Bigger isn't always better for creator strategy

0:09Marcus Yong: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Wark podcast. My name is Rica Facundo, APAC Managing Editor at Wark. We recently launched the second edition of Pace Principle, which is our landmark Asian effectiveness study. This year, we focused on how to build twin paces on social and creator marketing. Joining me today to put that theory into practice is Marcus Young, VP of Global Marketing at Kluk, a travel and leisure booking platform born out of Asia.

0:40Marcus Yong: This October, Walk is heading to Denver to host the Science and Magic Summit, exploring the shifts to reshaping marketing and how leading brands are turning creative insights into business impact. The summit is part of a three-day experience that brings together Lions, Content Marketing World and TMRE, the market research event, to help close the gaps between insights, strategy, content and creativity. Join us in Denver. Learn more at cmi.media.org. Save$450 on an all-access pass with code LIONS450.

1:23Marcus Yong: Welcome, Marcus.

1:24Rica Facundo: Thanks, Mika. Very happy to be here.

1:27Marcus Yong: Kluk launched the Creator Program, an industry-first influencer-affiliate program designed to move away from mega-influencers towards micro and nano creators. Marcus, tell us why this focus on niche and why are they more effective than celebrities?

1:41Rica Facundo: Well, you know, we've been doing influencer marketing actually for some time, and it's not anything that's new. But when we first started the Creator Program, we were very deliberate that this is not just any influencer marketing program. and what that means is that we didn't just want to be, you know, typically how brands commission influencers, I give you a brief, you post and then the job is done. We wanted to build a community, a relationship. We wanted to tackle not just kind of reach engagement but also sales and based on those objectives, we found that micro, nano influencers, their results were actually a lot better.

2:16Rica Facundo: Based on one of our Travel Pulse studies that we've done, which is an annual survey, four out of five people you know have said that they have bought something online that is recommended by an influencer and out of these people more than a third of them have bought it because of a more micro or niche influencer i think the main takeaway here is that these micro niche influencers they are a lot more i would say the way they recommend things are a little bit more niche the way they go the distance further in order to engage the customers is a bit different as well. And so because of that, we've seen that the results have actually favoured these micro and nano influences.

2:57Rica Facundo: But that's not to say that we do not work with large influences as well. I just want to put that on the record.

3:02Marcus Yong: Of course, it's never either or, right? There's a role to play for each one that I want to probe you a little bit more on micro because again, this is like an endless debate that I've heard many, many, many times before, right? Why do you think they're more effective at driving that sale, which I'm hearing from you? What is it about the way that they're engaging with their customers that you think is more effective for brands that want to push products and sales?

3:25Rica Facundo: Well, if you look at social media in the past, typically what happens is influencers or brands, the way they work with influencers, they see them pretty much as top of funnel. I give you a brief, you post about something and you reach as many people as possible. But when we talk about sales, that goes from mid to even low funnel, which means that the influencer has to think not just about content, but they need to think about how the content relates to the purchase cycle. So in the case of Klook, one of the things that we've actually launched recently, or not too long ago, is this thing called a creator shop.

3:59Rica Facundo: So what it means is that when a creator posts something online and they recommend something for people to book, the call to action is not just check it out on Klook. the call to action would be, I recently did this, this is what I'm recommending, check out my recommendations on my creator shop, my links in my bio, or you can also use my code or this is how you can get to my creator shop. So they're essentially guiding the user, right? Now that you know about this product, how do you book it? And by doing this, what additional value can you unlock? So I think because we are e-commerce in nature, we're an online platform and OTA, it kind of gels nicely, right?

4:36Rica Facundo: From top of funnel to engaging users, bringing them to actually how you convert and then closing that connection.

4:42Marcus Yong: He said something really interesting about how to think about content, right? He said, think about the content that fits naturally in the purchase cycle for your brand or I guess for the consumer and your consumer life cycle, right? That's a very different mindset for briefing for something like, I don't know, oh, the latest TikTok-like trend and whatnot. Can you talk about this difference and why that matters to become effective on social and creative marketing?

5:08Rica Facundo: Absolutely. So let's talk about travel because I'm in the travel space, right? If you are going to, let's say, New Zealand today, there's a ton of travel content out there on New Zealand. 10 things to do in New Zealand, how to get around New Zealand. And honestly, at Cloak, we've never seen that as kind of our core bread and butter. Instead, because we are in the business of experiences, a lot of the content that we work with our creators on is how to unlock smart ease and value. So rather than 10 things to do in New Zealand, it would be more like how I rented my car and got around New Zealand.

