Creator Acquisition with Divi, Solawave, and Social Snowball

Understanding TikTok Shop Beyond Affiliates

0:00I will say too Tik Tok shop is really beyond the affiliate it has a lot to do with like your ad spend are you doing lives are you posting your own shoppable content on your own Tik Tok feed so it's interesting because it's almost like its own little ecosystem that requires you to do like 10 15 different things that require different skill sets for different teams so I think it's important not only to consider it as part of your influencer strategy but it's also like one more step further it's much more than just a partnership or white listing it goes way way beyond that so I think it's really interesting to look at it from like a whole ecosystem perspective instead of just your affiliate relationship all right well we can start

Meet the Experts: Noah, Andrew, and Lauren

0:39with intro super quick my name is Noah I'm the founder of a company called social snowball which is an affiliate platform for DDC Brands where we help you partner with creators and influencers as Affiliates so think of you know traditional Affiliates our Publishers listicles review sites we help you partner with influencers ambassadors and even your own customers in a True Performance partnership and I'm here with Andrew and Lauren I'll let you guys introduce yourself as well yeah hi guys I'm Lauren bonic I'm the senior director of Partnerships and social commerce at divy we're a hair Health brand it's all about scalp health and hair care and putting yourself first and I'm Andrew silverin I'm the CEO and co-founder of solo wave we're a Omni Channel but digitally native skincare company focused on light therapy and Innovative technology for at home skin beautiful yeah these are two of the best operators and influencer I know genuinely so the fact that you guys are joining me on stage thank you very much

The Evolution of Influencer Partnerships

1:33so the first thing I wanted to talk to you guys about I think it's like super interesting because the influencer world is pivoting a lot right now right historically influencer Partnerships were very much you pay and you get deliverables you pay for a post you pay for content and that's the extent of what an influencer partnership would get you but today it's it's different right we have Tik Tok shop and a lot of things are changing and now influencer Partnerships are a little bit more performance-based it's a little bit more affiliate based and it's just a huge shift that we're seeing happening it's not just I pay you and you give me something it's you're in a long-term partnership with me and you get some of the upside of the revenue that you bring to me so I just wanted to ask both of you guys like with this shift what have you guys been seeing in your day-to-day with influencer Partnerships and how do you imagine that this is going to continue to shift over the next 3 five

2:19years yeah I mean I can go first so as a influencer founded brand at divy we kind of have a unique perspective our founder she's really big on Instagram that's always kind of been our home Cathedral where we feel most comfortable and I'll say that's typically like a paid to play space as it relates to influencer

Navigating TikTok Shop: Challenges and Opportunities

2:37then recently we've been really diving deep into Tik Tok shop where it's completely different the Affiliates in that space a lot of them are stay-at-home moms and they're doing this for extra cash on the side or you know we have an affiliate named Shirley and over the past two weeks she generated I think over 30k in gmv and she's got 2K followers and she's in her bedroom and she's like I've never done this before but I just really like this product and what's interesting is these smaller creators who are so new to the game are able to make such an impact on this platform and get momentum and get views and get traction where you know some of the other platforms now are so saturated it's so hard to break through so it's really cool to see all these upand cominging creators who wouldn't even call themselves a Creator they're just like this is my hustle this is my size hustle and trying to figure out how you can best support them as a brand as

3:24they continue to grow at the same time the brand myself I'm learning this day in and day out it's so new the rules change every single day every single week actually surely I don't even think was qualified to be an affiliate until like last week so it's very very interesting and it's very exciting because I do think that's the way just e-commerce in general is starting to shift so it's fun to kind of be on the cusp of that but I will say it's very much a roller coaster ride and very very much unpredictable which is kind of new I think as an operator and a marketer you typically know what levers do what this is just like every day I wake up to something brand new it's a thrill I think to Echo that sentiment I think it's the the entire industry has been upended by these new platforms but also advertising being so much less effective we started our business we self-funded it it was my first company where we didn't raise capital and so we always

4:13kind of assu expensive influencer deals cuz we didn't really have the cash or the confidence to invest and I think what's so cool is to your point there's people with a th000 followers 2,000 that have so much more impact than a 50 or 100K post from a top celebrity the authen icity is amazing and I think it's really you know connecting with people and it's been amazing to have social snowball to really have the best interface for these creators to come to because previously we would gift a lot of product and we'd have a lot of people asked to join an affiliate program and we would send them into our pepper Jam kind of old school platform which is really meant for Publishers not creators and they would get so confused and overwhelmed and lost and we would lose them and I think social snowball given all the Integrations to allows us to continue to kind of maintain those relationships and continue to nurture them cuz to your point it's changing from oneoff post to really an ongoing

