If you're selling cookware with a $350 AOV and your CPA is $200 on Facebook and $100 on Google, affiliate marketing can bring that blended CPA down significantly — ambassadors might cost you just $35-70 per sale.
One of our fashion clients drove about 40% of their traffic from affiliate through roundups on sites like ELLE and VOGUE. Their Google branded search numbers were on fire because Vogue did the top-of-funnel awareness work for them. It all works hand-in-hand.
A Refinery29 featured article could cost around $50k plus 10% of revenue generated. Because of the high cost, it's better to find a few publishers who knock it out of the park and then focus on listicles for everything else.
Once you figure out who your ride-or-die crew of creators are, you can reduce your paid CAC by 40%, co-host events, and expand. But it all starts with seeding product to the right people — you'd be surprised how easy it can be, especially if you have a good product.
When seeding product to influencers, never ask for anything in return. If they like the product, they will post. Will some people never post? Sure. But if you're getting an address in the first place, you're already in a good spot.
If you lock in an influencer for a promotion, give them a custom landing page and a custom coupon code. The clickthrough rates stay high, and it feels like a more put-together customer journey.
Haus didn't do anything special with influencer seeding — they went above and beyond with their standard packaging. The unboxing itself became their biggest driver of customer acquisition for the first year.
When in doubt, YouTubers are great storytellers and historically move the most product compared to other channels.
The biggest impact from influencer seeding happens at launch. But what people forget is you need to ALWAYS pay attention to your creators. It's like any good relationship — it's a two-way street.
If you sell cookware and see a creator is moving, hook them up with a new set. The cost to you is just COGs, and that $100 will have the highest ROI you could ever think of. Trust.
Give creators enough creative freedom. Their biggest frustration is getting a deck telling them how to talk, look, and act.
When I saw Sara Dietschy drinking La Croix, I sent her 108 bottles of Hint. It made it into her video and was the beginning of a very fruitful relationship. That's the power of a well-timed product seed.
Affiliate marketing is one of the hardest channels to get cruising because it's relationship-based. But once it's humming, it's revenue you can rely on no matter what's happening with Facebook CPMs, pixel issues, or iOS tracking.
The easiest way to start with proven TikTok ads is find what does well organically, and then amplify it. TikTok makes it 10x easier than Instagram to whitelist and begin running ads through creator handles.
You can't have high-quality content from a customer's perspective if they're not genuinely a customer. Well, you can, but the people watching this in their feeds will be able to smell the BS from the beginning.
With TikTok, influencers don't really win — it's everyday people who are just good storytellers. People want to hear from people.
For TikTok creator seeding, target creators with 20,000 to 150,000 followers. That amount isn't considered much, but it shows they know how to create content well enough. If you send out 50 packages, 20% should see good views, and a handful will probably go viral.
People love sharing their own coupon codes or URLs — it adds to their ego. If you can, make a personalized landing page for each creator.
Long-term, look at customer cohorts from influencer campaigns and understand which creators drove the best LTV for you — not just immediate sales.
Creators are usually a one-stop-shop. You don't need a director, a producer, an editor, a stylist. One creator will do it all for you — cheaper, faster, and more effectively than a studio.
Creators launch the most successful brands. Why? Because they lead with value — education, entertainment, or aspiration. The easiest way to think about your content being successful as a brand is to think like a creator.
At Hint, we did a $100k influencer campaign that Liz Eswein put together. She worked backward from Target's customer persona, found creators who also fit the Hint demographic, and it made magic.
For creators, you can't dictate the creative — just ask them to recreate content about why they like the product. They are creators, let them create.
With a portfolio company, we sent products to 100 TikTok creators. Whatever did well — about 20% — we boosted that content and it crushed for conversion. Cody Plofker at Jones Road Beauty does this a lot with customers who create TikTok content.
Creator content works so well for 3 reasons: 1. It's more content for you as a brand. 2. You get alignment with that creator's beliefs, values, and standards. 3. You get distribution to their audience.
