How ColourPop scaled their creator marketing program

Discover ColourPop’s approach to creator marketing and how it drives brand success.

8 / 5 / 2024
Michelle Song, Director of Social at ColourPop, and Tony Tran, Co-Founder and CEO of Lumanu, share their experiences and perspectives on creator marketing. Moderated by Nick Sharma, the discussion focuses on how ColourPop scaled their creator marketing program. Michelle discusses how her approach and tech stack streamline workflows, enhance relationships, and helped ColourPop scale. This transcript offers insights for brands looking to scale their creator programs and optimize their marketing strategies.

Nick Sharma: How about you guys start us off with quick intros, introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? And what brought you to grow?

Michelle Song: I'm Michelle. I am the director of social ColourPop. What brought me to grow is I'm a client of Lumanu and we got talking about how.

I use different products in my tech stack to be really efficient and to solve problems in not just the marketing funnel, but productivity and working collaboratively with different departments. And Lumanu has been a really great partner and really receptive to my feedback and product updates that just helped me to be really efficient, not just with my own workflow, but also for my creators who are really important partners to my day to day.

Tony Tran: I'm Tony, co-founder and CEO of Lumanu. We launched our payments product in 2020, which then we started learning about net payment terms and all these other things that jeopardize relationships that marketers spend a long time building. Sometimes finance isn't always the fastest to turn around payments. And then that's where we are.

One thing Michelle and I see eye to eye on is the importance of relationships especially in today's world, right? Where people like working with who they like, and if you want to see better results, it pays to treat creators right.

Nick Sharma: Totally. Michelle, you have experienced both on the agency and the brand side. I'm curious how that has led to the way that you treat creator marketing being at ColourPop.

Michelle Song: I myself was a creator. I was shooting content doing art direction and photography. And so all of that kind of combined with social marketing, I realized social media really needs workflows, and also creators really need an easy way to work with the brand. It can't be one way.

Because when you work with creators, it's actually a collaboration. Tony said creators want to work with people that they like, who they respect, and they'll do more. They'll give you extended usage rights, they'll give you discounted rates.

They know that, hey, if I moved to a different brand, I know Michelle always pays me on time. I know that she's really easy with her briefs or she will give me detailed instructions. She's super easy to work with and they'll be more amenable to working with me on like a three-day turnaround, which is really hard to do.

Nick Sharma: And I'm curious, you've got a lean team, right? On the social side. So what's your tech stack to help you automate and make sure that you get everything done?

Michelle Song: Yeah. I love Notion and it's funny because people call me like you're a tech bro, Michelle.

But it's really the best tool I've used. I've used Trello, I've used Jira. And when you're working with creators, you need a tool that's really easy, user-friendly without adding costs to seats. So I use Notion for not only project management but as a collaborative tool for creators to upload their content.

With each database that I work with it's like a Kanban board. I know, they know exactly what stage their brief is. We work on 120 pieces of content a month and it's always rotating. We have many product launches. And it has to always be a moving, living cycle.

So they know when their product has been sent for shipment, they know when something needs to be delivered, they get an automatic due date. It has to be easy for them to create content on their phone. Because it's UGC and it's really easy for them to just literally embed a video or even on their desktop, drag and drop.

Nick Sharma: Totally. And Lumanu also, in your tech stack. Why did you choose Lumanu for creator management and payouts?

Michelle Song: Yeah, I was grandfathered in, and I didn't really understand the platform until three months in my role.

It's really easy because AP, finance always takes forever. And in a way I can premeditate exactly how much budget I'm going to be spending monthly. And Lumanu recently onboarded us onto a new function of having projects, so I can start segregating. I have a budget for this campaign, and then I can actually bring in invoices into these specific projects.

Lumanu makes my tech stack very easy. I can do all my budgeting there.

Nick Sharma: Got it. Tony, can you walk us through the evolution of Lumanu since 2017 and where it is now?

Tony Tran: Yeah, for sure. We noticed the creative ways that they were charging, it wasn't always just paid upfront, sometimes it's a percentage of ad spend, a la carte usage rights, and then you had Spark ads, TikTok ads. We just learned that the traditional way that finance did it, which is every payment had to have an invoice, and bigger companies and EPOs just didn't really work.

