How a local newsroom got started in working with influencers

FINDING THE RIGHT INFLUENCER

Because we had already seen some success in the food creator space, we knew that we wanted to experiment with food content. Food is also a topic that generally performs well for us, with a healthy local creator ecosystem in Houston.

In the API Learning Cohort, and from our own conversations and research, we realized one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing who to partner with. Here are some things to consider.

• If you find the right creator who aligns with your mission, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road. For us, it was more important to find a creator who understood and valued what we did and also wanted to create accurate content, rather than someone who simply had the biggest numbers. The collaboration went smoothly as a result.
• We started with a creator brainstorming exercise with internal stakeholders, and we used the API’s guide to mapping your local influencer landscape as a starting point. There’s more to come on our own internal selection process, but we highly recommend starting with the API guide.
• Schedule a Zoom or phone call to explore a possible partnership, and treat that process like a blind date of sorts. Are there any red flags in how they communicate? Do you get the ick when they talk about their content creation process? If it takes them a while to respond, consider it a flag for how they might treat deadlines. Give yourself permission to discuss possible partnerships with several creators and move forward with the best fit.
• In that initial meeting, it might be useful to ask what their long-term goals are. If they have aspirations to host a podcast or author a newsletter, it could be a sustainable way to grow together.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO MEASURE?

From our initial success with the Top 100 Restaurants list, we knew it was possible to drive conversions through creators. So in our proposal, we wanted to collaborate on a set number of videos, where each video had its own KPI. Here’s how we did it:

• Conversions mean different things to different newsrooms, but for us, our north star metric is new subscribers. We wanted to see if promoting an area food guide would result in new subscribers the same way the outdated Top 100 project did, so one video was crafted with exploring the subscriber-only food guide as the call-to-action (CTA). Another video showcasing our inaugural food tour had a CTA to enter our contest by following the Chronicle’s newly launched food Instagram account, while a third video’s CTA was to sign up for our food newsletter.
• We tracked everything with custom UTM codes and made sure these call-to-actions and goals were clearly outlined to our creator in writing. Creators will want to ensure their work is being properly credited, so they’re likely willing to make the CTA clear.
• There were many positive comments we saw in the videos that highlighted our new restaurant critic and food tour, including ones that seemed pleasantly surprised by what we were doing and how it seemed to challenge their perceptions of the local paper. While comments weren’t initially a KPI, we began to track those types of comments as a way of measuring changes in sentiment or trust-building.

ONE LAST THING

If this is your first time working with a creator, give yourself extra time. There were a few bureaucratic hiccups on our side (mostly with our parent company’s legal department, since we were creating a new category of freelance agreement), and a major breaking news event that landed in the middle of our collaboration, so I was grateful to have extra time baked into the process. At the end of the day, independent creators are freelancers. They’re also juggling other clients, their personal lives and possibly even a full-time job.

Ultimately, we could not have partnered with a better creator. Shawn Singh is creative, deeply cares for Houston and was a delight to work with. (You’ll hear about our partnership from his perspective in next week’s installment.) The content from our collaboration performed well enough that we immediately began discussing how we can work together in the future, beyond this initial batch of videos.