If you spend at least $50k/month on Facebook ads and you don't have an in-house creator who can create content at high volume, what are you doing? A great creator can cost $5-10k/month and bring you $500k/month worth of digital ad spend.
Vanity URLs should be used anytime you put a URL out in public — whether for influencers, IG link stickers, or billboards. They look 10x cleaner and more trustworthy, plus they carry UTM parameters behind them.
The audience part of celebrity brands is great for the first 72 hours, maybe the first week if you play your cards right with product gifting and press. But the real brands that last have authentic content DNA and a team that can execute.
Five low-hanging fruit ways to work with influencers: Product Seeding, Product Co-Creation, Whitelisting, Content Creation, and building or co-founding a brand with someone who has an audience.
Building a brand is not easy, and just having a celebrity or well-known creator doesn't guarantee success. A ton of celebrity brands quietly closed down or were stripped of resources.
Ads made by creators generally have a higher click-through rate and a longer watch time. They know what works, as of right now, in the platforms we consume in.
The common traits of successful creator-founded brands: They act as content machines. They actually operate the business and understand the challenges. They leverage their network of other talent. And they understand that customer experience needs to be at the heart of everything — these customers are buying emotionally.
Using creators for eyeballs out the gate will allow you to maximize margin for the first few million in revenue, but that person will need to continue to grow and create for the business to grow, too. You can't just relax once you have someone with an audience attached.
Affiliate marketing is the intersection of social proof and native content. Getting inserted on websites, social media accounts, and blogs with their vouch to buy your product is one of the best forms of marketing.
Set up post-purchase surveys with depth — instead of just collecting that someone came from YouTube, also find out which influencer drove them.
Secondary Presence: combine 1P data, 1P customer insights, 1P ad targeting, and 1P ad dollars with 3P audiences, 3P trust, 3P social proof, and 3P content. That equation is whitelisting — and all of this works 10x better in B2B marketing, because B2B is like 10 years behind DTC.
Jones Road Beauty runs many of their ads from Bobbi Brown's personal handles. Eight Sleep runs Twitter ads from Matteo's handle instead of just the brand account. There's usually no one who can better explain a brand than the founder themselves.
Find creators who are really good at speaking to you through the screen — it should feel like they're talking to you, not just to a camera. That's why I prefer working with YouTube vloggers or good TikTok storytellers.
If someone sees your ad, goes to your site, then a few days later sees an influencer posting about it in their feed as a whitelisted ad, it gives the thought: 'Huh, that's funny, I just saw this the other day. I should look into this more.'
Content creators and influencers ARE the media. They know how to create content that is actually thumb-stopping and entertaining. Their ads get much higher engagement and CTR. If someone is obviously a content creator, people sense there might be good content behind the play button and will watch longer.
To find creators: search TikTok for your topic and find top voices. On Instagram, find a perfect-fit influencer and browse their comment section — like-minded influencers comment on each other's stuff. Ask your existing creators who in their network could be a good fit. The creator circles are tight and friendly.
Tell each affiliate creator to make a custom branded TikTok or IG account like 'TabsLovers' or 'Tabs4Life.' Brands like Tabs have dozens of these accounts independently posting content with affiliate links in their bio.
Andrew Tate posted very little original content of his own. His videos organically dominated the For You Page on TikTok, IG, and YouTube Shorts due to one thing and one thing only: affiliates.
Tabs bootstrapped their business to $11M+ in revenue without spending much on paid media, using the Andrew Tate affiliate model — an army of creators posting content independently across social platforms.
For the affiliate strategy to work, you really need to do this at scale. You can't have 3 affiliates creating 10 videos. You need 30-50+ affiliates and 300-500+ videos to really start seeing big results.
The goal of the affiliate content strategy is to use volume to increase the odds of getting an organic viral hit. With enough shots on goal — affiliates creating hundreds or thousands of posts per month — you are bound to have a few clips that take off.
