ColourPop's Advice to Creators, with Ashton Wall

Createur hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Ashton Wall, former Head of Marketing at ColourPop. In a direct conversation with creators, Ashton answered questions about winning strategies to build relationships with brands. 

We pulled some highlights from the conversation.

• According to Ashton, a brand is not what you tell people it is. It’s what community shows you what it means to them.
• The next 10 years are going to be the golden age for creators.
• Some of the biggest legacy beauty brands are just now realizing the importance of UGC. This means exciting upcoming opportunities for creators.
• Nurture your audience above all else. Engage with them, thank them for following you, and reply to their comments. That is what’s going to sustain longevity.
• Stay super true to yourself. Don’t bend and try to be what you think the brand needs you to be.
• To go from the PR list to paid collaborations, show love and reciprocity to the brand in the gifting phase to take the relationship further.
• Ashton summed up brand demands in three trends: nowadays brands are looking for vertical video content, TikTok creators, and vulnerable storytelling.
  
  

Liked what you read? Here’s the full conversation for more gems and insights on how to approach brands.

The next ten years are going to be the golden age of creators.

Why do you think creators are so important to brands today? What roles do they play in the success of brands you worked with until today?
A brand is not what you tell people it is. It’s what community shows you what it means to them. I don’t believe in an internal glossy brand book. I believe in getting your product in the hand of creatives and creators, and seeing what comes up.

Glossier and ColourPop were launched the same year and month. Glossier has a very detailed point of view on their brand and what meets their aesthetic. And you can see that on their feed. And that’s done very well for them.

For ColourPop, we had the vision of “what does ColourPop mean to the creators?” We spell ColourPop with a “u” even though we were born in LA, because we wanted to see the “you“ in color. Fast forward from 2014 to 2022, ColourPop has 10.1M followers on Instagram and Glossier has 2.6M. That’s 100% thanks to the community and letting the community show us what the products mean to them, and highlighting it and really giving them the reciprocity.

I care about what the community thinks, not about what a couple of people at a conference table in a glass room at a brand think.

Do you find that a challenging message to brands today?
Yes. And I think things are going to shift. The next 10 years are going to be the golden age for creators. I am so excited.

I talked to a lot of old-school beauty brands, some of them have been around since the 1900s or for 50 years. Some of them are just now realizing the importance of UGC. They’re understanding that a glossy photoshoot is not necessarily what people want to see on social, they want to see real creators. So I’m thinking, if the big legacy brands are getting that now, it’s going to be a really fun next couple of years.

Stay super true to yourself. Don’t bend and try to be what you think
the brand needs you to be.

What advice would you give to creators to take full advantage of what’s to come?
Stay super true to yourself. Don’t bend and try to be what you think the brand needs you to be. Be what comes naturally to you in terms of where you place your content. For example, if you feel a lot of pressure to go on TikTok but you’re a YouTuber through and through, stay true to that.

Nurture your audience above all else. That is the number one thing, that is what’s going to sustain longevity. Are you in there engaging with every single comment? Are you DMing every single person that’s following and genuinely thanking them for the follow? That is going to separate people who are here for a good time vs a long time. Nurture that community with everything you have.

From a brand standpoint, what sets a creator apart? How can creators catch the attention of brands they love?
So for me, when I'm in-house, I'm looking for a couple of things. In like earned media terms and in-house brands, we talk about post potency and post frequency.

Post potency means how potent is your content? What's the reach? What's the engagement like? And then post frequency is how often are you posting?

I would much rather work with a creator who is consistently feeding their content funnel, whatever platform it is, and engaging with their audience and has a much smaller following than work with someone that has a couple of million followers but is precious about their feed and their real estate that we get a branded post once every three to six months.

Ten out of ten times, I would rather work with someone with 20,000 followers on TikTok that is talking about us all the time, than someone with 5 million followers on TikTok who talks about us once a year.

Another thing is that I only want to work with creators that genuinely loved the product. You can really tell when someone's forcing it or when someone is like hitting pan and they're on their third concealer. I really want to reward those people.

We would monitor EMV very closely. And when I saw people consistently talking about ColourPop in a really genuine way, I would be like, I have to reach out to this person. I have to wrap my arms around them and give them an affiliate code whatever made sense.