5:42Rica Facundo: So there's a lot more utility behind it and it's a lot linked to the kind of product that we sell and the kind of value that we bring to the customers. And in order for us to do that, number one, the creator has to have had real experience in say booking this on Klook. The creator has to have a point of view about, was it a good experience? Could it have been improved? What were the things that I learned? The creator has to have useful tips. An example would be, if you are heading to New Zealand this winter, when you book a car, remember to also add snow chains because that has to be carried during winter.

6:16Rica Facundo: So things like that, I would say, it goes a little bit deeper than just the kind of surface inspirational content. And as an online OTA, where our job is to drive bookings and conversions, I think that's where we partner with the creators to add that little bit of extra thing beyond just 10 things to do in New Zealand.

6:36Marcus Yong: I've definitely looked at 10 things to do in New Zealand, but I don't know if that made me click on a particular purchase, but the additional utility I really like. And I want to bring out this framework that came out in the report, which is the social ceiling framework, right? So we had three levels. Level one is platform. then you have cultural and you have self-sustaining and everything has a constraint. And if you move beyond the platform and virality, there's kind of the other one, which is cultural content, which is more trends driven. But the way that you describe it sounds like, you know, it's about understanding those underlying forces, you know, that go into audience needs that kind of shape the culture of the category that you're in.

7:15Marcus Yong: Is that a way to think about maybe breaking through that kind of cultural ceiling that we've been talking about?

7:21Rica Facundo: I think that's firstly, that's a really good question. And I think the way we look at, let's say, our creator program kind of fits in quite nicely with what you just mentioned. So if you are looking within the platform itself, I think a lot of the objectives, a lot of the goals is about how can I get as many creators as possible to talk about me? How can I get them to post great content and maybe drive as many views as possible? But when we bring that out of that context, right, besides views and even besides sales, one great example that I can think of is how we are constantly also running a lot of community engagement events.

7:53Rica Facundo: And what that means is that we bring creators together to do something like a hackathon or workshop. We bring in a merchant partner of ours. We bring in a tourism bot. We get the creators to experience it, give us feedback. And through that hackathon, we come up with not just unique angles, but feedback about that particular activity or experience that we're trying to sell. So by engaging with the creators in this form of like community building, I think it goes beyond just, I have a need, get me more views or get me more sales. I think by doing that, this community element, I feel it's a lot closer and quite similar to what you mentioned, where we're trying to just break out of the platform.

8:32Rica Facundo: And, you know, one thing that, and maybe you might ask me about this later, is a lot of people always ask, what about virality? All right, that's a very, very common question. So we've never actually put that as an objective or KPI before, because we don't believe that virality is an objective. It could be a nice outcome, but it's never what we set out to do in the creative program.

8:51Marcus Yong: You just opened a can of worms, my friends, because I have a lot of opinions about virality is not a strategy. Please tell everyone who is listening here, why, number one, why do you think that's still a problem? And number two, why is it not a strategy, but actually an unpredictable outcome?

9:08Rica Facundo: Firstly, I think that virality only occurs when people can sense like spontaneity and authenticity. When you try and over-engineer it, which means that virality becomes your objective, the users can tell. And as we all know, the most viral moments often happen or the most viral things often happen where there's a moment, brands jump on it, they're organic in nature, people have a good laugh about it. I mean, the World Cup is happening right now, right? I mean, there are many moments about reactions in the World Cup, but that comes very spontaneously. So I think it's very difficult to engineer virality, number one.

9:40Rica Facundo: Number two is, I talk a lot about business objectives, business outcome, and I often tell my team this, right? And this is maybe a bit more unique to us. as a brand, as a business, we need to be very clear what our role is. We are not an entertainment agency. We are not a trend-jacking agency where our goal is to entertain people and make them laugh and make things go viral. I would love to do that. But at the end of the day, we are held accountable to, based on the resources that we invest, how do we create great marketing? How do we use our creators to drive, say, traffic and sales ultimately to our platform?