Want amazing video creative? Search for creators who do this for a living and contract them. If they've built their own audience online, they can make strong creative for your brand. Don't try to tell them exactly what to do — you hired them, let them do their job.
For influencers who have a meaningful following — 500K to 5M+ — I still think the best path is to partner with brands as a distribution channel versus starting your own company.
A micro-influencer with 10K followers can impact their community more directly than a cold ad to the same audience. A simple recommendation from someone you know and trust goes a very long way.
When you seed a product to 1,000 or 5,000 creators, you get 1,000 or 5,000 creative opinions on what might work. The more content generated, the more insights you get about what works, which you can use in your own ads going forward.
In 2022, Jolie generated ~5,000 pieces of content from creators. In 2023, nearly 10,000 pieces — which helped them achieve 5X growth year-over-year.
Jolie sends 1,000 shower heads out for free to people who will hopefully create content but have no expectation to do so — influencers, home designers, makeup artists, comedians. It might sound reckless, but it's genius.
Instead of the traditional COGS + creative + ad spend, Jolie's CAC through seeding can be as low as the raw cost of one unit + shipping. It's a genius strategy, but you have to do it at high volume or it doesn't work.
When Jolie's team thought about seeding product, they focused on creators who made great content, more than creators who had large followings.
A single viral creator post generated 500 sales from one seeded unit, reducing CAC to pennies. These outlier events make the seeding strategy even more compelling.
Brands like Jolie, Aritzia, and Cadence have their fans help promote products in new communities. Product seeding either has to be done at scale — minimum 100 per month — or not at all.
Goli did something smart: instead of discounting for customers, they told affiliates they could earn 30% commission that weekend. It created urgency on the affiliate side without discounting the brand.
You're already effectively paying Facebook 50–100% commission. If an affiliate costs 15%, 20%, even 40%, it can still be worth it. I pitched publishers 30% commission — they placed us high on lists. Win-win.
Whitelisting with the right creative via influencers is a great way to bring CACs down. This strategy has worked for many years on Meta and it still works today.
I prefer to give affiliates a percentage of revenue (5-20% depending on contribution margin) and incentivize them further with free products and cash bonuses based on milestones around how many sales they drove.
Jolie created over 10,000 pieces of organic content by seeding product to creators and affiliates. The majority of their revenue still comes from this vs paid ads. Their MER is one of the highest I've seen.
HexClad negotiated their Gordon Ramsay partnership from a point of leverage — on track for $50M in revenue, profitable, and derisked. If the deal didn't work, they'd have been fine. Gordon knew it.
Gordon Ramsay is a real partner to HexClad — not just an influencer. He helps think through new products, creates content for ads, and helped negotiate a deal with Fox to feature their cookware in shows. The best celebrity partnerships go far beyond contractual deliverables.
People like people a lot more than they like brands. Humans want to learn from, follow, and buy from other humans, not your corporate social media 'brand' account. I've been saying this since 2016 and it's still true.
The right celebrity/creator partnership creates massive 'free' top-of-funnel distribution — hundreds of millions of organic impressions that can yield 10X higher ROI than any other channel, including paid ads.
Review engagement rates, not just follower counts. Follower counts and email list sizes are vanity metrics. The real question: Can these people get others to take an action — swipe up, visit, enter their email, and buy?
Before you bring on a creator with a big equity deal, do a test project first. Launch a limited edition collection or hire them as a brand ambassador for 6 months in a cash-only deal to see how they perform.
Instead of allocating everything to Meta, Google, and TikTok, take 15% of your ads budget and allocate it to creator/influencer partnerships. It might be the unlock you're looking for.
If a creator has done 25 brand deals in the past 3 years, their audience might be tired of getting sold to. If they promoted your competitor 18 months ago, that's a red flag.
Creator/celebrity royalties range from 0.25-5% of contribution margin. For influencers with 500K-1M followers, think $50-150K cash plus 0.25-2% of net profit.
