bia

A platform to build better creator - brand partnerships

I worked with the bia team to make an easy to use platform that made sponsorship experience simple and transparent to both brands and creators.

year

2023

Deliverables

Web app, Marketing Site (Coming SOon)

Problem

Creators and brands struggle to work together today.

Influencer marketing is bigger than ever, however, the relationship between brands and creators is still inefficient and frustrating for both sides. Sourcing, negotiation, invoicing, and metric analysis all occur across various platforms and channels resulting in headaches and steep learning curves for creators and brands.

The goal of bia is to centralize all these different processes into one platform and provide a much more intuitive way for brands and creators to manage sponsorships. Additionally, bia offers analytics, workflow support, deal management, communication, and a marketplace.

Groundwork

To create a product that would be useful to both brands and creators I focused on the core interactions between both sides during the sponsorship process.

To begin designing the platform I conducted user interviews to establish a clear understanding of the problems that creators and brands experienced. I discovered creators face major pain points monetizing their audience and sourcing and executing brand deals. Brands face major pain points finding the right creators/audience and learning how to work with creators.

Additionally I aimed to understand how the sponsorship process currently takes place and at what points in this process creators and brands experienced the most stress. Findings from mainly backed up the the discover and deal aspect of the process however there was clear opportunity to focus on the sharing/viewing of analytics of a sponsored post/campaign.

Problems faced by Creators and Brands:

Creators

Finding the right Brand

Inefficient negotiation process

Inconsistent income

Getting paid

Metrics across channels

Media Kits

Brands

Finding the right Creator

Negotiating terms

Managing the collaboration

Measuring the impact

Solution

While both sides use bia to interface with each other, each need their own seperate platform tailored their unique needs.

From the information gathered from the user interviews I was able start outlining the main features for each side.

For Creators, Bia provides content planning tools, media kits, scheduled posts, and goal tracking to help them focus on what matters most: creating content.

For Brands, Bia offers invoicing, contracts, communications, a marketplace, and analytics to help manage all of their creator marketing efforts in a single place.

I set out to build a dashboard that encapsulated all of these different features into one cohesive platform.

Product Design

The biggest challenge was the scope of the platform. There was a ton of things we wanted to include in the first iteration and so it was super important to hone in on the core features that would have the biggest impact for both creators and brands. Additionally since the product is so big, I focused on making the product as simple and intuitive as possible to avoid overwhelming users.

Conclusion

Onboarding is key

While we are currently testing the product, I think the biggest opportunity to improve bia is to build out the onboarding process and a resource center. Currently there is a "bia Assist" that would provide tooltips that the user can click to get more info on different modules. I think there needs to be a step further that has users go through full flows (ie. creating a proposal, creating a media kit, etc). Even with mock data this would be super valuable for users getting familiar with the bia platform.