10:17Rica Facundo: So because of that, it's very difficult for us to create that culture and set up where everything just goes after virality. Instead, we prefer to focus on things like utility, value engagement. And we prefer to focus on things like, how can I create that scalable content flywheel that keeps giving me content? It's a deliberate choice. But honestly, I would love to see a lot more viral moments, but it's never something that we tell the team. You have to have seven viral clips per week per team. I think that's very difficult.

10:48Marcus Yong: Poor team. If that's what you're raving them, I don't think your team has that problem, right? You said another one of my favorite words, which is scaling, right? And that is a business objective. That's how brands grow. But traditionally, when we think about scale, it's about broad reach, right? You need to reach as many of your category buyers as possible. But earlier, we were talking about, at least with micro influencers, they're niche and targeted by nature. And even in our research, we found that if you're going to go for a social strategy, it has to be targeted because you're speaking to a specific community.

11:21Marcus Yong: How do you resolve that tension as a brand that wants to use creators to scale because it's much more fragmented? Is there other things that we need to be considering? How do we resolve that tension?

11:31Rica Facundo: Firstly, I think you need to look at a variety of different metrics. If you are only looking at creators based on, say, total reach, it's very difficult for you to break out of the mindset that the bigger the creator is or the more followers they have, the better my reach is. So for us at Cloak, we look at metrics such as video views, engagement, you know, referred traffic to the creator shops to site and ultimately sales. because we have that 360 view on those metrics, we are able to then see per creator over time, based on the amount that I'm investing on this creator, and the investment here will be not just commission that we're paying the creators, but even engagement fees, the hours or the time that we put into building the relationship with the creator, what is the real ROI?

12:18Rica Facundo: And when you look at that, you realize that based on these metrics, and again i'm not saying that mega influencers are bad or anything but at least in our view we've seen that the more micro and nano influencers consistently outperform the macro and large influencers and therefore our final verdict here is that based on what kluk needs the micro and nanos do really well but there from time to time would still exist a need for us to work with the larger influencers. Maybe we're doing a big, say, brand campaign with a big partner. Maybe we are launching a new product that we really need, you know, reach.

12:56Rica Facundo: That's where we'll pick someone that's a little bit bigger. But specific, again, going back to the creator program, I think based on those metrics that I mentioned, the micro and nanos typically do a lot better.

13:05Marcus Yong: I hear you. It's not, you know, micro versus celebrity, because again, like I said, they're more useful. Like you said that maybe mega celebrities are more useful for when it's a bigger brand campaign, you're trying to reach more of the category as possible. And I know creators are very powerful because of that earned credibility and media aspect. But I have to ask, what's the role of paid in all of this? Because organic can only go so far. What's your point of view on this?

13:31Rica Facundo: I fully agree and I fully feel that an organic strategy when it comes to creator or social commerce is 100 % insufficient. in today's world in today's environment any brand or any person that tells you that i can fully rely on organic virality in order to reach my goals right is either deluded or lying to you and the reason for that is because the algorithms out there they they also favor base or you need a strategy to put your brand front and center of people so the way we look at it is the investment or the payment comes in a few areas. What I'm paying the creators and at the same time, great content that I see doing well, am I willing to put budget behind to actually boost it?

14:16Rica Facundo: I'm sure you've heard of things like partnership ads, right? So you've seen brands boost posts in partnership with creators. That is actually part of our creator strategy. So we don't just look at the creator program as an organic channel, but we look at it as how much am I investing? Commission, cash, resources to push this. Once the content does well or I can see that it's doing well, can I put further paid budget behind to amplify it and light it up?

14:39Marcus Yong: I'm going to probe a little bit deeper. How do you know what to boost with paid? What is worth actually betting on? Is it just quantitative signals? Is it qualitative? I mean, I assume you're going to say both.

14:49Rica Facundo: Yeah, honestly, it's going to be both. But as a tech company, as a tech platform, we tend to lean a little bit more towards quantitative. So number one is we would probably look at the video views and the reach, right, based on the actual post itself. And secondly, again, coming back to the beauty of the creator program, where we have the creator shops, the links, we can actually see the amount of traffic that they are driving to our platform. So that gives us the clearest signals that this particular creator or this group of creators, based on this campaign, these posts that they're pushing out, is doing very well.

15:18Rica Facundo: Let's light it up.