When running a whitelisted ad, reply to every comment. Reply to most from the creator's account, but answer serious questions — ingredients, allergies, etc. — from the brand's social account.
Create incentives for your affiliates. I've heard of brands giving away cars to the influencer who drives the most revenue in a weekend or giving away a big trip to the affiliate with the most sales.
For content creators — usually micro-creators with less than 50k followers on TikTok or less than 10k on Instagram — you work with them to create content for your site, emails, ads, or social channels. This may be a product review video or a talented photographer you found on TikTok.
Sometimes you need the co-sign from a specific creator, which signals to their audience that your product passes an invisible set of standards. If Holly Owens recommends a product, I can count on the fact that it's non-toxic and clean and that she's researched it.
For product seeding around a new launch, you want a network of creators who receive your product, try it, and share their experience. No brand does this better than Lemme, executed by the brilliant Simon Huck.
It's important to understand how you're using creators. You don't want to pay someone who's set up to deliver reach when you really just need content. You might overpay by thousands of dollars.
A great lawyer gave me a full-license content paragraph 7 years ago. The main reason for having a full license is that if a media buyer joins the company 4 years later, opens Dropbox, sees an asset and runs it, you've opened yourself to legal liabilities. One of my commandments is to eliminate all liabilities.
Give creators the opportunity to earn affiliate sales on top of their flat fee to post — you want them to be truly invested in the long run.
If this is a consumable product, even when you're not actively working with a creator, make sure they stay stocked with product.
If possible, use branded links for each affiliate/creator/influencer — for example: haus.io/limited versus unbranded links that are hard to remember.
Jolie scaled by getting products into the hands of thousands of influencers and everyday users to create content, reviews, and testimonials. It's the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing. Seed product to native creators.
Total spend on influencer marketing has grown by more than 3x since 2019. Brands now spend close to $24B per year. Today, influencer marketing accounts for about the same revenue as email — 16% of total eCommerce sales.
When running ads from a verified creator on Meta, IG, or TikTok, you can expect your CPC to cut by 30-50%. You don't even need to create much original content with the creators — you can leverage your best ads with a creator handle.
Jolie, Graza, Lemme, Aritzia, and Snif all seed product incredibly well. The brands that drive creators to them — not just the other way around — win. When creators post and videos crank with views, your CPAs go down and your MER goes up because you're getting organic sales on top of paid.
The final level of creator partnerships is creators being the 'Founder' of brands — Matador with Danny Duncan, Osmo Salt with Nick DiGiovanni, Chamberlain Coffee with Emma Chamberlain. Why do YouTube brands do so well? YouTube has the best connection to a viewer due to the length and consistency of videos.
Gruns has 1,300 active video and static creatives in their Meta ads library. They use vertical-specific influencers like dietitians vouching for their products. Everyone wants big influencers, but there's a lot of credibility in using domain experts as your 'creators' in ads.
Whitelisting creators with good content does the job of both brand marketing AND performance marketing simultaneously.
When you have the whitelisting trifecta — the influencer genuinely loves the product, creates content, and you have a dedicated offer or landing page — you build long-term brand value alongside the influencer.
Whether you have $25,000 to create content and whitelist with a celebrity, or $14 to buy a ring light and need to whitelist your own account, you can win with whitelisting either way.
Working with verified influencers signals to the average consumer that you must be a legit brand. Even though we 'industry people' know that may not be the case, it contributes to trust and perception when someone's never seen your brand name before.
Whitelisting is running ads for your brand from a creator, influencer, publisher, or meme page's account instead of your own. It's a concept called Secondary Presence — combining your first-party data, customer insights, and ad dollars with third-party audiences, trust, and social proof.
Make influencer content feel authentic. People hate branded content already — just look at your TikTok ad comments. Make it something a follower can enjoy while being sold to.
Eight years ago at Hint, I would get to a hotel rooftop at 4pm, box out a corner, put a bunch of Hint on the table, and invite influencers to hang out. Total cost was $300-400, and I'd get a few million impressions.
