The Influencer Game Has Grown Up. Has Your Marketing?

By James Arnold
Rooster Chief Digital Officer

Influencer marketing in agriculture used to feel a little like the Wild West. Find someone with a decent following. Send them some product. Maybe send a hat or a shirt. Ask them to talk about it. Hope they liked it. Hope their audience cared. And then figure out afterward whether any of it actually worked. Those days are mostly gone.

Creators have become businesses. The tools available to evaluate them are considerably more sophisticated. Brands can understand audiences before entering a partnership. Programs can be designed around specific objectives. Creator content can be integrated into paid media, email, websites, product launches and lead-generation efforts.

But something more fundamental has changed, too. We've gotten better at understanding what creators are actually good at. It isn't simply generating reach. It's making the brand's story matter to a real person.

Features and benefits aren't enough

Agricultural marketers spend a lot of time getting our messages exactly right. We work through the features. We define the benefits. We refine the claims. We make sure everything is technically accurate and legally defensible. Eventually, we arrive at a carefully constructed message that can work across a broad audience.

While necessary, it can remove some of the humanity from the story.

Sara Wade, Content and Influencer Director at Rooster, believes that's one of the biggest opportunities creators provide. Creators can take those carefully constructed features and benefits and translate them into “why it matters on the farm or why it's important for me in a way that a brand can't do,” Wade said.

That's different from simply repeating the brand message. A farmer isn't necessarily thinking about the product the same way the product manager is. The farmer wants to know whether it fits their operation. Whether it solves the problem they're experiencing. Whether it's worth investigating. Whether someone who looks a little like them, farms a little like them and faces some of the same challenges has found it valuable.

A creator can bridge that gap.

“When a creator is telling a story, it's very real, it's very organic, it's in the moment,” Wade said.

Brands can make great content. But, as Wade puts it, “there's a realness to the creator content that a brand can't manufacture.”

Social media wasn't built for celebrity

Influencer marketing isn't actually new. We've been borrowing other people's credibility to sell products forever. Michael Jordan wore Nikes. Cindy Crawford drank Pepsi. Put a famous person next to something and maybe some of that person's appeal rubs off on the brand.

When social media influencers first emerged, marketers naturally applied the same thinking. Find the biggest audience. More followers meant more reach. More reach meant more value. Except social media doesn't really work that way.

“Social media wasn't built for celebrity,” Wade said. “It was built for community and connection.”

That difference helps explain why creator marketing has evolved away from simply chasing the largest possible audience. People follow creators because they see something familiar. The person uses the same equipment. Deals with similar problems. Farms in a similar part of the country. Wears the same boots. Drives the same truck.

“I see myself in that,” Wade said of the relationship audiences develop with creators.

That's much more powerful than celebrity adjacency. It's relevance. And relevance opens creator marketing to a much wider range of brands.

You don't need a massive budget

There is still a perception that influencer marketing belongs to big brands with big budgets. It doesn't have to. Wade points to nano creators, generally those with audiences of roughly 1,000 to 10,000, and micro creators in the 10,000 to 100,000 range as potentially valuable partners.

The word “nano” doesn't exactly scream marketing powerhouse. But audience size isn't the only thing that matters.

Smaller creators can have extremely engaged niche audiences. For an agricultural company trying to reach a very specific type of producer, geography, crop or area of expertise, 5,000 of the right people may be considerably more valuable than 500,000 people with little connection to the product.

The tools have improved, too. Marketers can dig deeper into audience location, age and other characteristics. Third-party tools can provide additional information about interests and behaviors. That makes creator selection much more scientific than scrolling through Instagram and deciding somebody seems popular.

And brands don't necessarily have to begin with a year-long commitment.

“I always think it's good to start a creator program with a test,” Wade said.

Give it two or three months. Learn how the audience responds. Learn whether the creator tells the story well. Determine whether the partnership feels right.

Creators shouldn't be different than any other marketing channel.

Stop starting with “we need an influencer”

One of the easiest ways to build a bad creator program is to start with the creator.

“We can't just start with, ‘I want a creator,’” Wade said.

Start with the story. What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to reach? What do we want that audience to understand, feel or do? Only then should we decide who might be good at telling that story.

That distinction becomes especially important in agriculture because “farmer” isn't a useful enough creator strategy. Some creators are particularly good at equipment. Some have agronomic expertise. Some are entertainers. Some can go deep technically. Others have built their following because they are excellent storytellers. Those are different capabilities.

The right creator for broad awareness may be completely wrong for explaining a complicated agronomic concept. The right person isn't necessarily the person with the most followers. It's the person whose credibility, expertise, audience and style match the job we're asking them to do.