5:03relationship and I think that's so important and you asked about where it's going I think what one thing I was Jus thinking about recently is because of the fact that there's so many people that are authentic and new to new to these platforms I think we're going to go through another one of those shifts of identifying the importance of authenticity and really people doing their research on the products they're promoting I think Tik Tok shops been so exciting and it's also very exciting for people that they can post a video and potentially go viral but with that comes a lot of stuffff that maybe consumers can't trust or maybe the influencer they're trusting that Creator but they themselves haven't had the time to really understand the product and so there's a lot of pressure on Tik Tok shops I don't know if you've seen this where I don't know if you guys do this we we we take a little bit more of a backseat but some brands are like hammering you daily to post and so it

5:48puts this pressure on like quick output and so I think similar to when influencer marketing first took off and there was this understanding you can't just believe what every influencer says I think we're going to go through that cycle again with these more you know con content creator first creators that don't necessarily have massive followings yeah yeah totally agree and I think with that like I I feel like a lot of people focus really in in the influencer world Focus really hard on influencer sourcing and influencer Discovery how do I find great influencers which is super important and you guys definitely have killer strategies for that but what's not

Retaining Influencers: Strategies and Tools

6:18talked about that much is influencer retention because now that the partnership is shifting into the direction that you guys are talking about and it's more long-term and more mutually beneficial it's really important that you retain these influencers after you acquire them so I'm curious to hear from both of you like how and I know we talked about like there's different email strategies and there's a lot of different ways to do it but how have you guys been able to actually retain these influencers for your brand long term after you acquir them initially yeah I mean social snowball has been great because you guys are integrated with quo and things like that so we have flow set up that help not only welcome an affiliate educate them on our brand educate them on what good content looks like they get their welcome gift they're also incentivized with different tiers throughout the process on how much they're earning I'm also able to send like a one-off campaign if we have a promo or a product

7:04launching and it's super easy it's like no different than sending an email to our regular list and then at the same time I have all of their information so when I want to one off someone CU I know that they have you know a special story to tell or an occasion coming up like I can directly email them from the brand and really nurture that relationship one-on-one so through the system super super easy so thanks Noah we also sometimes will take things offline and do chat groups SL groups things like that for quicker communication but that email is really really clutch for just like Mass hurting of people yeah yeah I agree with that I think the key thing is showing up where they are most likely to listen to you or hear from you so I think one of the challenges with Tik Tok shop and the rise of all these Bots that people are using is people are getting spammed with thousands of desperate Brands all over the world with all sorts of products and

7:53very little curation which I think is why Tik Tok tried really preventing that early on and so I think we similarly love the caveo integration and I think that's great and we get the data of who opened the email and did they click on anything and if not we can follow up with a text or other channels what we've now added on is an amazing company we started using a couple months ago called nectar AI which I strongly recommend looking into is a way to connect your creator program and your DMs and it's basically a clavio but for social and so essentially what we found is a lot of times going into the DMS is going to get a much better response rate yeah than an email and doing what you can to get them to essentially we leverage nectar to get them to opt into those DMS so that they're receiving the information and responding and then I think it's really the human touch I think because of the scale of these platforms I was just

8:39reading someone did an analysis yesterday that the average Tik Tok shop will generate about $130 per video and therefore to do a million dollars a year it's like thousands of pieces of content and so that makes it really challenging to have these personal relationships I think it's really finding your key creators sending them you know IRL gifts inviting them to events and the last thing we've gotten feedback too is sharing back data with them like what did we see work or what are we seeing working from other creators cuz back in the day with our pre-social snowball days we'd send stuff out to creators they'd sign up for affiliate if it wasn't effective we'd never hear from them again and they might either have moved onto another product or been maybe even embarrassed that they couldn't drive traffic and they all want not everyone but a lot of them want feedback on what else is working what Hooks are working what length of video what product should I talk about so it's really having the two-way communication

9:29wherever they're active I like to call it like a live breaking session like I just had one earlier today instead of just sending across like a Word document or a PowerPoint we got on a call we like tossed around a couple ideas here's what works here's what doesn't they have so many ideas like I feel like it's much more of a collaborative experience at this stage of the game which is really nice I think it's super critical cuz we put together these briefs and some people really want them and some people get them and no matter what we say they think we're demanding that they say exactly these things and so we've had some people get very frustrated that we're getting like a 75 page power point we're just trying to give them ideas exactly and I always say like you're the expert I want to hear from you like even today I was thinking oh you know it might be nice for you to demonstrate something on your hair and she's like actually I've got extra extensions I'm

10:07just going to whip those out and put the product on one and not on the other and I was like great I would have never thought of that this is why we're on the phone right so and she probably loved talking to you about exactly it sounds so simple but it really does come back to that one-on-one with the Affiliates that you're really trying to nurture how many creators will join that call and how often do you do them I mean right now it's like selective probably like 10 15 a month but we're still so new we're like month three on Tik Tok shop yeah very cool yeah so something else you guys are talking about is how it's like the smallest creator that usually like just surprises you and I think like another Trend I'm seeing is the criteria for what an an individual needs to be a an affiliate is just like basically nothing now anyone can be an affiliate