Influencer events range from $400 happy hours to $5,000 dinners to $140,000 trips. They work. The deeper the relationship with an influencer, the better the 'ad' comes across.
One creative seeding tactic: partner with a large influencer and seed a PR box to their entire network of influencer/celebrity friends. Everyone posts, and you pay a fraction of the cost.
If you're running a YouTube ad with Sara Dietschy for Hint Water, send traffic to a landing page with her favorite flavors in a premade bundle. Keep continuity and make sense of the partnership.
Paying influencers to post is dead. Instead, work with influencers for three reasons: whitelisting their handles for ads, getting content you own across channels, and seeding for organic goodwill.
Focus on niche consumer benefits with influencer content. Everyone has an opinion; let that shine through. People want to know why this specific person likes the product.
The Snif x Half Baked Harvest candle sold out within minutes, multiple times, thanks to Tieghan's audience. Collab product launches hit different — it's a collab post, IRL.
Consumers smell BS a mile away. When seeding product for content, tell creators to be honest. If they didn't like the way it felt or the price, they should say so. Honesty works in your favor when your product is excellent.
Influencers are famous because they're good at making content. When you work with them, let them bring their own vision. They should know your goals and KPIs and will create for that.
Jolie sent 10,000 shower heads to creators with 50 to 5,000,000 followers. Social proof isn't just what's on your website — it's what people find when they search TikTok, Google, or ask friends.
Partnership ads (formerly whitelisting) on Meta always deliver better ROI — whether AOV is $3,000 or $35. They balance overall CPA and build brand without separate brand dollars. Quarter over quarter, we increase the investment.
Some of the best affiliates are generating 7-figure monthly incomes just by sitting in their underwear and buying media better than any agency or employee can. They push the boundaries of what any internal brand marketing team would ever approve.
Clean out your affiliate program: remove all coupon/discount websites pushing out your WELCOME code and trying to get 10% of revenue. Make specific rules against allowing affiliates to bid on your branded terms.
I learned this from SEPHORA: every quarter or 6 months, they have a 30-minute Zoom with their influencers to understand what the influencer's own followers have been asking for. This gives key insights into where trends are going, well before they are already trending.
Full-time content creators who are successful at building their own personal brands on Instagram, TikTok, or Substack are making 7 figures per month in marketplace affiliate commissions. People are tired of the same slop. These creators build a brand around what they stand for, and through that, they can sell anything.
Fitness class instructors are still an underleveraged creator type to partner with. They have so much social proof from the company they teach for, and it works.
For ambassador programs, if your AOV is $350, you're paying $35-70 per sale they generate at 10-20% commission. Compare that to a $200 CPA on Facebook — affiliates can be 3-5x more efficient.
YouTubers out-sell non-YouTubers when it comes to merch. Danny Duncan and NELK sell well over 8 figures per year in merchandise because people relate to them on a deeper level than Instagram or TikTok creators. For CPG influencer seeding, I'd bet on YouTubers every single time.
In 1989, William Tobin patented the concept of affiliate marketing. Since then, Amazon drove the innovation to bring us where we are today. For DTC brands, when you spend over 50% of your AOV acquiring a single customer, the 10% of revenue affiliate charges help increase your overall ROAS and keep your CFO happy.
There are four buckets of affiliates: coupon sites (high-volume, low-quality — give them their own code and a lower commission rate), normal affiliate sites (10-12% commission — Skimlinks, Cartera/Rakuten, Lolli), ambassadors (creators with followings — works best for high AOV $150+ or high consumption products), and premium affiliates (25-40% commission plus flat fees — companies like RewardStyle).
Coupon affiliate sites have incredible SEO and will end up taking credit for a good amount of purchases. Make sure you specifically go into their profiles and keep a lower commission rate. People usually get to coupon sites once they already know they're buying — probably because of the advertising you've done yourself.
