Creator.co has a solid history of being a few steps ahead of the industry it serves. In 2018, when the company was launched, influencer marketing was still just a big brand/big reach thing. While big multinationals were falling over themselves trying to land a Kardashian or a Pew Die Pie, Creator.co (then operating under a different name) turned its attention instead to smaller businesses, showing them the power of the micro influencer. They rebranded from their old name (Shop and Shout) in 2020, finally becoming Creator.co a couple of years before everyone else started talking about the Creator Economy.
Flip the calendar ahead 5 years to today, and the company’s still at it, adding Affiliate Marketing functionality that leverages the platform’s 175k registered creators. This is something that a few other platforms are doing, but—as you’ll see in The Details—Creator.co’s doing it differently, and for the better. It’s all part of the platform’s evolution, from an influencer marketplace to a robust, end-to-end, influencer management platform.
It’s no wonder, then, that Creator.co has been on a steady growth trajectory since its inception. Its customers—from a niche company like Milkademia to a behemoth like Walmart—surely appreciate its ease of use and, of course, its effectiveness. Investors have taken notice, too, with Creator.co receiving another million plus in a third round of funding just this year. And, as influencer marketing and performance marketing start to converge, it’s worth pointing out that some of the biggest affiliate networks around—Rakuten, Impact, and Refersion, to name a few—are choosing to partner with Creator.co.
As the practice of influencer marketing has evolved, so has Creator.co, enabling it to stay relevant at every turn. It’s hard to fall behind when you’re offering solid marketing tools and revenue generating opportunities all in a single platform.
Pricing
Just as with any other SaaS platform, Creator.co offers multiple tiers of access that give you more capabilities as the price goes up. Unlike other platforms, though, the more you spend on your subscription, the less you have to actually do. That’s because the basic self-service plan gets you access to nearly all the platform’s features, and the higher levels of service get you increasing levels of assistance from the experts at Creator.co.
All of these plans require a minimum 3-month commitment and a $395 onboarding fee. A 15% discount is offered for annual billing.
- Startup, $460/mo — Creator Discovery, Content-only campaigns (gifted and paid), Giveaway/Contest campaigns, Advanced Creator Insights, Social Listening, Email Support
- Start-Up, $1795/mo — All of the above, plus an Account Manager, Campaign Strategy, Monthly health checks, Basic Recruiting, Newsletter Feature
- Trailblazer, $2695/mo — All of the above, plus creator management, 2x recruiting, bi-weekly health checks, dedicated Slack channel. This plan is essentially completely hands off for the customer, with the account manager running the show.
- Bespoke, $3495/mo — All of the above, plus: A-List talent, experiential campaign management, hyper-targeted recruiting, weekly strategy calls
In addition to these plans, there are a handful of add-ons available:
- Affiliate Marketing, $95/mo — Creator.co has partnerships with some of the biggest affiliate networks (Rakuten, Impact, Shopify, and more). Customers can manage one or more of these networks from the Creator.co dashboard, and recruit from Creator’s own network of influencers.
- Social Media Ads Management, $1495/mo — You’ll own all the content influencers make for your campaigns. Let Creator.co’s team manage the repurposing of this content into an effective paid ad strategy.
- Social Media Content Management, $1995/mo — Creator.co’s team will build you a social content strategy across all major social media channels
Note that this pricing is for brands; Creator.co also offers different plans for Agencies. Agency plans don’t differ in features, just in terms of being able to manage multiple brands and users. At this level, it’s best to discuss your needs with their sales team for an accurate price.
The Details
To get an idea of how thorough a platform Creator.co is, just log in and build a campaign. Broken down into four sections—General, Compensation, Requirements, and Deliverables—the Campaign Builder walks marketers through every conceivable variable of a campaign. You give the campaign a name, and define the social channels you want to use; Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok are the options. If you’re on the Bespoke plan, it can be anywhere you want. You can set the strategy: do you want to source a bunch of user generated content? Exchange product for a shout out? Do a giveaway? The choice here determines the rest of the setup, and the platform makes sure you don’t miss a thing regardless of what you choose. If you’re looking for UGC, for example, you can upload example pics that show exactly what you want so you don’t have to rely on descriptions.