Turning Customers into Affiliates

10:50so a strategy that I've seen both of you guys execute really well is turning customers into an a into Affiliates and so I was just was hoping you guys could share a little bit about that strategy as well yeah I mean that's like the main reason why we went to social snowball in the first place we are seeing from our post-p purchase surveys that a really really major source of traffic for us which is word of mouth and recommendations from family and friends I think it's because our products are so personal like if you're experiencing hair thinning or hair loss you're going to want to hear it from like a trusted source and no better person than a friend or family so I always saw that the opportunity was there I just needed someone to help me kind of pour gas on the fire which is why we came to social snowball in the first place and we've had a really great success I think the most important thing to know is in July

11:30we did like an incentive with all of our customers who are now Affiliates and we had said hey like whoever sells the most months of July gets this like prize bag we get a vacation we kind of treated them like influencers in a bigger way than we have before outside of just the standard commission and we Forex the performance in the program from the month prior so definitely really worked adding in special incentives and then we like took the winners on like a little trip we shouted them out on our social media and they really are just our customers so it was really special and I think super effective and we're looking at and doing that now like throughout the year and pulsing it in a calendar to really make sure we're nurturing the program and not just kind of like letting it live yeah i' say my my favorite example we've had is a customer in her late 60s that would never think probably didn't know what an affiliate was and it would

12:15never say that she's a Creator but happened to send us a video that at the time this is pre- social snowball but she you know my co-founder saw it and felt like this is brilliant we need to run this as an ad to me I actually thought it would totally flop if rambled on for three minutes it was like a very long-winded personal tale of why she loves the product and what ended up happening was that video through wh listing drove $7 million of Revenue over two years it continues to run and I think the point is really in that case it was storytelling personal storytelling for us works really well and to your point what better person to tell that story than your customer that actually has been using this product and loving it for a while and can talk to her motivation for buying or you know what skepticism and objections you had versus an influencer or tradition like a paid creator that you know is whipping through content super quickly and a lot

13:08of people can tell when like they literally open it out of the box 5 minutes ago and they're trying to speak authentically so I think the authenticity is so important and then beyond that it's like to that same point of why that person would never think of themselves as a Creator or an affiliate it's like we're and we're still learning it's what language do you use to really activate your customers because yes some of them would be excited to refer and earn some will be excited to earn a commiss Mission but especially with our demos some of which are above the age of 40 a lot of them are not thinking of themselves as like true influencers and that's not really what they are looking to do if you frame it more as like come to us share your story help Inspire others that gets them really excited and in some cases the financial incentives are great in other cases I can't tell you how many people are excited that they come to us're like oh my God I got

13:49500,000 views on this video and like that's really rewarding and exciting to them because they would never think of themselves as someone that so many people were compelled to listen to their story and engage that's awesome and these are customers like these are people that you didn't even have to find you didn't have to reach out to they found you they made a purchase from you and they're doing this on top of that which is just crazy which also shows that you guys have built really incredible Brands thank you so I think a lot of brands also like that do have influencer programs maybe some of the brands here are already partnering

Dealing with Fraud in Influencer Programs

14:17with influencers a really common issue is fraud and particularly codes leaking to coupon sites and honey it can create this attribution disaster of overpaid commissions and then reconciliation with the affiliate it it it can be a nightmare so I just know you guys have both dealt with this and it's not really an issue anymore so I just wanted to see if you guys can touch on that as well yeah I mean we use safe links through social snowballs that's helped a lot we actually have like a separate affiliate program just for our hair stylist that's run through a different program and we're constantly catching code leaks like every single day every single week and it's always an issue to be like hey we have to deactivate your code so it's kind of cool to have like the direct comparison CU we don't really have that problem often at all with our customers so it's been really helpful for us especially as we scale it's always top of mine and it's not like every everyone has time just to sit on

15:00you know coupon sites all day to spy and catch people yeah yeah it's definitely been a hot topic for the last couple years at our company we've had podcasts we've run that were a flop and then we start seeing a huge pickup two months later and we're like ringing the celebration Bell that we made a smart investment and then we find out it's cuz it leaked to some sketchy coupon site that's and back to not investing further into podcasts not to call out podcast that's just an example but we've seen so much code leakage use all sorts of tools to track it and that's why it's still been hard to get everyone on our team to get excited about affiliate that being said with the safe links feature of social snowball it's really prevented these codes from leaking so explain what safe link is yeah let me so to explain basically thanks to honey and rutin and all these plugins a lot of people have on their browser they're sitting on your computer listening and reading every

