Technology equalizes just about everything, including personal entertainment, fitness, and business. The savviest among us combine common technologies, like phone cameras and YouTube, with creative skills, like painting and drawing, writing, yoga, meditation, and even carpentry. The marriage of technology to personal skills has allowed these creators to earn money from their efforts and create something all their own: the creator economy.
What is the Creator Economy?
If you have a favorite YouTube channel or TikTok influencer, then you understand the creator economy. The creators that drive the creator economy generally arise from the public. They don’t have the financial backing nor the collective creative talent of Hollywood.
However, they have something more valuable: knowledge of what the public wants. These creators produce content based on their own skills and the interests of the public. They then make money from said content.
What this might look like is an artist like Ten Hundred creating a listicle video on the top-tier art supplies.
In this case, the “best of” list of art supplies answers the question that many novice artists have about which art supplies are the best to use.
Artist-creators like Ten Hundred know what the public wants because they interact with them regularly and then create content around those interactions.
Initiatives Businesses Should Take
According to Forbes, modern marketing professionals can take a page from this playbook. What the common creator brings to the table is a knowledge of the public, honed from years of watching them and interacting with them on social media.
Due to these interactions, creators understand the sensibilities of the niche markets that support the creator economy. For savvy marketers, this means less “top-down” marketing. Top-down marketing, in this case, arises when a business makes a product or service and then tries to find a public that supports that product or service.
However, creators like Ten Hundred have a pretty good idea of what the public likes because they deal with the public directly. As a result, they create successful content, and it’s successful because there is already a market for it.
This is a valuable lesson for big-time marketing professionals. Marketers should use social media to find out what kinds of problems the public has and then create products and services geared toward solving those problems.
How Does the Creator Economy Affect Modern Marketing?
The creator economy is closely tied to content and influencer marketing. Business owners who actively create content that solves consumer problems build brand loyalty with their customers.
As we’ve said, this comes from listening to the public. The marketers who really get this right even use content their customers and employees create. One recent, very successful example of customer participation comes from the movie franchise The Hunger Games.
Although this film series didn’t fall into the small-time indie film category, it also didn’t have the budget that many film series of the same size have. To compensate, the film’s marketing department created a fan promotion campaign.
For example, by creating special hashtags on Twitter, the franchise was often responsible for Twitter trends as millions of fans shared the day’s hashtag. Millions of fans already existed – Lionsgate Entertainment just aligned with an interest that was already there. As a result, their movies got an enormous amount of free publicity, and almost all of it was created by fans.
The Creator Economy Takeaway
But modern marketers don’t even have to have their own millions of fans to use this technique. By tapping into the customer- and employee-created content from within their own ranks, they stretch not only their marketing dollars, but their circle of influence, too.
One single company may have thousands of employees and customers who can become brand ambassadors. Tapping into this network alleviates the need for a company’s marketing department to create all of its own content for its content marketing. Some of its best content can come from its public and probably have better effects to boot.