When you’ve built the campaign out completely, you don’t just go live with it. Instead, you submit it for review, and the brief goes to the team at Creator.co. They’ll give it a once-over and make sure everything looks good. This happens even on the self-service plan, which is a great little bonus. The goal here, and Creator.co succeeds with it, is to make sure there are no surprises when the content starts going live.
When the brief goes live, it’s found on Creator.co’s Collaboration Hub, where more than 175,000 registered creators find campaigns they want to participate in. In another nod to getting-it-right, the creators are provided with search filters—they can search for brands, deliverable types, social platforms, strategies, and more—so they’re not just endlessly scrolling through brief after brief. They can find campaigns that appeal to their strengths and goals.
When creators apply to a campaign, brands are given every opportunity to vet them and ensure they’ll fit the brand vibe. One way they do this is with the “Deep Insights” reports available for any influencer. The name is not an exaggeration, though you might think it is at first. Looking at the section of your screen that says “Deep Insights,” you’ll see a handful of charts and graphs that, while useful, aren’t nearly enough to constitute a description of “deep.” But then you click that “Download” button under that, and you get a 20+ page PDF report that makes good on the promise of its name.
You’ll get all the performance metrics that you’ve come to expect, but you’ll also see it presented with greater context. Engagement rate is a good thing to know, but that engagement rate compared to the average of the greater community is even better. Knowing the various topics they cover is a good thing, but knowing which of those topics is the most important to that influencer is even better. Knowing how many followers an influencer has is a good thing, but knowing how many other people those followers are following is even better. Knowing their audience’s locations, languages, interests, and brand affinities is a good thing, but knowing that same info only about audience members who like and comment is even better.
You get the idea.
Actually, you don’t, because there’s even more. You’ll find out which of their followers are notable for their own level of influence. Ditto for the people who’ve engaged with their content. Each influencer report also contains a list of looklike influencers who hit all the same marks that you’re looking for. It’s an incredible amount of data and analysis, made even more notable by the fact that it’s on a platform built for small and medium sized businesses.
Another bonus of all this influencer data is that, with Creator.co’s new Affiliate Marketing features, you can run some really supercharged performance marketing campaigns. Historically, these campaigns are created by sending a brief out to massive affiliate networks. Since you’re only paying on performance, you could let just anyone sign up. And you still can, using any of the affiliate platforms that Creator.co partnered with. But you can also bring this campaigns into your Creator.co dashboard, even manage multiple campaigns across different networks there. And then you can start inviting influencers whose backgrounds and audiences are relevant. You don’t get this many search options with any other affiliate marketing platform:
Back to influencer campaigns: when it comes time to click on the “Activate” or “Decline” buttons, you will be plenty equipped to make an informed decision as to which one. You will have an easy time watching everything happen as it goes live, as well. The campaign dashboards are very cleanly laid out, easy to navigate between pending opt-ins, campaign performance metrics, and the collection of content that’s already been posted. The campaign reporting is excellent from a performance perspective, giving the details on engagement you’d expect, but also punctuating them each with an ROI. For example, those 2k likes calculate to an ROI of $100, the 30 comments are worth $5, and so on. Creator.co also added more audience insights to the campaign reporting, a very good thing. Now that you can match these ROIs with audience demographics, you get a keen understanding of the audiences you should be targeting in the future.
Conclusion
Creator.co isn’t the first influencer marketplace to serve brands. It isn’t the first platform to offer deep data analysis of the influencers you find. And it isn’t the first to launch with affordable subscription prices aimed at serving the SME sector.
It is the first platform to do all three of those things simultaneously, and they’ve done quite well at it. There’s a reason why a software tool built for smaller businesses on a budget is used by a multibillion dollar company like Walmart. Having reviewed this platform a few years ago, it’s easier to appreciate just how much they’ve grown the platform. It was very impressive then, so it’s kind of a big deal that we’re impressed all over again. They’ve improved nearly every aspect of the platform that was there the last time we saw it, and they added great new features that take Creator.co several steps beyond where they were. What will they do next?
Creator.co
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