15:52code you're typing in and every page you're reading and essentially building up glossies of coupon codes to use on sites and that's why people love them because when they go to a site to shop they can easily launch a code in well often times that code wasn't meant to be leaked to the public it might have been for a podcast or it might have been for you know VIP customers to get retention and so a common challenge when you have affiliate programs is that you're basically incentivizing these companies to steal codes that weren't meant to be used to give customers discounts which is a direct hit to your you know your profit margin your ebit margin and on top of that you're giving them an affiliate commission for driving it so it that doesn't have incremental value the whole point of the code was to get incremental sales and now it's just being used and abused and so when we started working with influencer creators on sometimes it wasn't their fault their codes that were in a YouTube description

16:40or an Instagram post would end up within 24 hours on the common coupon code sites and and especially back then we used to give a commission I mean we still do with snowball but we' give a commission based on sales driven by that code so all of a sudden we were paying wild amounts of money to creators when a lot of those sales were not driven by the Creator it was just someone else from an ad that clicked a coupon site so it becomes really hard to attribute the incremental value and with safe links it allows it so that there's not codes that leak people can see an offer and when they click it they they see the code on a screen which is I think on the back end unique to them and when they activate it that code can't be reused on a platform and so it really helps keep everyone honest and particularly prevent these coupon sites from leeching and kind of gaining additional margin from us when they have't driven value so

17:27it's been super helpful so now we don't have to worry about the thousands of graders that we're working with yeah that definitely saves a lot of money so when you look at your grader for both you guys when you look at your greater influencer strategy there's obviously a lot of pieces to it there's Instagram

Integrating TikTok Shop into Your Strategy

17:40YouTube now Tik Tok shop Tik Tok shop is obviously a really hot topic right now so I'm curious to both of you guys how you're incorporating and plan to continue incorporating Tik Tok shop affiliate into your greater influencer strategy yeah it's interesting I feel like it's becoming more and more one in the same right I mean we're inviting these creators to our events we're putting them on on our mailing lists we're sending them bespoke gifts but at the same time there's like a certain finesse like I mentioned that call earlier the content is very different I think that hits on Tik Tok shop so it's really important to make sure that you understand what's resonating what's not and how to work with your creators on that channel to really coach them in the right way to help them kind of take off so I think the content's very different I will say too Tik Tok shop is really beyond the affiliate it has a lot to do with like your ad spend are you doing

18:26lives you know are you posting your own able content on your own Tik Tok feed so it's interesting because it's almost like its own little ecosystem that requires you to do like 10 15 different things that require different skill sets for for different teams so I think it's important not only to consider it as part of your influencer strategy but it's also like one more step further it's much more than just a partnership or wh listing it goes way way beyond that so I think it's really interesting to look at it from like a whole ecos ecosystem perspective instead of just you know your affiliate relationship yeah I would say of LoveHate relationship with Tik Tok shop depending on the hour of the day but in general I think what's so cool is the scale of creators and the fact that again you don't have to have a bunch of followers to have content that can go viral some of the challenges we deal with you know with our the you know early success

19:16of our business we started getting a lot of knockoffs and people ripping us off that we're you know always seemingly in some sort of legal battle with and the challenge with Tik Tok shops is it can very easily the Creator could do a great job getting someone excited about a product but because it's a very like discount seemingly very discount and price sensitive platform it's also a really easy place for that person to then get distracted onto something similar or cheaper whatever it is it also is challenging just to make sure that they're not you know that they're following regulatory guidelines so when we think of a lot of new creators coming in or your customers they don't understand nor it took me two years to understand in like a thousand legal calls what you can and can't say about a health or beauty product and we as brands are entirely responsible for every word that they utter so it's just a lot the volume is exciting but it's also a challenge to make sure that

20:02everyone's following guidelines and and speaking positive about the brand but I love the fact I mean especially now you launched this connection with Tik Tok shop and the other affiliate program the more traditional snowball program what I'm excited about is sometimes someone might produce an amazing video that because of the time of day or the hashtags they use or didn't use or the description it didn't perform well on Tik Tok and it would do really well on another channel so I think that's what I'm most excited about is to say like hey we might have met you through Tik Tok we might have met you through Instagram and our own team you might have found us through snowball but essentially like here's all the different platforms you can show up in to either repurpose content which I don't even know if you can still do that without getting in trouble but at least make iterations of your content and give it more life CU to us anyone who's pouring their blood swe and deers into

20:46content we want to give them every possible option to benefit from that and then especially we want to be able to whitel list it so put ads spend behind it to really further boost the content that seems to be compelling and make sure it's getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible yep yep yeah

