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Performance marketers today are obsessed with the wrong variable. Creative isn’t your bottleneck. Your funnel is.
The traditional marketing funnel—awareness → consideration → conversion—was built in a world of TV spots, homepage takeovers, and billboard buys. It assumes consumers move predictably from stage to stage. But that world is long gone.
In the era of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Spark Ads, buyers don’t need three touchpoints. Sometimes, they just need one.
That’s why smart DTC brands are swapping the static funnel for a creator-powered flywheel, where a single piece of creator content builds trust, educates, and converts. All in 30 seconds or less.
Today’s best-performing creators do what three stages of a funnel used to do:
This isn’t a trend. It’s a systemic shift. Creators don’t supplement your funnel. They are your funnel.
In our work with Lyma Life, a high-end beauty brand, creators drove full-funnel results across paid channels. Their creator content—used in both organic and paid formats—outperformed all internal studio assets on Meta by more than 2.7x in RoAS.
Why? Because the content didn’t look like an ad. It looked like a genuine testimonial from someone the audience trusted. And when repurposed through Meta’s Partnership Ads, the reach scaled without losing authenticity.
Let’s compare what happens when brands rely on in-house content vs. creator content—especially when scaled through Spark Ads and Partnership Ads.
Across dozens of campaigns, we’ve seen creator-led content consistently win. And when paired with platform-native formats like TikTok Spark Ads and Meta Partnership Ads, the impact compounds. These formats allow brands to run creator posts as paid ads from the creator’s own handle: retaining trust and engagement while scaling reach.
Here’s how a creator-powered funnel works compared to a traditional setup:
In campaigns with Lookfantastic, a global beauty retailer, creators helped collapse the funnel entirely. A single Instagram Story drove more than 18,000 tracked clicks with a CPA 40% lower than the brand’s retargeting creative. And because the creators had licensing permissions baked in, their content was repurposed into an always-on paid campaign using Meta’s Partnership Ads.
Let’s talk format. Most marketers think of creator content as organic only. That’s a mistake.
When Spark Ads and Partnership Ads are layered into your strategy, you unlock the ability to scale content that already performs. No need to guess what will work. The data tells you.
These formats outperform traditional branded creative because they retain trust. People don’t skip over them—they watch, engage, and convert.
In the case of Secret Sales, Spark Ads generated a 3.8x higher conversion rate compared to their static product carousels. The best-performing ad? A 15-second unboxing by a mid-tier creator that cost less than $500 to produce.
Brands that treat creators like “just another awareness lever” are missing the point.
The top brands in our ecosystem have flipped the script. They treat creators as:
With Loop Earplugs, one of the fastest growing D2C brands, creators became the backbone of paid campaigns. Their performance team used historical RoAS benchmarks to select creators, negotiated in-platform licensing, and scaled the winning content via Meta and TikTok. The result? CAC dropped 32%, and new customer acquisition surged by 61% over two months.
This wasn’t luck. It was strategy. Driven by data. Powered by creators. Scaled with paid.
Use first-party performance data: past conversions, engagement quality, category match, to select creators who are likely to perform.
Ensure usage rights for Spark Ads and Meta Partnership Ads are included in every creator agreement. This gives your media team the freedom to scale.
Run each creator’s post organically. Track CTR, engagement, and conversions. Boost the best content using Spark or Partnership Ads.
Creators with the best performance become long-term partners. Their content becomes your ad engine. Their audience becomes your next customer base.
In a creator-first funnel, feedback loops are immediate and actionable. You’re not waiting for a month-end report. You’re seeing:
This precision is only possible when you combine:
Your brand gets smarter with every campaign. That’s the compounding advantage.
The influencer game used to be brand-led. Think polished lookbooks, curated aesthetics, and one-off seeding campaigns approved by creative directors who never opened Meta Ads Manager.
That era is over.
In its place? A new operating system (OS): one where performance teams own creator strategy, where sales data determines who gets the brief, and where content doesn’t get published unless it can be measured, optimized, and scaled.
This isn’t influencer marketing as a PR stunt. It’s creator-led performance marketing, and it’s changing how DTC brands grow.
Creators are no longer a bolt-on to your funnel. They are the funnel.
And when used correctly, they can outperform every other asset in your media library.
The modern funnel isn’t a cascade of content stages. It’s a creator flywheel: a tight loop of discovery, activation, amplification, and reinvestment.
This isn’t about aesthetics or vibes. it’s about predicted sales performance. Use historical RoAS, vertical alignment, engagement quality, and audience match to vet creators who can actually drive transactions, not just likes.
Start small. Give creators room to speak in their voice. Provide guidance tied to business goals (education, comparison, offer framing) and publish natively to their audience. Let performance data (not assumptions) tell you what works.
The best-performing creator content becomes your top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel engine. Spark Ads on TikTok. Partnership Ads on Meta. These aren’t workarounds, they’re performance multipliers that preserve the creator’s voice while expanding your brand’s reach with full ad control.
No fuzzy KPIs. Track every click, every purchase, and every return. Whether you integrate with Shopify, Meta Conversions API, or TikTok’s Events Manager, you need hard numbers to understand who moves product and why.
Creators aren’t a faucet you turn on and off. The smartest DTC brands treat them like owned media channels. When you find a winner, lock them in, scale their best content across new campaigns, and give them the data to iterate. It’s a performance loop, not a one-off tactic.
The next billion-dollar DTC brands won’t be built on prettier ads or larger media budgets.
They’ll be built on repeatable, attributable creator content that performs better than anything made in-house and scales like paid media.
This is the Creator Performance Era.
And it belongs to brands who build their funnels around the creators who convert.
Ready to rebuild your funnel around creators?
Let your next top-performing ad come from a creator’s phone—not your studio.