Then get out of their way

Marketers are accustomed to controlling the message. We write the copy. Approve the script. Review the visuals. Check the claims. Move a word. Change a phrase. Send it through another round of review. Some of those guardrails remain essential with creator marketing. Brands absolutely need a strong brief. Creators need to understand the product, the objective, required claims, safety considerations and the things they cannot say.

But a brief and a script aren't the same thing.

Wade believes one of the biggest mistakes brands make is expecting creator content to be scripted and still perform like creator content.

“The magic of a creator program is in a really well-written brief,” she said.

Give creators the information. Give them the guardrails. Give them examples of the stories that might be told. Then let them tell the story.

“At the end of the day, the creator is going to know their audience better than we do,” Wade said.

We can study their followers. We can use sophisticated audience tools. We can analyze their historical performance. But the creator built the community. They know what gets a response. They know how they talk. They know which stories their audience will believe. If we remove their voice and replace it with ours, we've eliminated much of what we were paying for.

Creators aren't a tactic off to the side anymore

Creators are now media businesses.

“They understand that their audience has value and that their content has value,” Wade said.

Some have managers. They have content calendars. They negotiate agreements. They understand usage rights. They make decisions about which brands fit their audience and which don't. In other words, they increasingly operate like the other media partners competing for marketing budgets.

That can create some discomfort.

The money has to come from somewhere. A creator program doesn't magically create a new line in the marketing budget. It may compete with traditional media, digital advertising, content production or other investments. But Wade thinks separating creators into their own little marketing universe is a mistake.

“Creators are going to do their best work when they're integrated into a program where they're not thought of as a separate line item or a separate tactic that we just do over here,” she said.

A creator doesn't have to make one social post and disappear. Their perspective can support a product launch. Their content can become part of paid media. It can be extended into email. It can inform website content. Creator stories can support lead generation. Brands can amplify creator content to audiences beyond the creator's organic following.

The creator becomes another part of the communications system. Not the influencer thing we're trying this year.

Relationships beat transactions

The maturation of the creator business hasn't made relationships less important. It has made them more important.

A transactional approach says: We pay you. You make three posts. We approve them. Done.

A partnership asks whether the creator actually believes in the product and whether the brand fits naturally into the community they've spent years building. That takes trust in both directions.

Brands need to trust creators enough to let them communicate authentically. Creators need to trust brands enough to know the partnership won't damage the relationship they have with their audience. That doesn't happen instantly.

Wade has seen long-term partnerships produce stronger results because repeated exposure creates familiarity and credibility.

“Long-term partnerships do work better,” she said, while acknowledging they aren't always the right tactic.

There is a simple reason. The seventh time a creator naturally talks about a product they've used for two years feels very different than a single sponsored post that showed up Tuesday because a contract said it had to. Audiences can tell the difference.

And then AI walks into the room

AI is already changing the creator business in productive ways. Wade uses third-party creator tools that can collect and analyze enormous amounts of content and performance information. Without that technology, evaluating creator posts across a large program could take days or weeks.

That's how to apply AI today. Then there's the other version. The AI-generated influencer.

Technically, the proposition is fascinating. A brand could create a virtual spokesperson who never has a scheduling conflict, never goes off message, can generate endless content and can be designed to look exactly like the target audience. There's just one fairly significant problem. They've never farmed.

Wade believes authenticity remains the central issue. An AI-generated farmer may look right. It can wear the boots. Drive the truck. Stand beside the equipment. Talk about planting. But, as Wade puts it, “they've never been where you've been.”

Then she gave an example that gets to the heart of the issue better than any marketing terminology could. An AI creator doesn't know about “the generational scrap metal pile out behind the barn.” That's a tiny detail. It's also everything.

Agriculture is filled with shared experiences that don't appear on a demographic profile. The weather that didn't cooperate. The equipment that broke at exactly the wrong time. The shoes that should never have been worn into the livestock barn. The field everybody in the family knows by a name that doesn't appear on any map.

AI can learn those details. It can imitate them. It hasn't lived them.

In a creator economy built increasingly around authenticity rather than celebrity, that's a pretty significant limitation.

Maybe the human part becomes more valuable

That's the irony of where creator marketing is heading. AI will make the business surrounding creators considerably more sophisticated. It will improve discovery. Audience analysis. Performance measurement. Content repurposing. Research. Perhaps even parts of production. But the more synthetic content fills our feeds, the more valuable genuine lived experience may become.

That's particularly true in agriculture. A farmer doesn't need another perfectly polished brand message. We already know how to make those. Sometimes they need to hear someone they trust explain why something mattered on their farm. That's the creator's superpower.

The influencer game has grown up. It's more measurable. More professional. More integrated. More strategic. And yes, it's competing for the same dollars as every other channel in the media plan. But the best creator programs aren't successful because we've gotten better at buying influencers.

They're successful because we've gotten better at recognizing what we were buying in the first place. Not followers. Not posts. Not even reach.

Trust.