Storytelling on Demand: It Has to Happen for the Creator Economy

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Marketing campaigns need to be “always-on” if brands are to communicate with audiences permanently tethered to their connected devices. Those who lack in-house resources — of which there will be many — should tap the global network of freelancer creators.

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According to on-demand creative services platform Storyhunter, relying on creative agencies or banking on a couple of campaigns a year is no longer sufficient to keep brands front and center in audience minds.

In a post on Medium, Shivan Sarna, Storyhunter’s head of stories, urges companies to shift to an always-on model of constant production.

“Agencies certainly provide value, but they are expensive and can’t produce content at the fast pace needed to thrive,” she says.

“In the old world, companies hired an agency or producer to manage all their freelancer relationships. Today, that’s flipped on its head: Talent is at the center of the creative process and has a direct relationship with the company.

“Companies are now in charge of telling their stories, and creator partnerships are highly valuable and strategic.”

How can brands get up to speed to respond to production needs in real time? By building a team of freelancers around the world who can jump in at the right time for the right project.

For example, brand marketers need an experimental, always-on mindset to keep up with the fast-evolving nature of social media platforms.

“Unless you experiment with your content creation, there is no way you can glean valuable insight into what is resonating with your audience and what simply is not,” Sarna writes.

Putting its money where its mouth is, Storyhunter recently flipped from emailing out a monthly newsletter to producing an animated vertical video for TikTok “displaying the breadth and depth of our network.”

Another idea is to serialize your content. Genealogy platform MyHeritage does this by serializing short-doc formats produced by local freelance teams, a move that Storyhunter says has helped the company grow to 62 million users.

The always-on mindset requires you to keep the pipeline full, but there’s another way of easing the workload of marketers everywhere: content repurposing.

“You can hire freelance editors, social media producers, graphic designers, and writers to showcase content in a brand new way.”

It’s essentially recycling your current content and presenting it in a new format to reach wider audiences and increase lifespan. Obvious perhaps, but the key would seem to be expanding resources by connecting with the creator community.