to help you get in on the action!
Welcome back! If you haven’t read the first part of this blog, What is the Creator Economy? we suggest you take a look at that before carrying so you are familiar with some of the concepts we’ll be covering in this blog. If you’ve already gone through it, you’re already a step closer to being a creator economy mogul!
Now that you’re familiar with what the content economy is, and why it’s so important to your digital marketing strategy, we’d like to introduce you to some of our favorite tools and upcoming trends in the industry! Don’t forget to bookmark this guide to come back to later!
Creator economy tools we love
So, now we know some ways to establish our brands in the creator economy as it grows and why that might be beneficial. We can also see how platform ad integrations like the Facebook Ads manager could help make that process even more lucrative. But what other tools exist to boost the sector? Well, loads! Here are some of our favorites:
MONETIZATION & MEMBERSHIP: PATREON
If your brand’s offerings involve services like coaching or education, or if you’re an entertainer or creative, an effective way to monetize that process would be through a subscription service like Patreon. With Patreon, subscribers can pay a certain amount monthly to unlock levels of your content in subscription tiers. This platform also has direct messaging functionality, encouraging your paying customers to engage with you further, and become even more loyal to your brand. Patreon encourages tipping, too, which is always a bonus!
The platform currently boasts over 6 million active patrons who regularly support around 210 thousand individual creators. In 2021, Patreon generated more than $2 billion for creators and appears to be growing exponentially in popularity, alongside platforms like OnlyFans. The most lucrative categories on Patreon in 2021 were videos, podcasts, games, and music.
The platform takes between 5% and 12% of the revenue creators accumulate, depending on their chosen plan, and adds a payment processing fee to their payout invoices.
SOCIAL SCHEDULING & DISTRIBUTION: AGORAPULSE
The creator economy hinges on the regular, frequent, and consistent content output from the creators involved. However, this constant cycle of publishing and creating can become incredibly difficult to maintain for many. Tools like Agorapulse can assist with running creator profiles’ scheduling, publishing, and community management.
Agorapulse allows for the easy scheduling and publishing of batched content so that creativity can come before logistics in your day-to-day. Their chronological community management software makes it easy to never miss a comment or DM and keep your followers feeling seen and heard. The platform also offers detailed reports on content performance and audience trends so that you can analyze your strategy and make any changes needed to reach your goals. Another exciting feature that benefits content creators is the Agorapulse “listening” function, which scours social media for search terms you’ve defined and presents you with select examples of their mentions. This can help you predict the collective interests and enthusiasms of your audience or industry and use those to optimize your content for maximum impact. Depending on the plan you choose, you can attach multiple social profiles across a myriad of platforms to this single, central user interface and use it to manage all of your brand’s interactions from one place.
COMMERCE & SHOPPING: WOOCOMMERCE
Though a few social and creator platforms have their own integrated shopping mechanisms, it’s essential, as a creator, to have your own independent storefront. Not only is this imperative because of the occasionally arbitrary banning that happens on platforms (I once got banned from Facebook for 30 days for jokingly calling somebody “my potato,”) but it’s beneficial to your branding. Your storefront can be your established domain with no competition in which your audience can engage in your offerings and learn more about your brand.
WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress that’s easy to use and customize to your offerings. It works for services, digital products, and physical products alike and integrates with countless other plugins to give you precisely the utility your brand requires. The initial plugin is completely free and makes for easily scalable growth as your brand expands. Alongside ease-of-use and customizability, we’ve found that WooCommerce customer service is incredibly responsive, which means that your primary means of making money won’t be down for days at a time without support responses. The plugin integrates seamlessly with accounting software like QuickBooks and syncing software like MyWorks, so you can easily automate your conversion process and spend your time creating great offerings and content.
Creator economy trends for 2022
Like any sector, the creator economy moves according to trends, changes, seasons, and new ideas. This is even more true for this digital industry because of the massive amount of information being generated and consumed daily in the digital sphere. According to Maren Thomas Bannon, the resident Venture Capital specialist at Forbes, the following trends are likely to appear on the scene in 2022, so jump on them ahead of time and watch your growth soar:
1. THE PANDEMIC HAS CAUSED A BOOM IN NEW CREATORS & COMPANIES
Pre-pandemic, entrepreneurship in the USA was on the decline. As of Q3 in 2021, however, more than 1.4 million new businesses were being filed in the space of three months. The rise of remote work and crypto-based businesses like NFTs have created a whole new work-from-home type of entrepreneur that will likely be taking the creator economy space by storm over the next year.
2. THE NFT TRADE IS GOING TO GROW BY 1000%
NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) are a new crypto technology that allows for coding true digital ownership into bits of data as logged on the blockchain. If you didn’t understand any of that, don’t worry, we didn’t get it at first either. Take a look at this video to better understand what this trend means, and you might even think of a terrific way to integrate this technology into your business!
3. SOCIAL FEEDS BASED ON CRYPTO TRADING WILL BOOM
Crypto is becoming the closest thing we’ve got to a universal, decentralized currency. This means significant strides for non-nationalized digital trading and gives us a universal creator experience that people worldwide can share. Expect an upswing in public crypto trading and discussion, and be ready for way more “what IS Bitcoin?” chats on your feed.
4. GEN Z CREATORS WILL CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT SMALL BUSINESS
Gen Z’s have already changed the way the global market sees social justice, but they might change how we look at business structure. They espouse much more of a focus on collaborative work, creativity, and decentralized teams. As Gen Z’s use new methods of workplace hierarchy and more egalitarian divisions of revenue, the typical pyramidal business structure we’ve come to expect as the norm may dissipate in the wake of the youth’s take on the creator economy.
5. ECOMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE WILL CONTINUE TO EXPAND
Gone are the days in which a conversion consisted of “pay a certain amount, receive a certain thing.” New remuneration models are arising, such as donation systems, subscriptions, crypto-investments, trade agreements, and creative exchange structures. As our ideas of equivalent exchange for goods and services expand, so must the capacity of our eCommerce infrastructure to incorporate this fluid creator economy method of business.
The creator economy is a rapidly expanding, endlessly fascinating, and relentlessly evolving industry to examine. It’s also the sector where digital marketing has the most potential for exponential growth and return on investment. In this blog, we covered the creator economy, how to use it for your brand, which tools could help you do that, and which trends to focus on in 2022.
Happy marketing, creator!
