Your Creator Program is Killing You
🥲Your roster looks perfect. That's exactly why it's underperforming, and more!
Hello! You've arrived at What Actually Works 🤓
We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.
🥲 Your Roster Looks Perfect. That's Exactly Why It's Underperforming.
Most brands select creators based on whether the creator fits the brand's aesthetic and category. A skincare brand picks creators who look like skincare creators. The brands' compounding pick on a different axis entirely: whether the creator's audience matches the buyer profile, regardless of whether the creator looks on-brand.
A creator who looks off-brand but reaches your exact buyer outperforms a creator who looks perfect but reaches an adjacent audience. Most rosters are built on the wrong variable.
The Data Tab Nobody Opens During Selection
Most creator selection is done by looking at the creator: their feed, aesthetic, follower count, content style. The audience-side data sits in the analytics tab that gets skipped.
Run this audit on every active creator:
- Audience demographics vs your customer profile
- Audience interest overlap with your buyer's category behavior
- Purchase behavior signals at your price point and frequency
The pattern that surfaces is almost always the same. Creators whose feed looks perfect have audiences structurally different from your buyer. Creators who look off-brand index 3-5x against your actual customer profile. The roster that looked right was reaching the wrong people.
Reweight The Selection Criteria
Modash is running a free 3-hour session on June 11th with brand-side teams from Moroccanoil, Edelman, and L'Oréal on exactly this: which creators on your current roster do not belong there, and the criteria that actually predicts whether a creator moves product.
If the rebuilt roster looks identical to the old one, the brand-fit weighting is still overriding the audience signal. You can secure your free spot now!
Recalibrate What "Brand Fit" Actually Means
The brand-fit conversation usually happens around aesthetics: does this creator look like our brand? The sharper question is whether the creator's audience behaves like your customer: do they buy in this category, at this price point, with this purchase frequency?
That recalibration changes who has authority in the selection process. The brand team's aesthetic judgment becomes a check on creators who already passed the audience filter, not the primary filter that shapes the roster before audience data is even considered.
The creator was always the proxy. The audience was always the asset.
Parttnership with HubSpot
Quick gut check: how many of your marketing tools actually talk to each other?
If the answer is "not enough," you're losing context every time a signal moves between platforms.
HubSpot's updated Essential Apps for Marketers collection pulls together key apps from TikTok Lead Syncing to Canva to Amplitude that connect directly to your CRM, so insights, leads, and creative all live in one place.
Less tab-switching, more context, and AI that actually knows your business.
🐥 Tweet Worth Saving
💃Events
🔥 Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, Is Teaching the Exact Signals That Control How AI Surfaces Your Brand
Tomorrow | Virtual Event | Free
AI is forming opinions about your brand from signals your team never prioritized. Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, and Bogdan Babiak, CMO at SE Ranking, show exactly which ones matter and what to build first. 30 sessions, 70+ practitioners, zero vendor pitches.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
🔥 The Agentic Playbook Udemy Uses to Scale AI Search Without Adding Headcount
June 11 | Virtual Event | Free
Nicholas King manages SEO and digital experience at Udemy at a scale most teams never reach. He's not adding people to keep up. He built a system that scales without them. On June 11, he's showing exactly how, alongside Bridget Nelson, who built the same thing at Chime.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.