With Aspire, Influencers Choose Brands to Work With

Over the last few years,  there has been a pivot to more efficient, full-funnel creator marketing approaches. Today, brands are relying more heavily on creator content, boosting it on social channels and licensing it to use across brands’ marketing channels including websites, ads, point-of-purchase, catalogs and more. Brands are leaning on creators more and more, and building either ongoing or even more in-depth relationships with the creators they partner with rather than one-off campaigns. 

Influencer engagements are a two-way street, and brands and influencers respectively need to consider their goals when evaluating a brand partnership. Professional creators act as informed advocates and are hugely influential, providing consumers with verified recommendations and reviews that go beyond surface-level understanding to instead serve as educational resources, trusted guides and certified community members within specific areas of expertise on behalf of their partnered brands and retailers. As such, they should consider a brand partnership as an extension of their own personal branding and do their due diligence prior to any engagement. 

Aspire’s influencer marketing platform is making it easy for creators and brands to find the right fit by flipping the script and letting creators choose the brands they want to work with and apply directly for campaigns. This saves brands time from manually searching for influencers and creates an inbound flow of creators to choose from. While free for creators, brands can receive proposals from creators, experts, and other influencers across a range of channels. Brands also can access creator reviews, engagement, metrics, and collaboration history for anyone who submits a proposal. 

For a campaign with the popular ecommerce brand Ruggable, Aspire helped them source 400+ brand evangelists to help build and grow the community. In less than 6 months, Ruggable went from working with 10 Influencers a week to an average of 45. This resulted in more than 2,300 posts, 36M impressions, nearly 1M engagements and 166K Instagram followers. Another engagement with mattress company Purple helped the brand scale its influencer program 3x each month, and the brand generated 2,000 pieces of content, gained 11.6M impressions and earned a campaign ROI of 260%, showing the success of Aspire’s novel approach to creator marketing and finding the best brand-influencer fit possible. 

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This article originally appeared in the PSFK iQ report, The Influencer Marketing Landscape.