Product Management

Creating a product feature to optimize content alignment between brands and influencers

Team
Daniel Leung (Me!)
Yvonne Wang
Helen Xia
Judy Zheng
Role
Product Manager
UX Designer
Timeline
November 12, 2022
(1 day)

Overview

Context
The University of Waterloo’s Product Management Club (UW PM) hosted a 1-day product pitch competition with Social Currant, a youth-powered media agency building a platform to connect creators with brands who want to partner with them for their advertising campaigns. Over 30 teams (100+ students) were challenged to design a solution to tackle a product challenge encountered on the Social Currant platform. Our team was awarded 1st place for our solution, so let’s take a look at how we did it!
A built-in form submission feature on the Social Currant platform enabling content alignment between influencers and brands by leveraging efficiency and transparency.
Problem
Solution
“Influencer marketing is time consuming and cumbersome.”
- Vidyut Ghuwalewala (Co-Founder & COO of Social Currant)
If you were a product manager at Social Currant, how would you design a solution to make this process faster for the brands that use it?

Process

Background Research
Problem Discovery
We conducted research into the problem space to understand the key components of the social media advertising landscape. We needed to know who the users are, their goals, and how the Social Currant platform supports them in reaching these objectives.
Users
Brands
Brands use Social Currant to:
  • Connect with content creators
  • Run advertising campaigns with influencer content
Content Creators / Influencers
Content creators / influencers use Social Currant to:
  • Connect with brands
  • Generate revenue
  • Grow audiences
Current Process
Phase 1
  1. Creator identification and sourcing
  2. Creator Outreach
Phase 2
  1. Messaging brief creation
  2. Contract negotiation
  3. Messaging brief send-off
  4. Draft review
Phase 3
  1. Video / campaign goes live
Identifying Pain Points
Our team attended a Q&A session with Social Currant’s founder. He shed light and gave deep insight into the main pain points experienced by users on the platform.
Pain Point #1
Sourcing the right influencers for a brand’s advertising campaign is difficult.
Pain Point #2
Contract negotiation is time consuming.
Pain Point #3
Brands and influencers often do not align on advertising campaign content.
Discovering the Problem
The team gravitated towards pain point #3 and made some key observations.
60% of phase 2 can be made more efficient if content misalignment rate is decreased.
The feedback loop is prone to repetition, iterations, and back and forth between parties.
Parties can be picky regarding content requirements, and a lack of communication causes misalignment.
Based on these observations, we wanted to focus on speeding up the steps in phase 2 to deliver the most impact.
Current Product
The current  platform allows brands to create campaigns by specifying campaign parameters pertaining to either the campaign or the influencer's details. We observed that the only way brands can communicate content requirements with the creator is via:
  1. The campaign description field during campaign creation.
  2. Private means outside of the Social Currant platform.
This is problematic because:
Brands must fit ALL content requirements within the confines of a short blurb.
This blurb is prone to missing content details and unclear content requirements.
Iterations/repetitions prevent videos from going live.
A lack of communication transparency between brands and influencers regarding content requirements cause a major bottle neck in phase 2. We can see that the platform does not give the opportunity for brands to be transparent with what they expect from influencers when creating content to fit with their advertising campaign.

How might we design a solution for brands and influencers to better align on campaign content requirements in a efficient and effective manner?

Solution
Goal & Objective
Goal
Enable brands and influencers to align on advertising campaign content requirements quickly by increasing communication transparency.
Objective
Decrease the content misalignment rate between brands and influencers.
Success Metrics
Misalignment rate
Is there less back and forth?
Are influencers finding it easier to understand brand requirements?
User adoption
How many users use the solution as a mode of communication compared to the current methods?
Completion time
Does the solution speed up phase 2? By how much?
Satisfaction & usability
Are users satisfied with this solution? Is it intuitive and easy to use?
Our Solution
Our solution is the matchbox, an embedded form submission feature on the Social Currant platform for brands and influencers to align on content requirements fast. This form would be used after the parties have been matched with one another and would outline the desired campaign contents in greater detail with ease.

We created a flow diagram to map out the user journey. This enabled us to gain greater insight into the process we had in mind and to expose any potential issues we needed to address.
Solution Value
Realistic
  • Easy to integrate into existing campaign creation process
Impactful
  • Reduces the content misalignment rate between influencers and brands by reducing the back and forth informal communication
  • Social Currant employee resources are freed as they no longer have to be the mediator
  • Ensures brand satisfaction on their content requirements
  • Reduces content negotiation time

Features

Campaign Design
In designing the campaign, the brand is presented with a series of frequently used requirements within campaigns in a drag-and-drop style UI. They simply drag and drop the content requirements onto the canvas to the left where they can add more details as they see fit.

The purpose is to create a template for brands to build off of and layout exactly the details they need to include in a space that focusses solely on the campaign’s contents. This makes it easy for them to visualize the content they want included on a campaign and helps them review it before sending it off to an influencer.
Campaign Requirements Send-Off
Once a campaign is designed on the canvas, the form can be sent to the matched influencer to which a review takes place.

The canvas provides a friendly and easy to analyze visualization of the content requirements, compared to that of a text blurb description. The aim of this visualization is that it makes it easier for influencers to review the content requirements before investing their efforts into content creation.
Revision Review
After a influencer reviews the content requirements, the matchbox is sent back to the brands for review. The contents requirements are now either approved or disapproved by the influencer and the brand can visually see exactly what requirements can and cannot be met.

From here, the brand can approve the changes, which indicates to the influencer that they may start making the content OR the brand can request revisions if some of the influencer’s requests are problematic.

Considerations

Risks & Mitigation

Risks

Mitigation Strategy

Content requirements on campaigns may limit the creative freedom of influencers.
The matchbox will allow brands to craft requirements while still allowing creators to have freedom. Having the ability to have custom details manually typed out by the user can mitigate this risk.
Influencers have to invest time into reviewing the content requirements instead of creating content.
The solution presented will have to consider UI and UX enhancements to make the review as intuitive and user-friendly as possible to reduce revision time.

Next Steps

Pre-Development
Delivery
  1. Identify common content requirement categories, giving predetermined selections for brands to simplify requirement definition
  2. Collect current data on:
    • Misalignment rate (i.e. number of back and forth transactions)
    • Phase 2 execution time
    • Satisfaction level with creator content
  3. Establish design specifications and user journey
  1. Validate the idea to gauge feature usage
  2. Release to a subset of interested users and track metrics

Conclusion

Key Takeaways
  1. Understand the problem space before diving into solutions. The judges at the competition credited our first place product pitch to our thorough understanding of the problem space and said this was the factor that made our team stand out. This takeaway reinforced the significance of problem discovery and is a friendly reminder to apply this mindset to any product challenge I face.
  2. Leverage the strengths of your team members. Our teammates did not know each other prior to the start of the competition like many of the other teams. I observed that by taking advantage of the diverse skillset of our team we were able to design an effective yet viable solution.
  3. Engage in meaningful conversations with stakeholders to understand the nuances of the product. Before the Q&A session with the founder, it was incredibly difficult to narrow down the problem. It felt like we were guessing, and ultimately, we would have missed a lot of details and user pain points. This takeaway reveals that in order to build successful products, one of the most critical elements is to sit down with your stakeholders and have a meaningful conversation to capture the sentiments, details, and ideas associated with the product, both the positives and the negatives.

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