If you’ve liked or engaged with content about Jellycats, having a sister, or listening to Taylor Swift, chances are good that Niamh Adkins has made an appearance on your For You page.
The 28-year-old creator has built an audience of more than 3 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube by posting comedic content about her life and interests. As she’s built her following, she’s worked with brands like Neutrogena, Uniqlo, Supergoop, Kosas, and Laneige.
Ahead of her appearance at Marketing Brew’s Perfecting Your Influencer IQ event, we spoke with Adkins about what she looks for in a brand partner, her most effective campaigns to date, and how she thinks marketers should approach building relationships with creators.
It’s all relative
When Uniqlo came to Adkins with a new line of bra tops, she said the brand let her run free on how to post about it—a direction she took literally. “Half the video was me pretending to run, because I was like, ‘Look, I could run in this if I wanted to,’” she said. That video, in which she was encouraged to share what she personally liked about the products, received more than 40k likes on TikTok.
“That did really well because they let me just go for it,” Adkins said.
Adkins says she thinks partnerships work best when brands view creators as creative partners and consultants. “If you’re paying [creators] to come up with something best for your product, get your money’s worth,” she said. “Let them come up with something that, with their specific set of marketing skills, will work best.”
When working with Neutrogena on a recent series of videos, Adkins said she suggested making some content that more closely resembles her usual content, like one video on “how it feels sneaking home early to take your makeup off” that showcases her Neutrogena skin-care routine. Integrating the brand into her content style, she said, felt more effective to her than showing products and explaining how to use them because, put simply, “you know what I’m doing with the face wipe.”
Creating content that relates to the creator is a strategy that Adkins said “works best with every audience,” not just hers. Because she’s currently redecorating her apartment, she’s sought out home-decor partners, like Albany Park, with whom she made a deal for the couch, she said.
“When it’s a fun, mutual exchange, it’s incredibly symbiotic,” Adkins said.
Structuring the deal
When a brand reaches out to work with Adkins, the first thing she said she does is search the brand name and “partner” to see the type of work the brand has done with creators based on existing examples. Beyond creative freedom, she said she also appreciates when brands have a single round of consolidated edits and send concepts weeks, rather than months, in advance. That, she said, can help make sure the concept is still relevant (and consistent) on the ever-changing internet.
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“I don’t know who I’m going to be two months from now,” she said. “What if I got bangs, and then I’m posting this random video where I don’t [have them]?”
Lizzy Bilasano, VP of creative strategy, North America, at Adkins’s talent agency Whalar, told us that it’s important for brands to check their campaign audiences against creators’ to make sure they overlap. “Let’s say you want them to speak to your target audience in Canada, but 100% of their audience is US-based,” she said. “Not doing your homework before you actually engage a creator is actually a huge red flag, and it happens more than you think.”
Beyond that, Bilasano emphasized the importance of brands and agencies communicating with creators about performance. “I don’t think a lot of creators get that feedback about how partnerships went,” she said, “it really is transactional…As a creative, it’s disheartening not to hear about how you could grow or where else you did well.”
Setting the foundation
Adkins said her goal is to build long-term relationships with brands, ideally after seeing how things perform in the first few months. These types of arrangements help her establish a more steady income as a creator and can also help brands build trust with her audience, she said.
“Not everyone’s looking for a new highlighter the second that it’s advertised to them,” she said, by way of example. “You want them to see someone they like with the same one just enough so that when they do need to buy a new highlighter, they go, ‘Oh, wait, I always see Niamh using this one. Let me check it out.’”
After beauty brand Kosas sent Adkins its products, she said she started incorporating them into both paid and organic videos. “Now it’s a harmonious little thing,” she said. “Whenever they have a campaign, I probably come up for it, and whenever I’m doing a makeup tutorial, they get that tag or link, too.”
If brands are seeking to establish more long-term relationships with creators, Bilasano said reaching out to a creator with a personalized message can have a big impact. “That human element really makes a difference in a long-term partnership so that it really does feel like a partnership, not just a contract,” she said.
If nothing else, Adkins said brands and creators often share the same goal. “At the end of the day, we both want [the content] to perform well,” she said. “Let’s figure out the way to get there.”