Preparing for BFCM with Influencers and Creators

21:01okay and then maybe the most important question obviously bfcm is coming up the the prep time is now everyone's thinking about it and I think you know you guys have both done a pretty good job in past years incorporating influencer and Creator into your greater bfcm strategy and I think a lot of people are worried about it clashing if you just don't line up the discounts right or just there's so many moving pieces with bfcm so I'm curious for this year you know coming up how are you guys planning to incorporate influencer and Creator into your bfcm strategy yeah sure I mean influencers and Affiliates are getting early access to our sale like mid November before the brand goes public sale we're going to have some bespoke bundles that we're working with some creators on where they get to curate their own products as part of their bundle we're also going to do another one of those incentives that I mentioned that we did over the summer so for our customers incentivizing them to sell

21:50during the key season and then probably the most different thing this year is we're doing like a series of Mega lives on Tik Tok shop we're going live for like six hours a day with creators so that's going to be interesting and something that we've been dipping our toes into have you guys been doing lives already or is yes so when I was handed Tik Tok shop I never imagined I'd be a Live host but I help host for live yeah I do like once a week tune in what time what's the time Thursdays at 12:30 Central yeah all right yeah I will not be doing all six hours thank goodness I have help but yeah that'd be brutal that'd be brutal do you get to use your own affiliate code are you making commissional yeah double diping A little I don't know you can call my bus it's I might have to look if you're driving rev like there's no reason for you not to pull that in right we get you a c Shack

Live TV Fun and Team Challenges

22:36you can jump in the live if you want oh dude you me on live TV is just a good time it's fun it's it's it's been fun I say for us I mean we it's usually like the Annual Festival of my team hating me because we have to try so many different things with the you know the whole ecosystem changing so definitely

Leveraging Influencers and Whitelisting

22:55this year a big Tik Tok shop component a lot more Creator influencer work similar to you having kind of exclusive offers for creators before we go live publicly and I love the idea of like personal bundles for different creators I'm inspired by that so maybe I'll add that to another reason the team hates me sorry team but yeah I think just this this year especially advertising is I feel like the digital advertising world has been completely Rewritten over the last you know especially the last year and so with that comes using all these other channels and especially creators to really Drive New audiences Facebook for us has driven much less incremental new eyeballs no matter what we tell it to do or what settings we put and so for us it's really leveraging influencers and Affiliates and really going even harder this year on the whitelisting component so that when we have signals of what's working we can really put media spend behind it because with the right whitelisting we often we'll see a

23:452 to 3x Improvement on return on ad spend than on our own branded ads so it's really just leveraging our community and getting the message out there about the promotion and and sustaining that throughout November and then into December as well are you guys

Boosting Commissions and Giveaway Success

23:59boosting the commission rate for your influencers during that period like how are you making sure that they're gonna because I'm sure these creators they're getting hit up by a million Brands to post during bfcm like how are you locking them in now yeah we're raising at least our customers they typically earn $10 so we're raising it to 20 okay when you look at tax it's not that bad and then for our like Affiliates that earn a percentage commission they'll earn like 5% higher during that time period I don't have an answer for you but I feel like we I think we probably I mean I'm not in charge of that decision but I would say we probably are increasing both customer and affiliate commissions and I think we're also working more closely with them to understand like how do we also control our own margin if we were to spend a million dollars to advertise one single video like what happened last year just also being mindful that we're not continuing the same large commission

24:46that we would give someone strictly for organic views so I think it's kind of balancing out like when we pay for it what do we pay and then if it's just more traditional influencer affiliate kind of what what the fair commission is and Lauren I think the way that you did for the customer Affiliates was like super interesting the fact that the fact that it Forex the revenue in a month is insane are you going to do anything like that for we haven't decided what the priz is and in July it was so simple it's literally a suitcase full of didy and a trip so we haven't decided what the prize is yet but we want to do something and is it just whoever refers the most revenue or how is it like a leader board or like a second and third place prize I think like for November we have to kind of have like some other prizes like most content posted things like that so definitely interested to see how it pans out amazing mhm

25:28yeah we can open up up for questions Chuck I I'm going to open up for

AI Creators: The Future of Marketing?

25:31questions but I I want to ask all three of you what's your thoughts on AI creators is this I'm I'm I'm so curious about this because it's the opposite of going into building relation and building story to the customer yet everyone's like but it's so cost effective we have to do it so I want to go down the line and know I want your opinion on this too dude I I think for ad creative it's super interesting because you could spin up a ton of new creative like very affordably I think as far as like attributable revenue from like an actual creator that has the or AI creator that has their own social following people buy from people and that's the value of Creator marketing and that's why you would rather buy from a Creator than an ad from Zuck so I'm skeptical to see if like these actual AI creators that have 5 million followers are actually going to be able to drive you know the same conversion that a real human being would but I do think for

