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McGee & Co +
CreatorIQ

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Om avsnittet

Ta reda på hur denna ledande återförsäljare av heminredning använder plattformen för hantering av influencersamarbeten för att få ledningens stöd.

Gå till upptäck

  • 02:13: Varför influencer och affiliate sammanfördes under samma interna ansvarsområde
  • 06:32: De grundläggande skillnaderna mellan traditionella affiliates och affiliateskapare
  • 20:23: Viktiga top-of-funnel-mätvärden för ledningsgruppens godkännande gällande influencer-affiliates

Gäster

McGee & Co. logo

Amanda Houston

Influencer and Affiliate Marketing Manager at McGee & Co.

CreatorIQ logo

Mike Balducci

General Manager of Affiliate, Ecommerce and Payment Solutions at CreatorIQ

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Avsnittstranskript

Observera, transkriptionen av detta avsnitt finns endast på engelska.

[00:00:00]Rob: Hi, Sam.

[00:00:07]Sam: Hey, Rob.

[00:00:08]Rob: So, on today's episode, I understand we're talking about your earned value in life or something? Is that right?

[00:00:14]Sam: No, no, no, no, no. We're not talking about my earned value in life. That's an entirely different podcast consisting [00:00:20] exclusively of bi weekly,

[00:00:21]Rob: Fortnightly

[00:00:22]Sam: Bi-monthly Zoom calls between me and my therapist.

Today's episode discusses a much simpler concept called earned media value.

[00:00:29]Rob: Okay, okay, yeah, that makes more sense. I mean, while I do moonlight as your therapist on occasion, um, I'm not sure I really want to commit to that full time.

[00:00:37]Sam: Honestly, that's totally fair. Sometimes I'm not [00:00:40] sure if my own therapist wants that full time gig either.

[00:00:42]Rob: Yeah, that's what she told me. Welcome back to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast.

[00:00:47]Sam: So the global influencer marketing industry is expected to reach a whopping 14 billion dollars in 2024. But what many brands don't realize is that those that are finding the most success with influencer marketing are those that [00:01:00] are blending creator partnerships into the affiliate channel.

[00:01:02]Rob: Yeah, exactly. More influencer activity into their larger affiliate strategy as the tactics really complement each other in key ways.

[00:01:12]Sam: This is why today's guest, McGee & Co, an interior brand from Studio McGee that offers designer furniture and decor, turned to [00:01:20] CreatorIQ as the right partner for bringing influencer and affiliate together.

[00:01:23]Rob: Now, prior to this, I wasn't actually all that familiar with McGee & Co, but I do know CreatorIQ. They're a global influencer management platform, and they help brands manage and scale their creator campaigns. But, how does the platform actually ease McGee & Co 's efforts to blend influencer into affiliate, [00:01:40] Sam?

[00:01:40]Sam: Well, actually, Awin has a strategic partnership with CreatorIQ, so our advertisers like McGee & Co, can easily connect both platforms. We're an incredibly robust partnerships network.

[00:01:49]Rob: So would you say that makes the CreatorIQ an Awin duo a real win-win?

[00:01:55]Sam: You just couldn't resist that one, could you?

[00:01:58]Rob: Nope.[00:02:00]

[00:02:04]Amanda Houston: We had brought affiliate in-house a little over a year ago.

Sam: With me is Amanda Houston, Influencer and Affiliate Marketing Manager at McGee & Co

[00:02:13]Amanda Houston: And so for us, it was figuring out where affiliate fits within the marketing team, how to optimize within our [00:02:20] team when it came to deciding how that role would fit together.

Influencer felt like a really seamless fit. We were seeing a little bit of success influencer affiliates. So we decided to pair the influencer and affiliate roles together into one role. And so I oversee all affiliate and influencer partnerships.

[00:02:39]Sam: Mike, tell me, [00:02:40] what about this partnership opportunity and challenge the McGee & Co team was facing most excited you and CreatorIQ?

It's

[00:02:47]Mike Balducci: really the perfect use case of our platform where you're blending What's best about Awin in terms of the affiliate marketing capabilities for conversion tracking, commission tracking, and all that data with what we have on the [00:03:00] influencer side, which is, you know, connections to the social media platforms for visibility into the individual influencer profiles and bringing those things together to, uh, really quickly scale up am affiliate creator program.

[00:03:11]Sam: And that's Mike Balducci, CreatorIQ's General Manager of Affiliate and Ecommerce.

[00:03:16]Mike Balducci: We are not an affiliate platform. We don't try to be an affiliate platform. We just [00:03:20] integrate with the brand's existing affiliate platform. So that seems to be the best model. It's working. I think we were just looking at it.

We have over 60 customers that, that do that. And McGee & Co is one of the most successful ones we have. They're doing great. And, uh, it's proving to be a really good, successful model.

[00:03:35]Sam: So Amanda, we talked a bit about this beforehand, but part of the reason for kind of [00:03:40] blending influencer into affiliate strategy, it was to like, try and get more c suite buy in for creator programs specifically. Can you talk us through a little bit more of like, why you thought this was a good way to do that?