Transactional influencer partnerships — select influencers, give free products, pay for a sponsored post, supply a discount code, wait, track, move on — are doomed from the start. Instead, look at influencers as partners and content creators who are an extension of your team. Develop a meaningful relationship, not a transaction.
More than 41% of consumers get more interested in a brand when they partner with a celebrity or influencer they love. But successful influencer partnerships are based on trust, not reach — they aren't built on vanity metrics like follower counts.
Cartera, owned by Rakuten, powers the offers you see in your customer portal as a Chase or Amex cardholder. Getting your brand into credit card affiliate portals places high-quality customers with offers based on their spending habits.
For ambassador affiliate programs, set up creative structures: content cadence requirements, bonuses, tiers of higher commission. Works incredibly well for high AOV products ($150+ per purchase) and high consumption products.
TikTok makes it 10x easier than Instagram to whitelist a creator's post and begin running ads. If you seed a product to creators and the TikTok does well organically, ask them for whitelisting rights — that's the easiest way to start with proven TikTok ads.
The TikTok Creator Marketplace is free. Just apply to join, and you get approved fairly quickly. If you're wondering how to find creators easily, start there before paying for any third-party tool.
For The Pill Club's whitelisting campaign, the creator cheat sheet was built from: customer reviews, pain points, negative feedback, social tags/posts, and survey insights. The culmination of all these first-party insights crafted the bullet points creators spoke to — giving us the best chance to convert cold audiences.
If you don't plan to own creator content outright, track when usage rights expire. The worst blindside: a new marketer joins three years later, finds great content, runs it as an ad, and you're unintentionally violating the agreement.
Shaan Puri's outreach trick from Power Writing: when you reach out to creators, aim for a 'yes, no, or talk to this person' as the response. Your message doesn't need your whole life story — just get them to say yes, no, or talk to my manager.
For Hint Sunscreen's influencer campaign, the brief was intentionally loose: 'We want people to understand how awesome this smells and make sure they know to buy it in Target.' Each creator showed it differently — a daughter smelling it, showing no pasty white finish on darker skin. The collection of approaches made it special to different audiences.
Danny Duncan, one of the largest YouTubers in the US, makes well over 8 figures in revenue through DTC + wholesale merch. The brands who think like creators — not like advertisers — are going to win in the long run.
Snif created a scent, Suganami, in collaboration with Steph Shep. The launch party, seeding, and launch campaign generated at least 500 million impressions. For Snif to buy those 500M impressions at a $30 CPM would have cost $15M. That's the power of a collab product with the right influencer.
Influencer giveaways on Instagram boost followers but the quality is usually bad. When collecting emails through giveaways, the quality is generally poor — they bring down your overall revenue per user, open rates, and click-through rates. I'm not a big fan in 99% of instances.
Creators who are good at content creation as freelancers usually also have a small following of their own. That small following is validation — it means they know what works on the platform. You can still whitelist their content even without a huge following.
Create a contest where the influencer announces and encourages their audience to contribute content. Have 20-50 influencers ready to post pre-approved paid content that tricks their audience into participating. This is more of a brand play versus whitelisting which is mid/lower funnel acquisition.
If you have an influencer on your cap table — investor or advisor — use them to send products to their friends (other influencers). You don't need a celebrity; a super well-connected investor or advisor like Alli Webb works too. Cost is basically COGS plus any special packaging.
Search your product name on TikTok or Instagram — you'll find thousands of videos where people explain your product 10x better than you ever have. Those are creators. Reach out to build a relationship: content on retainer, hire full-time, or send products to review organically.
LuluLemon built an indirect referral engine through fitness trainers: 10-20% off to shop at Lulu, with the understood expectation that instructors wear only LuluLemon when teaching. Their students naturally wanted the same gear. Indirect, but brilliant alignment.