26:17Creative like for actually getting ad creative it's a cost- effective way it's definitely the future I I would say the same thing about people shopping from humans like I don't know if any of you have played around with these tools I Contin to on a weekly basis and they're just so bizarre like I made an AI of myself last night and it was terrifying and couldn't even understand what I was saying I looked like I was like heavily drugged and so I can't imagine oh it was you like your face that was like try number seven you should have gotten that ready to pull up on the screen thank God it's not here but basically I think we're probably a year away from it really working but I think to your point people buy from people especially what we see is people buy when there's like an authentic real story I'm sure in the near future there you'll be able to have an AI tell a very real scene story that was fabricated by

27:00a marketer but I think there's so much value untapped today in real people and I think that's really what's exciting about social snowball is really leveraging real people of which you know if you I mean I would say if you don't have customers that's a great place to start if you don't have customers and don't have a budget use an AI tool start there but if you have real customers and they have exciting stories to tell like I would invest your time there instead of you know trying to make a bot work yeah I second that again I think our products are super super personal and when people share their own before and afters or say hey like this got me through postpartum or this really gave me confidence back and you know when I was going through menopause or chemo or whatever it was I think people really want to see that and hear that from like a real authentic human being those are the kinds of stories that are just hard to digest from an AI

27:45Creator I think it also would be terrible for the brand if people found out that you were making up fabricating chemo stories with an AI I feel like that could be a downturn f before and afters I shudder at the thought yeah once the OG Affiliates get a hold of this thing it's over it's going to be selling all shorts of shenanigans question right here ma'am it okay I it's two questions the

TikTok Shop Success Across Industries

28:14first one is beauty just kills it on Tik Tok and it seems like other Industries it's like oh no we totally knock it out of the park and it's like are you beauty yeah okay well like other Industries are there a lot of other Industries killing it on Tik Tok shops or is it really beauty or fashion I mean we really tried hard we did affiliate like through the platform what's your space pet lots of bll penis anyone anyone dogs love it into it I mean you have yours we buy tons of bow penises yeah I mean don't go for a North American South American is where it's at but that's where I went wrong are there any I mean is it like any industry can kill it I know Tik Tok has been trying to push other Industries but it just seems like a lot of effort for a lot of falling on your face have you guys seen it like social snowball maybe I've seen a lot of food and beverage Brands kill it I've

29:20seen a ton of Health and Wellness pet I want to say I have but I'm none are coming to the top of my mind I feel like if would work though because it's very easy to film a video of your dog and you know that people love those videos and if it's with a cool product that they're engaging with or if it's a helness product for pets which is now like a huge category you know I think it would do similar I don't knowes does the social snowman know any examples that maybe I'm not thinking of he's he talks to a lot of Brands he loves bully how did he did he make you do this not if you are in trouble my friends link no we there's one there's one called it's actually for cat piss and cat urine pagag again p a g a link you to these two these two people they run basically it's like to get rid of the odor that's makes it makes the owner no longer

30:15have like allergies towards the things that cats do I don't know I'm not a cat person obviously but I can get link you too cuz they are doing pretty decent numbers on that and then there's another company called dog sauce that's just starting to Launch dog sauce topper that they put on their food so those are two other gravy it is like a gravy yeah exactly can I just

Integrating Organic and Paid Social Strategies

30:36ask one more yes of course one more is how do you get because where we're at we have or we have organic social and we have paid social so if you're talking to customers how do you merge those two or like who is in the DMS of the channels so that you can find the customers because our organic person is not going to be thinking like we should bring this person on as a paid affiliate you know we'll have ambassadors or whatever but so how are the Departments structured where you have the proper person in the DMS does that make sense yeah I would say what's we've had the same challenge for a while and nectar which I mentioned earlier it's get nectar they have an amazing tool that basically allows you to start using links their own you know your own branded links in your DMs but helps connect create the creators that are also customers and helps you better also track the revenue through it but through that we've been able to better

31:29tie the two together and through their platform you can also assign you know this type of person this team should talk to versus that team so it's like a CRM kind it's basically like Cavo but for your DMs on social CU that's always been a huge challenge for us is really understanding who's a customer who's a prospective customer who's a celebrity I we I wrote to a celebrity once by accident not realizing who it was I was like they asked for a free case for their product and I absolutely not I know and I was like oh shoot it was actually one of my favorite musicians so the point is this tool helps you bucket you know who are the VIPs who are the customers who are the repeat customers and really help figure out who should handle what part of the DMS and then the tricky part is especially I was mentioning whitelisting is like helping customers understand what that really means if you're trying to put paid spend behind their content cuz that's usually

