Establishing Your Creator Pool

In this lesson you will learn:

• How to work with your client to develop a health creator criteria

• Best practices to consider when building your ideal creator profile and creator pool

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When working with your client to develop an outline of creator requirements for your program, it's important to understand how factors such as creator location, age, style, audience and more can impact your ability to work with a diverse and healthy pool of people. 

What is a creator "pool"?

When working with #paid, we have a large community of creators signed-up to our platform that we need to search through to find relevant options to utilize for a given campaign. These creators have indicated that they are interested in being considered for different programs we are running and provide us information such as their age, gender, location etc. When a client provides #paid their campaign criteria, we use this information to establish a pool of creators that could be a fit for their program. 

What does a healthy creator pool look like? 

Generally, the size of pool that you should establish depends on the total amount of creators you'd like to use on your program. Every requirement that you layer on to your selection criteria will reduce the amount of creators available so try to keep your list of "must-have's" to 3-5 items. Ultimately, you generally need to have an initial pool at least 4 to 5 times the size of the final amount of creators you're looking to contract. In other words, if you need 10 creators you should work with your client to ensure that you at least 40 creators are available to to opt-in who meet your selection criteria.

What selection criteria is most important?

The selection criteria on your program will typically include a mix of qualitative and quantitative elements. 

• Demographic constraints include age, gender and ethnicity

• Geographic constraints include Country, Territory and City 

• Audience constraints include the creators audience age, gender, location, language, interests and more

• Online presence constraints include the creators minimum amount of followers, average engagement rate, types of content they post, platforms they are active on, other brands they work with and more

• Qualitative constraints include the "feel" of their content, the style the posts in and more

• Additional constraints include exclusivity requirements, travel requirements and more

As stated, requirements around too many of the constraints above can significantly reduce the amount of creators available to participate in your program and ultimately harm the ability for your client to achieve their desired campaign results.

Creator pool examples

In the following examples, the client is looking to contract 20 creators for a campaign. The client began with the requirements below

• Females aged 20 - 23 years old

• Located in 3 specific cities across the country

• Diverse ethnicities 

• Engagement rate of at least 5%

• 80% of the creators audience is female 

• 70% of the creators audience between ages 20 - 23 years old

• 50% of the creators audience is located in Canada

• Creator is able to capture photo and video content

• Creator has at least 10,000 followers

• Creator feed is "relatable" 

• Creator is willing to provide 1 year of category exclusivity

Based on the requirements above, the available number of creators would go from 20,000 creators to a pool of 11 available options. Since we're looking to contract 20 creators, there are too many constraints as we need a pool of at least 80 people. We need to adjust some of the requirements in order to create a healthier pool, such as below. 

• Females aged 18 - 30 years old

• Located in 15 cities across the country

• Diverse ethnicities 

• Engagement rate of at least 2%

• 60% of the creators audience is female 

• 50% of the creators audience between ages 20 - 23 years old

• 35% of the creators audience is located in Canada

• Creator is able to capture photo and video content

• Creator has at least 10,000 followers

• Creator feed is flexible

• Creator is willing to provide 3 months of category exclusivity

In the adjusted example above, the creator pool increases from 11 creators to 123, more than enough for the opt-in step. 

Final thoughts

Ultimately, the client holds the keys to their success in their own hands. In the scenario where there are too many constraints, simply working with your #paid team to show the client how adjusting certain criteria can open up the available options can help to deliver a healthy pool and set you up for success!