For influencers thinking about starting a DTC brand: if brands already exist doing something similar, partner with them as a distribution channel instead. Do a 6-month trial revenue share deal. You can earn just as much without dealing with inventory, 3PL headaches, customer service, and employees quitting.
According to a Meta report, creator ads deliver ROAS up 35%, CPA down 21%, and CPM down 29% compared to brand-produced ads. That's not a marginal improvement — that's a completely different business model.
The Gordon Ramsay deal got done for 3 reasons: he genuinely loved the product, HexClad was negotiating from leverage ($50M run rate — they'd be fine without the deal), and Gordon became a real partner — shareholder, product collaborator, content creator, not just a spokesperson.
Creator/celebrity partnerships create 'free' top-of-funnel distribution — some have audiences generating hundreds of millions of organic impressions per month. This can yield 10x higher ROI than any other channel, including paid ads.
Before signing a tier-1 celebrity deal, do a smaller paid test first. Creator/celebrity royalties typically range from 0.25-5% of contributed revenue. Make sure there's genuine product-celebrity fit — the celebrity needs to actually use and love the product.
TikTok influencer marketing spending is expected to grow 82% faster than total influencer spending in 2024. The money is moving to TikTok whether you like it or not.
With creator content, negotiate your price to renew usage rights early — before you know the content crushes. Yesterday's price is not today's price. Once a creator knows their content is performing, the renewal cost skyrockets.
When a celebrity organically uses your product, you can't use their content directly — but you CAN pitch earned media. You can't say Sydney Sweeney loves Solawave, but you can pitch People Magazine to write 'Sydney Sweeney Revealed the Secret to Her Glowing Complexion Is a Face Wand.'
For influencer-driven landing pages, put the influencer's own photo with the product in the hero section. If the traffic isn't from an influencer, find creative that closely resembles the creative direction of the traffic source — I've found this to help with conversion.
There are four types of creator relationships — be clear about which you're paying for so you don't overpay: content (micro-creators for assets), reach (wide audience for eyeball coverage), co-sign (credibility signal to their audience), and affiliate sales (commission-based selling).
For product launches, compile video reviews from VIP customers or content creators in advance so you have creator content ready at launch. If you're selling something in beauty, apparel, or with a novel application like mouth tape, people need to see how to use or wear the product before they'll buy.
Sponsor evergreen YouTube content — the links stay in video descriptions forever. Morning Brew found they still gained subscribers months later from YouTube videos long after the initial campaign flight was over. It's a compounding channel most brands ignore.
Influencer marketing now accounts for about the same revenue as email — 16% of total eCommerce sales. Total spend has grown by more than 3x since 2019 to close to $24B per year.
Gruns uses vertical-specific influencers like dietitians as their 'creators' in ads. Everyone wants to work with big influencers, but there is a lot of credibility in using professionals in your product's vertical — dietitians for supplements, dermatologists for skincare, etc.
For influencer seeding, there are now agencies with rosters of people who have 500 to 5,000 followers who know how to make amazing PR-unboxing-style content for short-form platforms. If you have a product with low COGS and shipping costs, you're a great fit for seeding at scale.
On the macro scale for influencer measurement, use a tool like Paramark to understand halo effects across channels or Tracksuit for brand penetration. On the micro scale, use URL shortening with analytics, affiliate tracking, ShopMy, or native TikTok tools.
Meta rebranded 'Whitelisting' to 'Partnership Ads' with product updates. The CPC can be half, CPMs are lower because creator content is more favored in auctions, CTR is higher, and many times AOV and LTV are higher too because the content does a better job explaining the product.
GLP-1 affiliates are generating 7-figure monthly incomes buying media better than any agency. They push boundaries no internal team would approve. Study their funnels — the GLP-1 space is always at the cutting edge of performance marketing tactics.
Mommy bloggers with 150K to 450K followers on Instagram are making $500K to $2M per month in marketplace affiliate commissions. Full-time content creators who build strong personal brands are making 7-figures per month. People are tired of the same slop — creators win because they have a personality people can attach to.