to take away and action straight away and still have that commercial lens to all of the advice and feedback that they provide.

Steph Smith:

If you are just basing a campaign on assumptions about groups of people or you kind of don’t have that real insight that you are building on first, then your message might not resonate and it might just not hit and it won’t reach the people that you are wanting it to reach.

Introduction (00:54):

Dani Roberts:

Hello and welcome back to The Purple Goat Podcast. Today’s episode is all about creator insights, what it is and how we do it at Purple Goat. I’m Dani the Campaigns Director, and I’m here with Steph.

Steph Smith:

Hi, I’m Steph. I’m Senior Performance Manager here at PG.

Dani Roberts:

Perfect. So, what is creator insights?

Steph Smith:

So at PG we work with creators to do qualitative research, focus groups, conversations, that kind of thing, to then apply that to our client’s marketing strategies.

Dani Roberts:

Nice. And why do we use creators?

Steph Smith:

So we use creators because they’re generally really ingrained within their communities, and trying to get more disabled representation, those are really key communities and groups to tap into, so they make for really great spokespeople for those communities and they understand their audiences the best of anyone that we could get to speak to. So they give us really great insights.

Dani Roberts:

Nice. I guess they’re like consultants in their own right.

Steph Smith:

Yeah. And a lot probably do consultancy work as well, so they’re very used to putting things into kind of actionable, tangible phrasing that clients are really able to use and go forward in their marketing.

Dani Roberts:

They also view things through a commercial lens as well, so it’s actually applicable for businesses to take away and action straight away and still have that commercial lens to all of the advice and feedback that they provide.

Steph Smith:

Yeah, for sure. Because kind of on both sides of it, so they’re creating their own content and engaging with their audiences, and then they’re also members probably of that community that you’re trying to target or reach out to, or resonate with, so they can kind of see it from a really interesting perspective from both sides.

Dani Roberts:

Perfect.

Steph Smith:

I think creator Insights can really benefit a campaign because if you potentially are just basing a campaign on assumptions about groups of people or you don’t have that real insight that you’re building on first, then your message might not resonate and it might just not hit the note that you’re trying to hit, and it won’t reach the people that you are wanting it to reach. So when you start with insights, when you have that data driving a campaign, then you’re much more likely to have success. It’ll be more authentic and it’ll reach the people that you’re trying to talk to.

Dani Roberts:

You kind of touched on it there a little bit, but how important is it that brands actually invest in insights upfront instead of trying to retrofit and add it on once the creative and that process has already been completed?

Steph Smith:

I mean hugely, because if you’re not basing it in that to begin with, then you are always going to be starting from a point of assumption, and it’s so much easier to build something or craft something around the insight when you have it. If you speak to a community, you find out what they want, what they like, what they resonate with, what they don’t, and then you can use that as your building block rather than trying to retrofit it, which never works out smoothly.

Dani Roberts:

Of course. How important is it that obviously when a brand agrees to do insights and stuff, that they actually listen to the community and are vulnerable enough to have that open conversation and implement any changes and recommendations that the community provides?

Steph Smith:

I mean, yeah, really important. If you’re not going to take on the feedback, then there’s kind of no point getting the insights to start with, because you have to come into it with a little bit of vulnerability and a curiosity to learn, and you have to accept that you might need to get out of your box of what you think or you might need to shake things up a little bit and just be willing and open to learning something new and adapting based on that.

Because yeah, if you’re not driving the decision with Insight or if you’re not going to listen to the insight when you get it, then there’s kind of no point asking the question because sometimes asking and then not doing is worse than not asking.

Dani Roberts:

Fair. Yeah, I get that. Do you have any good examples of brands that have done insights and taken on that feedback and then actually implemented change upon that and changed the way that they talk about their brand or a specific marketing campaign?

Steph Smith:

I think probably one of the biggest ones or the coolest ones to see kind of be shaped was Channel 4 for their Paralympic ads that came out for a Paralympic Paris 2024, mouthful.

So they were working with Purple Goat for a couple of years, I think even before the Paralympics, to really shape the creative. They came with kind of initial ideas and they were really open to the community feeding back and feeding into where that creative eventually led. And then we had a couple of round table conversations with the community getting feedback, and that was a really good example of seeing something come from a start point and work all the way through and from the round tables to then seeing the finished ad, being able to pick out things that I know people said in the round table and see those elements adding into the creative or seeing how they tweak certain lines so that you could really literally see it in real time kind of shaping the finished product.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah, I think with C4 it’s also really cool if you zoom in even further, you can see the complete narrative change from the Superhuman campaign way back in 2012, to where we are today. And it was just really nice to see that change and that development, and you can really see that the community’s been involved in that process as well.