15:19Marcus Yong: So building on what you're saying, your shared gripe that you have with me about this idea of virality, right, which is very fleeting and short-term. And of course, this report is all about going from social sprint to sustained growth, which brings in the long-term brand thinking here. How do we use creators and social with a more long-term lens? And what are some useful ways that you've seen that makes a considerable impact on the bottom line for you?

15:43Rica Facundo: I go back to the three pillars that we built our creator program on. And as a marketer, I love acronyms and short forms, right? So we call it the three Cs. Content, commerce, and community. Content is pretty straightforward, right? We want to work with our creators to create great content. and when we do this, it's not just about kind of commissioning them or getting them to produce things based on our briefs. Very often when we have a new activity launch, maybe there's a new event, we give them exclusive previews behind the scenes. We enable them to create good content that we think is valuable to the viewer.

16:17Rica Facundo: So that's the first C. The second C, which is on commerce, has a lot to do with the creator tools that we provide. The creator shops, the creator codes. We often also do a lot of things like focus groups. So we ask our creators, and this has nothing to do with our campaign. So we literally bring like 20 creators, right? Sit down in a room, we ask them, based on these shops, is it good? Based on this tool, what do you need? If we were to make this AI enabled, yes, no. Based on that feedback, we're literally running a product sprint, right? On these creator shops. So the commerce part, right? Which is the tools that we give creators to earn commission, referrals, has to be solid.

16:52Rica Facundo: That's the second C. And the third C, which is community, is the secret sauce. because community is where the creators feel like it's not just a one-off relationship that ends when the brief is completed. They know that the more they earn, the more they engage with us, they will, you know, attend things like our Creatorverse event, which is one where we gather the top creators in certain destinations and we do almost like a keynote with them, hackathons and whatnot. We bring them together to learn from each other, right? Exchange learnings. Last year, we did our Creatorverse in Hiroshima. Earlier this year, we had one regional creative us in Shanghai.

17:27Rica Facundo: And the next upcoming one is going to be in Phu Cô, Vietnam. So things like that actually help to build that community. So the three Cs add together, I think that is our secret ingredient to that long-term sustainability that you mentioned. And I'm really proud of it, honestly.

17:41Marcus Yong: I know you said it's your secret sauce, but I think we need all get a little bit of a taste in my last few questions here. The last C you were talking about reminds me of the last ceiling in our framework, which is self-sustaining ceiling, right? that is constrained by credibility. And when you get that right, that's something that you've earned. Creators will be talking about you. People will be talking about you with minimal brand intervention. What are some of the criteria you think that enables brands to reach that ceiling? I mean, we've spoken a little bit about some of them. Like maybe there's this co-authorship, for example.

18:15Marcus Yong: Is there anything else that we need to think about to get to that level?

18:22Rica Facundo: I certainly thought of a 4C. Okay, what's the fourth C?

18:25Marcus Yong: Exclusive, you'll first heard it here.

18:27Rica Facundo: Yeah, I think we need to revamp our playbook a little bit. Collaboration. And I thought about this because, you know, I just realized that, and maybe this is so for some brands, but not others, right? But very often when a brand commissions an influencer to do something, I have a very solid brief, right? I want you to talk about these three product points. This is the product, please talk about it. But when I talk about collaboration with the creators, in our case, recently, for example, we wanted to promote spring travel, cherry blossoms in Japan, Korea, Shanghai. We ran a campaign called the Chief Spring Officer Campaign.

19:01Rica Facundo: So we were trying to find somebody out there in the world of social media that could be our CSO. And who better to engage than our creators to help us amplify that? So we actually got creators input. We got them to amplify this. We got them to give us their ideas of what they thought a good CSO would be in each market. And eventually, you know, we pick the winner. So that is one example. Another example of collaboration, we just did this in Australia. So we actually have a creator flagship program there called the Cluck Fandom Program. So we would invite creators and get the entire kind of Australia to vote for their top creator.

19:36Rica Facundo: We bring them on a trip, they create content. And I think the most recent iteration, they even had Eddie, the strongman from physical Asia. He was actually a creator mentor. So he went down on the trip with some of these creators that were selected they created great content we posted it we boosted it it was part of our fandom tour so collaboration right i think that that would be

19:58Marcus Yong: my answer i'm going to probe a little bit on this because you know it's important for us to collaborate with creators and whatnot but i always hear that one of the main pain points is what we call the briefing process and actually hearing you talk made me think that briefing sounds like a very top-down thing. I'm the brand, here's the brief, here are the guidelines. Should we do away with the term brief? What's the dynamic we need to create to create this kind of collaboration?