[00:03:52]Amanda Houston: It's a little bit hard to get C suite buy in when it comes to Influencer. A lot of the people who've been in the game for a really long time are not [00:04:00] familiar with how Influencer works.

Can work to optimize their marketing strategy. And we knew if we could demonstrate that influencers work really well as affiliates, it opens the door for all the other things that influencers are capable of that are towards the top of the funnel.

[00:04:15]Sam: And would you say this like idea of blending influencer and affiliate [00:04:20] under the same remit department, team, however you want to phrase it, is common, not common.

[00:04:25]Amanda Houston: I think we're starting to see it more across the industry. I would say a couple years ago, you weren't seeing many roles that combined the two, but now you're seeing a lot more emerge where people are using their influencers and their affiliates together and [00:04:40] working with.

A platform like Awin, you're seeing a lot of influencer metrics really make sense to blend them.

[00:04:46]Sam: Yeah, I think that's a really good segue actually to the next question. Why did you feel like CreatorIQ was the right partner to really help you to do this?

[00:04:53]Amanda Houston: So when it came to finding a partner to work with, CreatorIQ made the most sense.

I think some of the [00:05:00] other influencer platforms, it's a little bit hard to see that granular data on an influencer by influencer scale of who's converting and who's performing. And it was really important. For us to be able to have those metrics internally to know what creators to invest in. CreatorIQ's partnered with Awin, so uses Awin's data.

We use Awin for [00:05:20] our affiliate network, and so housing all that data in one place made a lot of sense for us. I think CreatorIQ also had the option for creators to make their own links, which was really huge for us as we have Thousands of skews on the websites for creators to share what they're excited about.

I talk a lot about how like [00:05:40] creators know what their audience likes best. And so instead of saying, we want you to promote this link and this link and this link, we give them the opportunity to choose their own product, promote what they think would be best promoted and CreatorIQ. Provides a lot of opportunity to do that.

[00:05:55]Sam: Thanks, Amanda. So Mike, in like your opinion and experience, like, why [00:06:00] do you think it's been like top line so successful for McGee & Co?

[00:06:03]Mike Balducci: I mean, she has the right approach, right? It's like, let creators do their thing, right? Let them choose which products they want to promote. We did some market research last year with, with affiliate creators specifically, and the number one, most important thing when they're considering an affiliate collaboration with a brand is that they love that brand.

Right. And they love, and [00:06:20] you already use the products of that brand. And so you got to kind of let them create and do what they're passionate about it. That's more important than how much they're getting paid. It's the number one thing. And that's kind of unique about affiliate marketing. Right. I mean, I think the more traditional affiliate marketer is probably most concerned about how much they're going to get paid and they're testing different offers and different placements on their, on their sites, [00:06:40] whereas.

You know, creators are looking for the brands they were using love to partner with, and they're willing to do that on an affiliate model if it checks that box for them.

[00:06:47]Sam: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. The flexibility to cater to their own audience really like speaks volumes when you're, you're negotiating those partnerships.

So I want to get a little bit more into the weeds of this partnership. I know when we [00:07:00] initially talked, we discussed a tiered program amended that you guys have for creators, but. Before we get into those specifics, we'd love to hear a bit more about your process and collaboration with CreatorIQ from both of you on identifying creators for the program in general.

What does that look like? How do you find those right partners? How do you onboard them to the program and kind of get them up and running?

[00:07:19]Amanda Houston: [00:07:20] So CreatorIQ is really great because they have a landing page you can build out that feeds creators in. So whenever we have creators reach out, we're able to send them to a full site that gives them a questionnaire.

And we can build that out however we like, so we'll ask anything from them. their usual [00:07:40] rates to what home style they have, which really helps us to understand how they could fit within our program. And then once we bring them in, CreatorIQ does a great job tracking all of their content, all of their other kind of brand affinities.

Just this week, we were looking to explore a new partner and I was in CreatorIQ's data trying to figure out if [00:08:00] they had similar brand affinities, if their audience had interest in the home space. And I just think there's so, so much data there. That has really helped us to be able to identify the creators that are most effective to work with.

[00:08:11]Sam: Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the, the tiered program that you had mentioned?

[00:08:16]Amanda Houston: Yeah. So this year we really wanted to invest in kind of that [00:08:20] influencer ambassador model. And previously we had been working with creators in this way. However, we really wanted to define a way that creators could become successful.

And so we implemented a new tiered program that identifies the amount of product they would get at every tier, their commission rate at every tier, even down to if you hit a certain tier, you can [00:08:40] receive a discount code to share with your followers that you'll earn commission on. So in order to scale on our program, there's certain revenue targets.

That they can see on their end with CreatorIQ previously, when we had just been working with creators, it was really hard to ignite that fire within them to be able to drive sales. So we do everything we can on our end to invest in creators, and we [00:09:00] appreciate all they do to invest with us in this tiered program really allows us to monitor that and reward them for the progress that they're making.