Steph Smith:

Yeah, for sure. Because I think the whole narrative and wanting to change that was also rooted in community feedback. So to then take those steps and make quite, I think a drastic change from previous versions and to want to do that, it just speaks volumes for sure.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah, nice. We got a lot of love for the C4 campaign this year.

If a brand approached PG today, and they said ‘we want to do some insights’, what would be your suggestion on where they should start and what that process of gathering those insights should look like?

Steph Smith:

I mean, it obviously depends on the kind of insight they want to uncover, what the goal is of the research. It is always got to be tailored to what the client is wanting the end result to be, or what they’re specifically wanting to look at to just look at it broadly.

I mean, I love a round table because you get loads of different dynamic people around a table. You can get lots of different representation and you kind of watch the conversation spark, and you watch people kind of pick up off each other and you get to really watch that grow and shape the conversation, which can be really powerful. I also love interviews. You can go a lot more zoomed in with one specific person if you have a more specific goal of your research. If you’re wanting to look at something more closely in a lot more detail then interviews are always going to be really good.

Dani Roberts:

I think for me, I always love to start with that quantitative data, start with a big survey and get a really broad picture of what things are looking like within whatever topic or area we’re investigating, so to speak. Because then I think it really sets the groundwork for going in and having those more qual conversations and getting that more in depth information from people.

Steph Smith:

If you can have the balance of both, it’s always perfect because the quant side of things in surveys, they’re great for getting broader kind of stats, but you can’t always get to the why, or I try to sometimes in surveys, but it’s tricky when you only have 15 questions and you’re trying to keep responses motivated.

So you start with that and then you can take that and then apply that into a conversation with people, and you can start to unpick the stats and hear some of the stories behind why that might be and whether they resonate with that. And then you can really paint the whole picture.

Dani Roberts:

So as you’ve just said, it’s really important to have the quant and qual data, but why is that so important for a client? Why should they always consider trying to get both types of data instead of just one or the other?

Steph Smith:

I think both can definitely have their pros, but they can equally have a few cons. But when you bring the two together, you are covering all the bases. So you get both sides of the story, you get the broader stats that you can use, kind of more the widely applicable to see broader patterns, but then you can also zoom in and you can see some really kind of personal stories and narratives that help support that through lived experience.

And I think particularly what we do at PG, often talking within the Disabled community in a survey, it can be quite hard to pinpoint all of those nuances and understand them all, especially because in surveys, we’re often looking at 10, 11 different sub communities within that survey, and it’s just quite difficult to convey all of the things that we want to find out within that survey. But it’s great to have them as a starting point and then you can build on that and have those more nuanced conversations where the kind of intricacies of it can be discussed in more detail.

Dani Roberts:

So once we’ve got all that incredible data in, we’ve got the numbers from the quant data, and we’ve got all the incredible stories from the creators that we’ve worked with, what do we actually do with all of that? What do the next steps actually look like?

Steph Smith:

So then I go into my analysis hole, and for the qualitative, it’s all about theming, categorising sentiment, pulling out those key bits throughout those real kind of little nuggets that were through the conversation, which we usually have quite a good eye for just hearing when we’re talking about it with people as well. But we kind of go and pour through all of the transcripts and run those all through and pull out all the key themes and all the key bits of information that are going to be most useful.

As we’ve said, creators are generally very good at packaging up their opinions and thoughts and feedback into quite actionable packages for brands anyway, so they generally do make our lives quite a lot easier as well. And then when it comes to surveys, it’s just a lot of spreadsheets, it’s a lot, it’s a huge amount that I am not going to bore everyone with now, but I would just go into Google Sheets for days on end essentially.

And then once I’ve come out with all of the kind of key findings, again, just kind of going through the survey and pulling out key patterns, key themes, the key stats, I love it when we find something that isn’t what we thought it was going to be as well. Sometimes when you’ve been doing it a while, there’s certain things that you get quite good at guessing, and then sometimes something will come in, it will just throw you off a little bit and it’ll be kind of a new thing that you might not have thought that a certain group would answer that way, but they do. Or you’ll pick out a new kind of pattern that you hadn’t seen before. So it’s really a lot of fun. But then once I’ve got all of that, I’ve kind of compiled all of my findings, look for any patterns across the two as well, link one to the other. I then kind of pass that back on to you, Dani.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah. And then I have the fun of looking at all of that, kind of chatting with you a lot. And we do a lot of brain dumping sessions where we literally just offload all the information to one another and I come up with actionable next steps for clients essentially. And yeah, I think as you said, creators are so great at actually giving us really packaged answers. So quite often there’ll be a lot of really short, quick fire easy wins for brands that we can immediately feed back on. And sometimes it’s working with our strategy team to come up with and implement longer term plans or longer term strategies and marketing campaigns for clients that need a little bit more work and need to be completed over a longer period of time.

