In LTK’s recent Most Loved products of the year awards, we evaluated millions of Creator-linked products to identify top-performing products based on consumer engagement, impressions, clicked links, items sold, and total sales. Leveraging these success stories, we’ve compiled tips for creating closer relationships with Creators and shoppers.
Take a look at what we learned — we hope the tips can help you in building stronger relationships with Creators and your customers as well!
Before we get into the strategies to which we attribute our clients’ success, let’s go over the overall growth in the three sides of our marketplace in 2022:
Our New Creator count grew by tens of thousands every quarter. Among all of our Creators, post volume across all channels grew double digits. Video dominated as the main form of product marketing and more than doubled.
Monthly LTK shoppers grew double digits year-over-year and month-over-month.
LTK campaign spend grew in the double digits. This was driven by both the increase in the number of brands investing and an increase in spend per brand investing.
What were some of the trends that we think Creators and brands can take advantage of in the new year to see similar results? Let’s dive in!
As social media moves more and more toward favoring video, brands need to consider creating video-first marketing strategies.
We took this approach in 2022 and found a number of favorable results:
Why is this information valuable? Two important reasons:
Benchmarking takes out the guesswork by providing you with real data to understand your strengths and weaknesses. By implementing a benchmarking process, you can compare success with companies in your industry and better understand common problems.
For the annual LTK Most Loved awards, we evaluated millions of Creator-linked products using the LTK Influencer Benchmark Tool to determine the top-performing products based on:
By evaluating the data from these metrics, we were able to identify the most loved products from major brand names, including Express, Walmart, Stanley, Ulta, and Abercrombie & Fitch.
According to our sales trends, consumers are most likely to purchase food, beauty, fashion, and home products based on Creator recommendations. The top 10 categories for general population, millennials, and Gen Z are:
Now more than ever, shoppers are using Creators to search for new products. LTK serves as a one-stop destination and trusted resource for these needs. Below are some of the new features in the LTK platform that are helping to drive conversions:
This last point is an obvious one, but you’d be surprised by how many businesses in this industry treat buyer behaviors with a “set it and forget” mentality. In reality, shopper behaviors are changing all the time. In 2022, we found that:
When it comes to mobile shopping:
When it comes to shopping on social media:
Additionally, millennials and Gen Zers purchase through Creators 38 percent more than the general population.
Our How to Become Most Loved by Creators & Shoppers webinar revealed a number of insights into how LTK has grown and where we have yet to grow.
When it comes down to it, building better relationships with Creators and shoppers is possible with the following best practices:
Want to dive deeper into the data-backed ways you can build better relationships?
Ready to discuss your Creator marketing strategy? Contact us today to get started!