We develop payments, and then when we launch a creator app, to Michelle's point, one thing I tell my team is, the creator space is very much a multiplayer space. We built out payments. And one of the big things we did was actually this feature called Instant Pay.

So to Michelle's point, I remember talking to her like, asking a creator to turn around and edit in 24 hours, yet you're telling them, I want to pay you in 60 days. We actually saw that, when you tell creators, hey, Lumanu will pay you as soon as you finish your work.

Finance will pay them later. It allows you to get those really quick edit turnarounds, or last-minute changes.

Nick Sharma: I'm curious, Michelle, as you work with creators, where does Lumanu fit into that relationship or that journey of working with a creator?

Michelle Song: It starts from when we sign a creator on. We say, hey, go sign up at Lumanu, here's your link.

If we have a video that we're like, hey, we're restocking this product, we lost usage rights. We want to extend it, and it's immediately done. For us, net 30 isn't end of the month. It's as soon as we receive your deliverable, you will get paid in 30 days.

So a lot of creators just really enjoy knowing that they have financial stability, they know they will get paid. They know that we are very reliable.

Nick Sharma: And how has that also impacted the relationships with the creators?

Michelle Song: So we've actually started to onboard creators as retainers, you'll get X amount for X amount of deliverables each month. And we have perpetuity in usage and in content.

So they get signed on as a retainer and they're like, okay, great, I know I'm going to have money coming in. And they're also very open to having lowered rates.

Nick Sharma: Yeah. I feel the guarantee is a mental thing for creators. They don't have a stable income. So knowing it's coming is huge. I'm curious, like from a creator working with creators, has using Lumanu enabled you to add a ton more creators to your roster that you work with on a monthly basis?

Michelle Song: Yeah, because I don't have to do the back and forth with the, Hey, submit your invoice. We need to get your W-9 form.

It's all in Lumanu, which is super easy. So we literally just have an email blurb that we're like, this is a submit it and, it's very easy for them.

Nick Sharma: Tony, on average, when you start working with somebody for let's say six months in, do you see a big increase in brands being able to bring on more creators?

Tony Tran: We do, and it's a very collaborative effort with the brands we work with. One of the things we noticed, especially in the beauty space, or any brand that has an affiliate program, is that they drive better ROAS, lower CPAs, but it's hard to attribute with last-click attribution.

If you introduce those additional compensation models, the number of creators you work with increases because now you're not paying 2k, 3k per pop. You can pay, a hundred plus residuals, right?

Nick Sharma: Speaking of metrics, Michelle, I'm curious what kind of metrics you look for with creator posts.

Michelle Song: For ColourPop, everything on social is for organic and it trickles down to paid ads. We see exactly what they're tracking and how they're tracking it and they're very good about projecting this group of influencers.

We have to support all these different legs of the business. Sometimes I am trying to get content that is specifically meant to convert.

Nick Sharma: Do you find that certain creators are best for educational type content? Certain are best for promoting sales or promotions, things like that?

Michelle Song: Whenever we have a campaign, we look at, okay, we want to get content that has some speaking heads. We know we need tutorials. We know we need macros. And I've created an internal CRM where I can actually filter for those specific niches.

Nick Sharma: Tony, where else do you think Lumanu fits into that creator org or that creator journey as you guys continue to grow?

Tony Tran: Many different people can be considered creators, even if you don't think about it initially. We have a lot of fitness brands, food and beverage brands that partner with local businesses.

It pays to keep an open mind and to have that data to manage those relationships.

Nick Sharma: Yeah, I also feel like the best content is created by just genuine customers or genuine reactions. If you were to give some advice on how to get started on creator marketing or expand their creator program, what would you say?

Michelle Song: Figure out what your objective is. Are you trying to create content to sell? Or are you trying to create content that resonates with your community? Once you figure out your objectives, you can lean into that.

Tony Tran: Treat creators like an extension of your team. Make life easier on yourself and focus on the creatives. The easier each shot is in terms of time, energy, money, the more chances you have of something really blowing up.