Steph Smith:

Yeah, there’s always going to be the low hanging fruit. Is that a marketing buzzword?

Dani Roberts:

Yeah. I feel like we say it a lot.

Steph Smith:

But there’s always those really easy things that can just be a quick switch, or just a little change that can make quite a big difference. And then there’s the biggest scale stuff that just takes a little bit more time longer.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah, for sure. Insights generally have been around for a really long time. Loads of people have been using them, and I think marketing generally has become a lot more data informed, but actually using creators to get those insights is something that’s fairly new and something we don’t see a lot of other brands doing really. Do you think this is going to change? Do you think more brands will look to implement creator insights in the future?

Steph Smith:

I mean, I don’t know why people wouldn’t, because they’re just so much more ingrained within their audience. They have a fuller understanding of what’s going to resonate on that side of things. And then also, I know we’ve spoken about it quite a lot, but being able to package that up in a way that’s really easy for a brand to act on.

I just think that they’re the kind of perfect people that you would leverage to get that kind of really in depth information, because they’re kind of heading up their own channels and have their own followings. And we say it on the influencer side of PG all the time, that the influencer knows their audience better than anyone, and they’re just going to be really ingrained in those communities and just make it really easy for you to tap into and create really authentic content.

Dani Roberts:

I couldn’t agree more, I think as well, obviously, I think just marketing generally and the creator economy is just going to continue to grow. I think we’re seeing it more and more, right? Influencers are heading up their own brands now. Like Molly Mae is doing incredible at the minute, and there’s so many influencers doing that and building their own brands from scratch. I think it’s a really smart way for brands to continue to innovate and to continue to connect with their audiences, and more particularly younger audiences. I think it’s quite difficult for a lot of traditional brands these days to connect with younger audiences and influencers, and having an influencer as the face of your brand now is an easy way in.

Steph Smith:

So speaking about growth and innovation, my mind always goes to AI because it’s a very hot topic at the minute. How do you think that AI could be used to support this kind of insights? Or do you think that humans are just always ultimately going to win over AI?

Dani Roberts:

A human versus machine?

Steph Smith:

Yeah.

Dani Roberts:

I think AI is incredibly powerful, and it’s obviously got amazing capabilities that are going to continue to grow and develop over time. Obviously, the more we’re inputting into AI, the quicker it’ll develop and learn. But I think for me, human stories are the most important thing.

There’s nothing more that I love than sitting down and having that one-on-one conversation with someone and really understanding their experiences and understanding their challenges and needs, but also the things that work incredibly well for them too. And I think that’s where brands can get the most value out of having those important conversations. And I don’t think AI will ever be able to replicate that. I think if it does, we’re at a really scary place where we’ve just lost that human connection. And as incredibly powerful as AI can be, and as incredibly helpful it can be. I hope it doesn’t ever take away that human to human interaction.

Steph Smith:

Yeah, I guess what we’re always wanting and searching for is authenticity.

Dani Roberts:

Exactly.

Steph Smith:

And that’s just something that you can’t manufacture.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah, exactly. We want to feel the emotions, and that’s really important. And for me, a really great marketing campaign, more generally, is when it makes someone feel something. And it doesn’t matter what that emotion is, whether it’s anger or sadness or incredible joy and happiness. You have to make someone feel something. And I think that’s really difficult to replicate, particularly with AI because it can’t feel, it is just factual information. It doesn’t have that emotion tied to it. So yeah, I hope we don’t get to a point where we lose all of that.

Steph Smith:

Nice.

Outro (18:20):

Dani Roberts:

So we’ve had an incredible conversation here today about all things creator insights and we’ve spoken about a lot. I think we’ve covered a lot as well. But for anyone watching, I think we should do a quick elevator style wrap up.

Steph Smith:

Okay. So I would say that insights is tapping into niche communities at scale without losing the nuance of lived experience.

Dani Roberts:

Oh, I really love that. I think that’s the perfect way to..

Steph Smith:

It’s a new slogan right there.

Dani Roberts:

Yeah, absolutely. We’ll be using that. But yeah, massive thank you for everyone watching. If you have any more questions around anything insights related, please give us an email.

And a massive thank you goes out to ID Studios for hosting us. It’s an incredibly inclusive space. If you guys need any podcast studios, get in touch with those guys as well.