You've got more than 50 people in a program. Great work. Now it's time to make them feel like they are recognized, appreciated, and part of something important.

The goal of a creator program is to make your team feel like they are part of a tight-knit, exclusive community. Even if that community is (10k creators), it should feel important. You can build a successful coin-operated program where creators are just in it for the incentives, but you'll always get more out of creators that feel like they are part of something.

How do you build that? There are many ways. We'll outline here how to create incentives, community building, and milestones to get as much out of your creators as possible.

While we want programs to be more than the incentives, they are the primary appeal for creators. Here's what should be on the table:

1) Commissions. Creating sales performance incentives best align the creator and the business and should be used as often as possible.

2) Gifting strategy. Creating a welcome gift or credit when joining the program is our most popular gift, and it helps creators get started with content. Also sending periodic (quarterly) or campaign based gifts (new product drop) is popular.

3) Content rewards. When creators create a certain amount of content, you can automatically reward them with cash, site credit, reward points or products.

4) Challenges / Briefs. Creating one-off challenges or briefs asking for a specific type of content help keep the program fresh, engaging and relevant.

5) Features. More of an implicit reward, but we encourage brands to heavily feature their creators since they have content rights already. This creates an additional incentive for creators to sign up and create content, and it doesn't cost anything.

Community building is the difference between a program with coin-operated creators and truly passionate brand ambassadors that will go above for the brand.

We recommend putting a large emphasis on community building to achieve the latter. Here are our best practices:

1) Instagram Group Chat. Building a community group chat does not cost anything, and it will have an enormous impact on engagement. Creators will become friends with like-minded people, ask each other very engaging questions, and feel like they are part of something important. We recommend that one program admin joins to help with any questions the creators can't answer themselves.

2) Community Zooms. We recommend that brands do a monthly or quarterly ambassador call to share best practices about content creation and do product education. Bringing in guest speakers (like big influencers) can also be a cool added bonus.

3) Gamification and Features. Just like featuring creators on Instagram, sending out newsletters that highlight creators that have made amazing content or sold the most over a period can be very motivational.

People always want to be progressing, so creating program milestones or tiers can also really help creators to feel like they are getting more and more invested in the program.

You can build in milestones like when someone reaches a certain amount of sales or content created, they get higher commissions, nicer gifts, and a new status. Obviously this motivates individuals to get to that status, and then improves retention once they achieve it.

There are infinite small, positive touches that managers can do to make sure creators feel the love. But implementing all of the above best-practices with a group of creators that truly love the brand will always lead to a very highly engaging program.

For more questions, reach out to [email protected]