How Brands Choose Which Beauty Creators to Work With

Creators have become trusted sources for beauty recommendations, and brands increasingly need to work with creators to drive buzzy product launches and reviews.

Finding the right creator starts with clarifying what a brand is trying to achieve, Natalie Silverstein, Collectively’s chief innovation officer, told ADWEEK. That means gauging the number of people a brand wants to reach and determining a budget. Using those two metrics, an influencer-marketing agency can estimate how many views it could get from partnering with different types of creators.

“Each creator-marketing agency has their own back-end formulas of expected view rate based on the followers of a creator,” said Silverstein. 

To reach that estimate, an agency will look at a creator’s followers and increasingly, the consistency of their views.

“If they’re consistently getting attention, it’s because of all the signals that the algorithm is getting,” said Silverstein. Those signals include the number of times an individual watches the video and whether they share or save it, Silverstein said.

Social views are becoming harder to predict

However, the TikTok and Instagram Reels algorithms have become more unruly over the years, making it increasingly challenging for marketers to predict the performance of a post, Keith Bendes, Linqia’s chief strategy, officer told ADWEEK. Algorithms are now based on user interests rather than follower graphs.

“With data analytics two to four years ago, we could predict reach pretty well,” said Bendes. “Now TikTok and Instagram Reels have interest algorithms and reach has nothing to do with following graphs anymore.”

With algorithms losing relevance, Bendes advised brands to work with multiplatform creators to increase reach.

On the qualitative side, brands can measure a creator’s influence by looking at which creators are trendsetters and are referenced by other creators, said Silverstein. 

“In the beauty space, there are some influential makeup artists who are providing a lot of techniques that then other creators reference,” said Silverstein. 

Brands and marketing agencies also consider the vibe of the creator and whether that aligns with the brand and campaign. But in recent years, Silverstein noticed that brands have started to loosen up on aligning perfectly with a creator. Now, brands focus more on how the creator connects with the people that the brand is trying to reach. 

“Maybe they aren’t like the brand, but they are super effective communicators to this group of customers that we just started to speak to.”