Let's talk about the process. What's the best way to get in touch with the brand that you want to work with?
Definitely through DM on Instagram. We, like most brands, are monitoring that very closely and have multiple teams in there. The other thing is good old-fashioned tagging. Put up some great content and tag the brand. I am searching those tagged photos, like nobody's business. I am searching brand keywords on TikTok and YouTube, like no one's business, and sharing the content that I feel our audience needs to see. We will find you. Just keep talking, keep talking.

So let’s say you reach out, it’s successful, you get looped into the PR list, you get gifted. How do you move from that gifting phase into more paid collaborations? How do you work your way deeper into that relationship?
This is the number one question I get all the time. So first and foremost we are monitoring responsiveness and care within the PR list. So the worst thing is when we notice we're sending PR to someone month after month after month, and they're not posting. So then we're not really inclined to take the relationship further.

But I would look at it as a funnel. So it goes, let me give somebody some products, let's see what happens. Do they connect with the product? Do they post about it? Is the content aligned with something that we would repost? Then let's get to the next step. Then we're reposting. When we repost the content and give credit, is our audience engaging with it and responding well to it? If they're posting on their own channels, how is their audience responding to it?

If I see you have a feed of videos on TikTok or Instagram and your baseline engagement is X, but when you post about our product, it's significantly lower, which tells me maybe this person isn’t ready for it and I shouldn't invest in it. Conversely, if your engagement is holding, when you talk about our product or above baseline, I think “let's get something on the books and work on it.” So then we can graduate into a pay-to-play deal for earned and owned content on your channels.

Then sometimes we want to find out, are you a converter? With a lot of creators, there's the double whammy where you can get insane awareness and engagement and also convert.

And then there are people that are a bit bifurcated. Some are converters and some are great at awareness. And there is a place for both of those people. So sometimes we'll offer a code and say, okay, let's give this a month. Let's see how this looks, and how you intertwine the code into your content.

And if it does well, then it's the sky's the limit. Let's give you more commission. Let's do a collab. Every single creator that ColourPop collabed with started out as a PR recipient, graduated to a pay-to-play deal, graduated to an affiliate, and then a clap.

So to sum up, start small and build the relationship step-by-step. To increase your chances of getting noticed and growing your relationship, 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 and all-in engagement rates.

Let’s say I'm a creator who can drive awareness and conversion. Is that something that you want to hear from the creators in advance? Or do you figure it out on the backend?
It certainly doesn't hurt to hear it from a creator, what does their audience connect with the most in terms of interest versus purchase behavior. So don't be afraid to attempt and try it out. DM a brand and say “Hey, I really think I can drive some traffic and conversion for you guys. Why don't you give me a code with no commission for four weeks? Let's just see, and then let's check in.”

I would respect that and say “Yes, I'm making you a code right now. I'm setting a timer for four weeks from now.” I respect the hustle. Let's do it. Let's see what happens.

I know the content creation has come up a couple of times, both from the time it takes to actually create great content to what brands are looking for. Can you talk about the content that has been catching your eye, and what your clients today are kind of looking for? What do you look for today in terms of content?
Right now the name of the game with all of my clients is “how can I find more TikTok creators? I'm really over-indexed on Instagram.” That is in huge demand. And if it's not necessarily a TikTok creator, it's “I need more vertical videos.” So vertical video content and I’m also looking for creators who are super comfortable in front of the camera and talking into it.

Everyone wants to work with creators that can like story tell or give just a little peek into their heart and soul while they're putting on makeup. It's not just about the makeup.

Has that changed in the last five years?
Yes, five years ago we were looking for beautiful lay photos, with beautiful finished looks. Now it’s switched to who’s good on stories, who can put up reels.

Instagram just recently made an announcement about collaboration tools for posting. Every profile will have access to tag shoppable products. That's going to be insanely huge. Instagram has been so forthcoming in sharing that they are looking to be a shopping and entertainment platform and no longer a photo-sharing app. So really leaning into that because you're going to get rewarded by the Instagram algorithm.

In regards to vertical videos, are you guys also looking for YouTube shorts?
Yes, absolutely. Anytime a platform releases something new, so YouTube shorts and now TikTok stories, creators are first to lean into those formats. And brands are like “how do we use this? They released yet another thing.” Creators got this. They’ve already been trying this out. So on the brand side, we’re so excited to partner with creators that are continually in that experimental and curiosity mode.