Later | Creator & Brand Collabs - For Brands

How might we help brands manage their campaigns and find creators to collaborate with?

Project Details

Product

Desktop web feature suite -https://app.later.com/signup/

  • Find + Add Creators to Campaigns

  • Create Campaigns

  • Manage Campaigns + Review Applicants

Role

UX Designer

  • Wireframes + prototypes

  • Usability tests + interviews

  • Feature + roadmap shaping

  • Cross-functional team collaboration (PM, FE/BE/QA engineers, UI Designers, UX Researchers)

Timeline

4 months

Context

Background

Later is a social media management company that helps businesses and individuals schedule and publish content across multiple social media platforms.

Project Goal

This project aimed to expand our services by building a creator marketplace where brands can share campaigns for creators to apply to, find creators to collaborate with, and manage their campaigns.

Problem Discovery

Based on competitive analysis…

  • Brands want an easy way to share and manage campaigns without having to use too many tools

  • Brands want a more efficient way to organize and track creators within their campaigns

  • Brands have trouble finding creators that suit their niche when looking to promote their products/services through influencer marketing

Problem Validation

We conducted user interviews and surveys with brands to…

  • Further define and validate challenges brands experience with influencer campaigns and creators

  • Define existing solutions being used to tackle those problems, and their pros/cons

  • Determine features needed to tackle these problems

Pain Points

1. Comunicating with creators: Negotiating, pitching, setting expectations while staying organized

2. Finding authentic and reliable creators: Brands want to work with creators who aligned with their brand and values

3. Organizing and tracking campaigns, creators ,and deliverables: All users said there was value in having a separate organizational level beyond Saved Creators

Existing Solutions

  1. Searching for Creators: 77.3% search natively in social media apps for creators

  2. Sharing Campaigns: 61.7% share a campaign brief or customized template with creators

  3. Organizing Campaigns: 61% use spreadsheets in some way to organize their influencer marketing

    • Pros: Simple and flexible, can use integrations and formulas

    • Cons: Clunky, manually update info, no way to track results, not centralized

Solutions

  1. Find Creators: Allow brands to search our creator database to find creators to collaborate with and invite to campaigns

  2. Create + Share Campaigns: Allow brands to post campaigns that creators can apply to

  3. Manage Campaigns: Allow brands to manage their campaigns and the creators in each campaign

Feature Scoping + Planning

  1. Determine features to be built + collaborative shaping sessions for complex features

  2. Estimate level of effort vs. impact to determine feature prioritization

  3. Divide features into phases to allow us plan our sprint timeline in a flexible yet granular way

Flow charts

Flow charts were created to map out main user paths and review with the dev team to scope out technical limitations. As we iterated into wireframes and high-fidelity mockups, minor changes were made to the flows, but never caused extensions to our sprint timeline.

Create Campaigns

Find and Save Creators

Manage Creators and Review Campaign Applicants

Journey Map + Storyboard

With a group of designers and the PM on this project, we did a half-day session of Journey Mapping, Storyboarding, and Sketching to guide the next steps for design.

Wireframes

Set Up Brand Profile

Create Campaign - Link to prototype

Find + Add Creators to Campaigns

Manage Campaigns + Review Applicants

*This is a subset of wireframes from this project, all wireframes are available upon request - jessicalimdr@gmail.com :)

User Testing

Goals

Find Creators

  • Confirm creator profiles contain enough useful information

  • Confirm if the filters are appropriate for what users would typically search

  • Confirm if search results are sufficient in quality and quantity

Manage Campaigns

  • Better understand and validate the problem of organizing creators

  • Validate the Manage Campaign solution

Methodology

  • 7 user interviews with participants experienced in influencer marketing

  • Access for a week to allow participants to test the product

  • FullStory review of participants’ sessions and follow-up survey with participants

Findings - Find Creators

  1. Lack of search results, which required them to significantly broaden their search criteria (typically expected 50-100 results)

  2. Search filters were sufficient for most users, with minor suggestions to improve the Industry, Engagement, and Location filters

  3. All users were able to easily save creators and said they would save a short list then contact in bulk within 1-4 weeks.

Findings - Manage Campaigns

  1. All users saw value in a separate organizational level beyond Saved Creators

  2. Brands liked that there was a flexible way to add notes for each creator

  3. Predetermined campaign stages matched the expected workflow for a product-based campaign, but not all types of campaigns (e.g. evergreen)

  4. Brands liked having a centralized place for a social team to work

Additional feature requests for prioritization and discovery: In-app communication, Campaign duplication, Campaign post analytics, Task reminders, Campaign brief mood boards

Design Takeaways

Next Steps

  • Explore more automated and flexible ways to organize creators in a campaign

  • Allow brands to add inspiration content to campaign briefs

  • Explore feasibility of an in-app communication solution

  • Continue recruiting creators to improve search results

Iterations

  • Manage Campaigns: Automate moving creators through campaign stages to reduce manual effort

  • Find Creators: Improve search filters - make Industry multi-select, broaden Location, provide help text in tooltips to explain calculations

Feature Exploration

My manager and I introduced a collaborative Feature Shaping Session (including PM, Design, and Lead Developers) as part of the product discovery process for an in-app communication feature. This allowed to determine the feature as out of scope, and improved our discovery process for future projects.

Individual Sketching - Product Manager, Product Design, Lead Developers

Discussion - Technical constraints, components and access, rabbit holes, items for discovery

Mockups

Set Up Brand Profile

Create Campaign

Find + Add Creators to Campaigns

Manage Campaigns + Review Applicants

KPIs

  • Active campaigns (# of campaigns posted by brands)

  • Matches made (# of creators added to campaigns)

Impact Metrics

Conversion rate of brands who created a campaign and added a creator to a campaign:

  • 46.7% during the beta period (Jun 20/22 - Jul 30/22)

  • 41.4% during the full release period (Aug 1/22 - Apr 1/23)

The conversion rates indicated that many users were able to successfully add creators to campaigns, but the raw numbers indicated that discovery/adoption for these features was low.

Brand Funnel

Reasons for Low Adoption

  • No marketing: This was part of an entirely new suite of collaborative features with no marketing behind it, resulting in low discovery on both the brand and creator side 

  • Campaign application paywall: Creators had to be on a paid plan to apply to campaigns during the first year of release, resulting in low application rates

What I Learned

  • Break complex projects into phases - this makes it easier to plan timelines, iterate, and test features early

  • Collaborate early with project managers - asking for KPI’s allows us to discuss UX suggestions so we can design for both the user and the business

  • Get feedback from engineers early and frequently - his can help identify constraints/edge cases so more time can be spent on innovation

  • Get feedback from fellow designers, especially when feeling stuck - this can help reduce tunnel vision on large projects, while also helping the design team to create a more holistic and consistent product experience

Next

Later | Creator & Brand Collabs - For Creators