32:12a newer concept so we we have a lot of materials that explain it so it doesn't scare them but actually helps them understand like how it works yeah cuz social just now there's so many people in the one space and it's like this needs to go there that needs to go there okay thank you very much questions go throw it to the Snowman yeah I let snowman doesn't speak man to speak okay cool so one question I have so obviously safe safe links is awesome we we dealt with code leakage for a really long time and it's made my job way easier there's obviously limitations with it which is not all creators want to include your link in their let's just say like link to bio or whatever their short links are in their bio how are you measuring that non-affiliate awareness are you are you formulating some sort of EMV or are you just measuring cpms how I guess how are you tracking that outside of just affiliate Revenue are you saying

33:17specifically was that say either one of us either either of you yeah I mean we just started tracking EMV like recently as a brand just looking for directional like increases month of a month as we start seeding more doing more things like that so we definitely look at that I would say obviously it's not the most like direct metric there ever was and we'll look at cpms every once in a while for like our targeted seing campaigns but mostly EMV yeah I'd say for us we're more tracking I just don't really know how to like really way in on EMV and so we look more at just overall brand awareness how it's tracking month over month how to some degree that correlates with the validated eyeballs from our paid spend and then looking then you can look kind of at the metrics of organic and to make sense of what's really contributing but I would say it's more looking overall at kind of traffic Trends and and branded surge Trends which is a

34:06challenge both with snowball and outside of it is we know for instance so much of our Amazon sales are driven by people that see an ad don't click it and search it on Amazon in the front hello I'm John from tandem Surf

Maximizing Co-Branded Product Opportunities

34:23and I'm excited to share that tandem surf which is a shark tank water sports brand has now partnered with Margaritaville with over 20 million visitors wow they call themselves parro heads that's big four years in and because of our Shark Tank update the president of Margaritaville reached out yeah dude yes thank you thank you you understand the impact that makes on our our small family brand 100% so now that we're partnering with Margaritaville with 20 million parro head visitors how can we leverage this co-branded product opportunity along with the right Tech and the right content in order to maximize this incredible licensing opportunity tandem Surf and Margaritaville well congrats first of all I mean I think the low hanging fruit would be this influx of customers you're getting customers from a new channel now they could be powerful Affiliates for you and so if you're turning those into Affiliates postp purchase and maybe you're tailoring the message a little bit more to the Margaritaville demographic they probably want to hear or something different like

35:28Andrew was talking about some customers it's more about sharing their story some or it's more about margaritas so maybe if you tailor it more to them and have a smooth postp purchase flow for enrolling those customers into your affiliate program integrating that with your email and just having it be so that all of your customers know to share they have a link to share I think that could go a long way are they buying online or they also buying at Resorts so that's a great question so it is all through all different channels they have over 65 locations Resorts retail locations and online so for example with some other co-branded opportunities they've done with Crocs for example in 24 hours the Crocs Margaritaville shoe did over $5 million in 24 hours oh my God been the wrong business I would say for you if they're buying in store what about also activating them right there they get their products there's a little explainer of the program get them their link right then and there while they're

36:23hot and get them to like sip a margar give them a free Margarita if they shoot a video with their purchase and talk about it give them their link that's sick get their email cuz once those margaritas wear off they're going to they may forget about the purchase or you know what it meant to them at the time but I think like we've learned the sooner you at the right time where especially when you have that one toone relationship that's when you can really get them excited about doing something especially customers that they're not used to doing which is creating content for marketing purposes yeah because they'll be taking our products into the pool out into the ocean so it's paddle boards it's water Saddles sit and sip products do you put in kind of insert in the Box we've done that for Amazon as of recent and we are working on something for our D Toc site but yeah I think putting it in the packaging is super smart but I think based on everything

37:09you just said I'm just thinking also a lot of times creators struggle or hold off on producing content CU they're like waiting for the perfect moment that their house is clean they're not breaking out they're having a good day blah blah blah if they're on vacation at Margaritaville Three Margaritas deep and just bought your product this is the time time is now probably going to be so good so we going to be so good can we activate them that quickly as they can become a customer and then an affiliate like that I think they it could also just be instead of raving about the product it could just be like why they just bought it and their excitement they're at Margaritaville this is why they bought it and like share that excitement with others and let others that are at home on Tik Tok feel like they could get an ounce of the Margaritaville Vibe wherever they are on their couch from afar got it thank you guys anything else yeah no I love all

37:58that I think you could even kind of hit them up with an email or two after the fact and say like hey like here's a voucher for X Y and Z thanks for you know joining us at Margaritaville looking forward for your next video kind of thing so maybe even having our own community of Tandem Margaritaville users and so forth that sign up yeah it thank you I want that give me that oh let's go oh God hey guys Jean

