Learn from the Top 10% Fastest Growing Creators with What Are the Best Doing, Createur's data-backed series that puts numbers behind success!
📖 Top 10% Fastest Growing Creators: Creators that underwent the largest growth in the past 12 months in terms of follower count increase, earned media value (EMV) progress, engagement growth, and other success metrics. Not to be confused with the largest creators in terms of overall follower count.
WABD is back with NY-based fashion influencer, @byaimeekelly. An account as colorful as her personality! We’ve analyzed Aimee’s Instagram data and came up with actionable tips and best practices to help you boost your career as a creator.
Key Figures 🔑
99k followers on Instagram
18.1k followers on Tik Tok
366 monthly Post Frequency on Instagram
5.5% Engagement Rate on Instagram
Let’s dive into her winning Instagram strategy!
Instagram branded posts
📖 Branded posts include stories and any posts that tagged or mentioned one or more brands, whether sponsored or not.
Post frequency - The power of quantity
All posts
📊 The data: In the past 12 months Aimee published a total of 4.400 posts and stories on Instagram. That’s a monthly average Post Frequency of 366 posts, including stories.
Branded posts
📊 Out of these 4k posts, 611 of them were branded (mentioning a brand). That’s an average Post Frequency of 51 branded posts per month. Which means that, even though Aimee produces a large volume of branded posts, only 14% of her content mentions a brand. The rest is brand-free.
💎 Aimee has the space and content type (fashion reels and posts) to tag lots of brands, but decided otherwise. Her brand tagging is not as thorough and systematic as Sophie Hannah Richardson for instance. Aimee's audience is therefore not used to being exposed to consumer goods when on her profile.
📊 Out of these 4k posts, 47 are sponsored posts. That’s an average of 4 paid posts per month.
💎 Once again, Aimee clearly has the volume, level and capacity to do more sponsored posts. Instead she stays on the organic lane, with a minimal amount of paid collaborations.
🔎 What do brands think about Post Frequency?
Here’s a word on how important Post Frequency is for brands, and why you should consider quantity in your strategy. Coming to us from Ashton Wall who worked at ColourPop as Head of Marketing for two years, you can read the full article here.
“To increase your chances of getting noticed by brands and growing your relationship with them, focus on post potency (how engaged your audience is with your content about that specific brand) and post frequency (how often do you talk about the brand and products). Having high potency and frequency speak louder than follower count.”
-- Ashton Wall, ColourPop
Engagement Rate - The art of perfecting a niche
📊 Aimee’s Instagram Engagement Rate (ER) is 5.5%. Here are her Top Five Instagram branded posts over the past 12 months:
- This monochromatic green reel went viral with a 51% ER with nearly 36k likes.
- This monochromatic yellow reel got a 27% ER and nearly 17k likes.
- This monochromatic blue reel got a 25% ER and over 16k likes.
- This monochromatic pink reel got a 22.8% ER and 14.4k likes.
- This colorful shoe reel got a 22.4% ER with 13.4k likes.
💎 The list goes on with more chromatic looks posted throughout the year. This content never gets boring, quite the opposite. Aimee does 30-day monochromatic challenges that are absolute hits on Instagram. Her colorful reels perform really well and went viral many times.
Even though Aimee's top posts are almost integrally monochromatic, that’s not the only content she produces. She publishes a lot of street styles, reels where she styles different pieces, tries out color combos, etc. It’s safe to say that monochromatic reels are the niche where she performs the most.
Paid Collaborations - Let’s talk $$$
📊 As mentioned above, Aimee Kelly published 47 paid posts in the past 12 months. She worked with 14 brands, her biggest collaborations being with Primark and Target. She also worked with JCPenney, Burtsbees, American Eagle, and others. The average Engagement Rate on her sponsored posts is 1.5%.
💎 On average, Aimee collaborates with one brand per month, so she’s not a serial collaborator. The engagement on her sponsored posts is much lower than her average rate. But let’s not forget that Aimee is one of the Top 10% Fastest Growing creators, in terms of EMV. So she knows how to talk about brands and how to drive value for them. She’s also an expert at creating smooth, impactful, engaging branded content. All her top posts are branded, which shows that branded posts get high engagement and perform well with her audience and beyond.
So why do Aimee's sponsored posts perform below her usual content?
The answer might be that so far, Aimee hasn’t worked with brands that are a right fit for her one-of-a-kind content. She is a crafty, unique creator, but she partnered with generic, big chains with blander brand identities, such as Target and Primark. As a consequence, her sponsored posts don’t sit as smoothly as the rest of her content in her overall style.
As a creator, it’s hard to find willing-to-pay partners, it’s harder to make a brand fit in naturally with your content. Even more so if there is a gap between your universe and the brand’s identity. Visually, Aimee did a great job incorporating her paid collaborators within her niche. The love story behind the collaboration is less palpable, which can explain the lower engagement.
🔎 What do brands think about engagement on sponsored posts?
Supergoop!’s Director of Marketing, Isabelle Conner told us about the importance of your audience being excited about your collaborations. Read the full interview here.
“We're always looking for a mutual affinity. It’s really important. Creators are building out their audience, right? Paid partnerships should always be the priority from your business point of view. But make sure that your audience is used to hearing you talk about consumer goods across the board and getting product recommendations that are unpaid and organic. So that once you approach your audience with a paid promotion, they’re ready for it, and they’re excited. Our favorite partnerships are when we look at the comments and the creator’s audience is like “you go bestie”, “congrats on the partnership!” We love to see when a creator’s audience is really excited for them about the collaboration.”
-- Isabelle Conner, Supergoop!
Following this "love story" argument, Primark and Target are not a perfect match for a creator like Aimee, with such a vibrant fiber. At her level and seeing the quality of her work, she can be way pickier in her choices and collaborate with brands that are as unique and authentic as her. This would allow her to tell a more heartfelt story about the products she features, generating content with higher engagement, and in turn, drive more paid collaborations and long-term deals.
Aimee’s the perfect practical example for the "love story with the brand" strategy:
- She’s a micro-influencer (under 100k on Instagram).
- She has a colorful, unique style and a bubbly personality.
- She doesn’t use a lot of makeup but shops a lot of accessories and clothes.
❤️ Amazing matches for her could be Paloma Wool, Hippie Shake, Mirae, Marcia, and Lamoda - all chic and independent brands in her tier with a gorgeous, colorful identity.
❤️ In the bigger tier, Converse, Crocs, JPWei, and Jacquemus would definitely match her universe. We imagine Aimee could talk about that kind of brand in an authentic, organic way.
Our final word is, be like Aimee: find your niche, master it, do what you love, and post consistently. In addition, really try to target brands that make the most sense with your value, your style, and your niche. This is when the Createur app comes in handy for brand search. We’re currently working on adding more filters to help you find perfect matches!
Actively approaching brands you genuinely love and that match your status and values is such a rewarding strategy. We’re aware of the amount of time and research that go into this perfect-brand-search process. That’s the passion behind Createur!
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