For some they may sound like buzzwords, for professional and experienced marketeers they are crucial concepts: co-creation and influencer marketing. Two marketing-techniques that are modern, relevant and indispensable for a good marketing-strategy. This blogpost we’ll check out both of the concepts individually before seeing what they could do together.
Co-creation
Take a guess: co-creation is focused on creating something together. In most of the cases it means that brands or companies seek help in innovating or creating products from the customers. Well-known examples are when Vitamin Water asked their loyal fans for suggestions on new flavors they should develop. Moreover, in the Netherlands we all know the Lays Patatje Joppie Superchips. Consumers aren’t that crazy after all!
Companies use co-creation, but not enough by far. Only 3% of companies has experience in developing or improving products with the help of their consumers. Collaborations are mostly set up small and in a pilot-case, only if these are successful they are developed into structural changes in the company’s policy. From the 3% of companies with experience, only 8% invites consumers to launching-events of a new product. Pretty strange, if you see that a) a lot of corporate problems could be fixed through collaboration with consumers and b) products that are born from co-creation receive higher sales figures than products that have been developed by the brand alone. Strange? I agree – hold on to that thought.
Influencer marketing
You know, the specialization of the Join platform and the absolute #1 on the to-do lists of all marketeers next year: collaborations with influencers. Influencers really reach your consumers, make beautiful content for your brand and bring it to life. Apart from these reasons, influencer marketing also scores in the green digits: the ROI of influencer marketing is way higher than that of a traditional digital advertising-campaign. Co-creation seems to work for improving products and sales, and influencer marketing seems to work for making content and reaching an audience. Start to feel where I am going?
Co-creation with influencers
That’s all for co-creation and influencer marketing. Now let’s fast forward to the point where it starts to make sense: the definition of co-creation according to the co-creation awards, the distinctive (and only) award show for benchmarking co-creation. In their definition of co-creation, they diffuse between innovation and marketing.
Innovation: involvement of customers or other external stakeholders in order to innovate in products, services or processes.
Marketing & communications: involvement of customers or other stakeholders to increase brand awareness and create relevant campaigns.
Those “other stakeholders” are what it’s all about. Swap these words for “influencers” and you’ll see what I mean. Co-creation with influencers. We kindly present three ways you can start working with co-creating influencers.
- “The Classic”
Simply said an influencer marketing-campaign. With Join you can easily find and brief the right influencers for a campaign. The influencer makes content about your product and they share this through their social channels. People feel connected with your brand and influencer, and sales will improve. Later on you might use the content for promotional purposes – another good application. A relatively young, but beautiful classic.
- Innovation
Influencers know what your target audience wants and needs because they are and reach your target audience. For that reason you can easily trust an influencer with the discussion on product innovations. What does the influencer like about the product, what would they change and hey – say you want to launch a new product, what should it be? By including influencers in the development of your products you have an inside scoop and avoid making mistakes.
- A “real” collab
A collab is true buzzword for influencers and means nothing more than a collaboration. What if you try and take this collab to the next level by really collaborating? Include an influencer in the development of your product, let that fashion-blogger make decisions in the design-process and have her endorse your product. Be crazy and ask that big foodblogger to co-create the single best pancake-recipe in the world! You will find that your products are innovative and high-quality and that the products do their own promotional work.
That’s how you can combine co-creation and influencer marketing to become the cherry-on-top of your marketing strategy. Influencer marketing is not just a trend and the possibilities of influencer marketing (like this one) are endless. Are you interested in what our platform can mean for your business? Don’t hesitate and contact us for a demo.
