Creator marketing gets messy. There’s a lot of moving parts, and not a lot of intuitive ways of tracking them all. Discovery happens in one tool, outreach in another, contracts somewhere in an email thread, and reporting in a spreadsheet that three people have edited and nobody fully trusts. Agencies get briefed on different parts of the same campaign and end up pulling in different directions. At best this creates unnecessary stress and excessive communication, but at worst creators and plans start to fall through the cracks between activations.
So we’ve been working on something to streamline the whole process: Creator Communities. Creator Communities are a new way of handling the entire creator marketing process in one place, from discovery and onboarding through to activation and reporting. It’s designed to close the creator marketing loop and give brands a single, reliable home for every stage of the process. In this article, we’ll walk through how Creator Communities works, what it does for your team, and give you a sneak peek at where we’ll be taking this next.
You’re hooked already? Just want to jump straight into the nitty gritty with one of our sales team? Chat with them right now!
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet:
- Creator Communities covers the entire creator marketing lifecycle from discovery and onboarding to activation and reporting
- This feature draws on over a decade of creator data from around the world and real-life creator marketing activations
- With unbiased recommendations, Creator Communities can find the correct match-up for your purposes from mega-popular creators to niche creators with highly engaged audiences
The Full Creator Marketing Process with Creator Communities
As mentioned before, Creator Communities is Stream Hatchet’s new end-to-end solution for the entire creator marketing lifecycle: Finding the right creators for your brand, getting them onboarded, running campaigns, and reporting on how everything went. All in one place, without the usual chaos of juggling agencies, spreadsheets, and seventeen browser tabs.
Here’s how it works step-by-step:
Step 1: Discovery
Every creator marketing campaign starts with figuring out who you want to work with. Whether it’s searching through communities that suit your brand or uncovering creators you’d never heard of that are actually a perfect fit, you need a deep repository of potential candidates to look through.
Creator discovery has always been our bread and butter. Creator Communities gives brands and publishers access to Stream Hatchet’s full database of 55M+ creators across 200M+ unique social profiles and 32 platforms, filterable by audience size, content category, platform, region, and more. Not sure where to start? Smart Search lets you describe what you’re looking for in plain language and does the heavy lifting from there.
Step 2: Consideration
Of course all that creator data can be overwhelming if you don’t have a helpful way of sifting through the results and picking out the wheat from the chaff.
The Consideration stage is where you can group creators, compare them side-by-side, and track their performance over time. Rather than making big decisions based on a single good month, you’re building a proper picture: How has this creator performed historically, how do they stack up against peers with similarly sized audiences or creators playing similar games, and do they have the cultural relevance your campaign needs?
Step 3: Shortlisting with My Creators
You can save your favourite creators in the My Creators section of the app: Think of it as a living roster of creators your brand has worked with or has an eye on for future campaigns.
Think of it like this: Maybe you’re a brand that has a product launch coming up soon. You can go to your My Creators shortlist that you’ve (perhaps) previously curated and check through to see which creators would be appropriate for this newest product. Not all of them are active on a current campaign, but they’re all tracked, organised, and ready to be pulled in when the time comes. That means no more losing a great creator to the void between activations.
Step 4: Onboarding
Once you know who you want to work with, the entire outreach and onboarding process happens within the Stream Hatchet platform: Initial contact, negotiation, signing, and campaign induction.
Bulk messaging lets you reach groups of creators simultaneously, keeping things consistent without the headache of managing separate threads across five different apps. You can connect up your Gmail to the app so that you’re messaging via your regular Gmail address, but with the convenience of doing it right next to your My Creators page.
Step 5: Execution
When it’s time to go live, your creator community is like a standing army ready to go to battle for your brand. You can launch campaigns directly from the platform via the same bulk messaging tool described earlier to reach out to your most suitable creators and let them know what’s up.
Even better, you can actually manage certain aspects of your campaigns from within the platform. Say you want to distribute beta keys for your soon-to-be-released game or promo codes for your latest product: You can now do that via the Codes Management tool. It lets you generate and assign codes to specific creators and track when each one gets used. And, of course, all of that code data sits alongside your other campaign data.