Nurturing Affiliates for a Strong Start to the Year

38:28so everyone's talking about like Black Friday Cyber Monday and that's really the focus I found building Out programs that you start nurturing them now for sales in January so that you can start off a January really strong so do either of you guys already have strategies in place of how you're nurturing your Affiliates to like really get a really strong start of the year in 2025 yeah we have a couple things happening in October I mentioned earlier we were doing a a bunch of lives for Black Friday but we're having our first one on October 7th that coincides with Tik Tok shop deals for you days so we're flying in like three of the major Affiliates from La we're going to do a sixh hour live in our home office with our influencer Founders so we're really excited to try that as like a first start to warm up for the rest of the season I think for us we're still creating new programs for Affiliates and there's so much to now apply to the

39:23Black Friday period to test but essentially for the new year we have four of our most important products launching next month it naturally takes time to get the information out and to really nurture the relationship there so we're kind of holding off on introducing it to them then but then really creating more contest and giveaways to incentivize more excitement and more content creation through [Music] January all right I got one for Noah

Influencer Program Impact on AOV and CPMs

39:49do you see like any like is there an average aov with brands that just hit better with influencers like is there a threshold like hey brands that are selling an aov under this much just has better performance brands that between here and here is the best and then brands that are above this just doesn't really work like I wouldn't say there's a sweet spot I would say the rule is the higher the aov usually the better for the only reason that you could offer a more generous commission and that really moves the needle so we have a lot of high higher ticket Brands like for example like high ticket health and wellness we work with like plunge. comom and the the pod company like these ice baths they can offer like a $100 $200 CPA payout because it's like a $2,000 aov you know for some of these some of these brand so obviously every influencer is going to be super motivated for that and every customer is going to change their life if they refer

40:41a few friends like it's super meaningful so that you know that being said lower aov Brands still do well it's just like I think the mistake they make is they offer too low of a commission and what I always recommend a brand does is Benchmark their commission to their paid ads CA Target so like if a brand is like a $30 aob but they have to pay $30 on meta to get that customer and that works for them like they shouldn't be offering a $5 commission they should be maybe not 30 but maybe if their goal is more like in the 25 to 20 range then all for that and then it's still going to do good things to your Blended CAC overall it's still bringing the overall numbers down but it's not so low enough of a commission that nobody's really incentivized right on cool and then for Lauren and Andrew do you guys see I heard I think Andrew mentioned something about house like do you see your your paid acquisition cpms drop as

41:29you like scale your influencer program and how are you measuring that and then also the second thing is for both you guys do you generally see a higher aov with the influencers orders I'd say in mind if we we're doing more so I guess the first part about your question to him was around aov and whether that's like there's kind of a sweet spot and I think a critical thing that we're still testing and learning more about is where's like really figure out ways to drive urgency cuz we we have a higher aov we're a higher aov business where aov is about $140 $150 it's really hard for people to impulsively spend and that's where you know testing offers with them or exclusive bundles for a limited period of time can create the urgency to convert people and so I think that just because you have higho doesn't mean that that inherently will mean it's harder to convert to your other question I'd say we it's easier for us to track certain wh listing performing

42:23considerably better if we trust in platform data or triple whale and unfortunately we trust neither but if we you know triangulate between the two we can generally track that on a per influencer creative basis I would say we've been doing more analyses looking back and it does feel like the or it does seem to show that the periods of time where we've done tons of seating like a th to, 1500 influencers in a given month tends to have a halo effect for the next 30 or so days in terms of lowering cpms and probably because of it kind of signaling in new audiences to bring in the one thing I'll qualify though is with the ads that we're whitelisting there seems to be a much shorter lifespan where you get that better row as or CPM so it's what what seems to be happening is you're benefiting from the audience they have and maybe like the immediate look alikes and then it fatigues really quickly so another brand that you know we got some notes on recently they were saying

43:12they're just cycling through creators and whitelisting it to kind of keep beefing up the audiences so you're sending more signals to Facebook so I definitely have confidence it's helping I just it's hard to say that like what the quantity needs to be to sustain that Improvement yeah it's again the aov note we're a little bit lower so like typically around 65 if we do a specific bundle we'll get closer to like 100 on Tik Tok shop I will say though it's closer to 50 we find the lower price bundles obviously the customer there is just like a little bit more price sensitive but for the most part outside of Tik Tok shop that's pretty much in line with like our normal D toz aov which is nice to see in terms of tracking performance like I feel like it's like you it's like it's all over the place to be honest I do think that we've really started ramping up seating in the past 3 months and we do tracking and being been able to see dead

43:57directional increase I'm interested to see what happens like 3 months from now if we do see our CPM start to decrease from a weight listed perspective we typically have a most success with our founder content she's an influencer and her content by far in a way gets the most scale most spend higher surad best metrics we're trying to find ways to diversify but definitely there's like something really special about our founder story and her content time and time

Concluding Thoughts and Final Q&A

44:22again Noah Lauren and Andrew thank you guys for joining us today well done thank you [Applause] thank you so man [Music]