20:22Rica Facundo: I think you can't fully run away from giving a brief as a brand, right? Because there are definitely, you know, key messages that you need to hit or things that you want them to talk about. But I think that whole process has to be collaborative and organic in nature. So what we've learned is that rather than coming up with a very fixed brief, come up with something that's a bit loose. In fact, think of it as where are the gaps that the creators can fill for you. So share with them your objective, create the environment that they can create content. So our version of creating the environment would be bringing them, let's say on the FEM trip, inviting them to a hackathon event where they have access to live experiences.

20:57Rica Facundo: And from there, based on their understanding of our objectives, they fill in the blanks with how they interpret those experiences. Last year in Hiroshima, for example, how they filled in the blank was we told them that, you know what? Based on your persona, what you guys are good for, we're going to split you into like three tribes, right? Culture, adventure, outdoor. And then based on these tribes, they go and create a content themselves. So we let them experience the activity. They shoot it in 24 hours. They post it. So we created an environment for them. We roughly told them what they want, but we kept it very loose, very organic.

21:30Rica Facundo: And the end result was spectacular because I never knew that even in Hiroshima, like there could be content that was like so entertaining because typically people see Hiroshima as, you know, somewhere that's a bit more somber, you know, you recognize the history, but some creators really brought out a different side of it.

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22:32Marcus Yong: I know that we're talking a lot about social and creators, but it's only one touch point in an ecosystem. And an ecosystem is very important for advertising effectiveness. How do you think about how creators and social should work with other touch points to create that scale that we were talking about earlier?

22:49Rica Facundo: At least at Cloak, what we see the creator program is, is we see creator almost as a channel. And I don't know whether in other brands they do it the same way. So what that means is that when we look multi-channel or across the board, creators are not just, oh, it's for engagement and reach. We literally have performance marketing, you know, CRM, etc. And then you have one line item there called social commerce and creators. And when we have that, we can then not just allocate the budget accordingly, but we can look basically across the full funnel. So we can see that I'm going to allocate a certain amount of money to the mid-funnel channels like this.

23:24Rica Facundo: And as a result of doing that, based on the tracking, can I see that the funnel has improved? And then that leads to conversion. So because we put so much emphasis on the creator program as a channel, an ecosystem, I think that really allows us to achieve what you just mentioned, right? Rather than, you know, typically where people just see as it's an amplification channel and it stops there.

23:45Marcus Yong: My last question is based on what you just said there, which is for all the CMOs and people who are listening here, what should they stop doing and start doing in order to do more effective social and creator marketing?

23:57Rica Facundo: They should definitely stop chasing virality. I think we said a lot about that. I think they need to stop seeing creator or social commerce or what you call it as kind of just one stage of the funnel. They need to look at it as a whole ecosystem. I strongly encourage that, number one, they develop their own attribution system on how this fits in their own conversion funnel. It is honestly okay if you feel that, you know, your social commerce or creator program is on the top of the funnel, right? But don't just leave it there. Ask yourself how that connects to the mid funnel, the bottom funnel, and how you track everything end to end.

24:28Rica Facundo: So come up with your own measurement, your attribution system that makes sense. That's number one. Number two things to start doing is give it time, be consistent. Success is not achieved overnight. We've had our ups and downs. So we've had to learn. Some things we've rolled out, some features, right? Creator shops have not done well. And we're okay with that. So if you acknowledge that, it's almost like it's a journey. It's not a destination. So give yourself time to tinker experiment, but be very clear where your North Star is. And then I think, you know, last but not least is, and this is probably to all CMOs, right?

25:00Rica Facundo: We want marketing to not be seen as a cost center. We want it to be seen as an enabler, right? A profit center. So the more you're able to equate some of those to sales a lot closer, and maybe this is similar to point number one, I think you get a lot more, you know, easier time from your CFO or, you know, your bosses when you ask for more budget to invest and double down on this.

25:22Marcus Yong: And that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Marcus.

25:25Rica Facundo: Thank you, Rika.

25:26Marcus Yong: If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe to the Wark podcast. And if you want to read more about Pace Principle, non-Wark subscribers can download a sample report. But if you are a Wark subscriber, just check out the Pace Principle Hub. Until next time.