Step 6: Reporting
Speaking of which: Reporting on your campaign performance can also be viewed within the app. Once your campaign wraps, Creator Communities pulls together performance data and insights that make sense of the numbers. Optionally, you can also set up custom dashboards that let you pick your priority metrics and arrange it in a way that makes the most sense to you.
When it’s time to share results with stakeholders who aren’t on the platform, everything exports into a clean, readable summary report with no manual formatting required.
An Extension of Your Team: How Creator Communities Enhances Your Creator Marketing
Creator Communities exist to help destress your life, provide the most relevant creators, and go beyond to actively engage with your marketing lifecycle. So we wanted to cover a few key areas in which Creator Communities improves upon previous creator marketing workflows:
One Platform Means One Tool, One Agency, One Space for Creator Marketing
Imagine the sheer bliss of logging in to a single hub for all your creator marketing needs. You no longer need a different tool, agency, or workflow for every stage of the creator marketing process. Discovery, shortlisting, onboarding, activation, reporting, it all lives in the same place. No more briefing multiple agencies on the same vision and hoping they stay aligned. No more syncing data between apps or hunting for the right version of a spreadsheet. And…
No more dropping the ball between activations because the handoff between tools got messy. Creator marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts, and miscommunication is one of the most common ways things go sideways. Creator Communities keeps everything centrally visible: Your full creator roster, their current status, their performance data, and your campaign progress, all accessible to everyone who needs to see them. Plus, as mentioned before, exportable reports make it easy to loop in stakeholders who aren’t on the platform.
Creator Communities is Backed By Stream Hatchet’s Global, Extensive Creator Data
Stream Hatchet has been tracking the live streaming and gaming ecosystem for over ten years, and all of that data feeds directly into Creator Communities. With 55M+ creators across 200M+ unique social profiles and 32 platforms, this scope is unmatched. Even for specific use cases, this depth and breadth of data is invaluable. Say you’re evaluating a creator: You’re not just seeing their last few months of performance, you’re seeing a long-term track record that gives a much more accurate read on their reliability, audience trends, and cultural staying power.
Plus our data goes global. A lot of creator marketing platforms skew heavily toward Western markets. Data on the Stream Hatchet platform covers creators and audiences worldwide, which is crucial if your game or brand has global ambitions. Whether you’re trying to reach audiences in Latin America, Southeast Asia, MENA or anywhere else in this big beautiful world of ours, the Creator Communities has the coverage to find creators who speak directly to those communities.
Surface Recommendations Built Upon Real Activation Experience
Embedded within Creator Communities is an awareness of the outcomes of real-life creator marketing activations. Through Stream Hatchet’s position within the GameSquare ecosystem, we draw on the first-hand expertise of our sister agencies like Click and Zoned (two companies with deep roots in creator marketing activations). The recommendations and benchmarks you see are informed by people who have actually run these campaigns and know what good performance looks like in practice. That includes activations for brands like Capcom, Hyper X, and Sony Cameras among many others.
These are just a few of the major benefits that the Creator Communities feature has to offer. But there’s also…
- Unbiased Creator Recommendations: Unlike agencies that have certain platforms or creators on their books, we operate without pre-arranged partnerships. Our data is totally unbiased and only surfaces the most relevant creators to your needs
- Expertise in Live Streaming: Beyond socials data, we are also deeply ingrained in the live-streaming space. Looking for expert insights into Twitch, YouTube Gaming, or Kick streamers? We can shepherd you through it (particularly useful for gaming activations!)
- Access to Niche Creators: Micro- and nano-influencers have some of the most devoted fans and are eager to find sponsorships. Thanks to the depths our data, we can even locate these emerging creators and put you in touch with niches that suit your brand
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Creator Communities closes the creator marketing loop, but that’s not all it does: It also sets up a business intelligence layer that acts as a genuine strategic partner to brands. The future of creator discovery involves learning from every campaign, every creator collaboration, and every performance report. The goal is a platform that moves from passive discovery to active intelligence, one that continuously surfaces smarter recommendations the more you use it.
With the most accurate data on creators and connection to modern creator marketing activations, Stream Hatchet has the foundation to create this active intelligence engine – a genuine participant in your marketing team. To start that journey, brands and publishers need to start centralizing their creator marketing onto a single platform. If you’re interested in learning how Creator Communities help you to connect with creators, chat with our Sales Team today:
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