[00:09:08]Sam: And how long has the tiered program been live now?

[00:09:12]Amanda Houston: So we implemented the tiered program when we joined CreatorIQ earlier this year. And so it's only been live [00:09:20] for, I want to say three, four months now. And we were already seeing 300 percent growth year over year in revenue. We're seeing impressions up, I think it's It's about 400 percent engagements are up.

So it's been incredibly successful for us. And I think a lot of that was just [00:09:40] identifying for the creators, how they can be successful and what our expectations are in order to invest in them.

[00:09:45]Sam: Mike, I'd love to get your opinion on why you think McGee & Co has seen so much success with this model. And thinking about to some of the CreatorIQ events that I've been to, it was always really interesting to me that brands are more focused, I would say, on growing [00:10:00] brand awareness and consideration with affiliate sales drivers.

It's, it's less of a focus. And so knowing that the tiered program is giving creators revenue, like direct revenue goals, I would imagine it's pretty unique, but it also sounds like it's, it's pretty successful for, for the brand.

[00:10:14]Mike Balducci: I mean, just tying it back to our, our research with affiliate creators specifically, I mean, the one thing they said that was [00:10:20] really also important to them is that they wanted to feel like it was a partnership with the brand.

Sometimes affiliate collaborations don't feel like that. You know, they just go in as a publisher into a program and they don't get a lot of support. And when you offer, you know, what they're doing in terms of the tiering and support and everything they do to help those critters be successful in the program.

I think that's really the key driver there [00:10:40] is that. I always say this. I mean, like, how would you treat a seller that you hired as a full time employee? Right. You would give them a sales goal. You would give them materials on how they should be talking about the products that you're promoting. You give them embargoed information about sales, like, Hey, we're gonna have a sale coming up.

So, you know, be ready to promote it. And, and that really, I think goes a long way to making that [00:11:00] creator on the other end of that relationship, feel like they're really your partner. Right. And you're giving them feedback on how they're doing. You know, that's the nice thing about A1's data. It's pretty instant, right?

When they promote a link or a code, you know, within a matter of hours after doing that, they'll be able to see the results that that's generating for them.

[00:11:14]Sam: Yeah, definitely. Amanda, when you've had these conversations with creators, knowing that maybe they're not familiar with the [00:11:20] affiliate model or they have brand partners that are not holding them.

Directly accountable to revenue goals. How do you navigate those? Let's say sticky conversation.

[00:11:29]Amanda Houston: Sometimes when it comes to influencer marketing in the affiliate space, you really have to acknowledge that there's certain influencers who are a fit for those. And those are your influencers who are always posting.

There are [00:11:40] links to everything. So you can usually go to their stories and identify if they're a creator who likes to link out a ton. And there are certain creators who are really content focused and really tried to have like a more elevated aesthetic and not feel as salesy. And there's a place for them too, but it's probably going to be flat feet campaigns.

And while like you want everyone to join your [00:12:00] program and everyone to participate, it's a very unique type of structure. So I think it's just identifying the difference and working with creators where they're at. The nice thing about like an affiliate creator structure is it's a little bit blended. So you're not sticking them into like some affiliate program where they don't really have much communication and they're not feeling like they're a partner or a part of it.

[00:12:20] You're still communicating with them. They still have a direct contact in you. You're giving them sales information and supporting their success, but you're also not only working with them on the flat fee. So I think it's a little bit of a blend of both.

[00:12:32]Sam: Have there been any creators, maybe from your old program, that you pitched this new content set to that you were like really excited [00:12:40] to like get their buy in and, and win?

[00:12:42]Amanda Houston: Yeah, and we had a lot of creators who I was maybe unsure what their reaction would be and their feedback was, this program's awesome, I'm excited to do everything I can to scale. A lot of creators want to find ways to grow within our brand. And we're wanting to support that as much as we can with as many creators [00:13:00] as we can.

And so while there are some who are, it's not for them. I think there's a lot that we're really excited about the new program.

[00:13:07]Sam: Mike, anything you want to add on the topic of scalability?

[00:13:10]Mike Balducci: We have some clients that have thousands of creators in these programs. And one of the things that makes a good affiliate creator is They post a lot, [00:13:20] you know, so I kind of go back to like the traditional metrics.

You know, when you think about like you're a publisher, you're trying to yield optimize, you know, your impressions, right? So how much money you can make based on the impressions and for an affiliate creator, they have to kind of be thinking along those lines, like, Hey, I'm not going to talk about this brand, like in every post, but I got to, you know, I want to weave them in [00:13:40] and frequency matters for conversion, right?

When your goal is to convert an eyeball to a sale or some frequency that goes into that equation. So we do see a lot of creators come in and post once and not get a result and exit the program. So they got to kind of stick with it and they're passionate enough about the product. They'll post frequently about it and they'll start to see those sales come in.

And I [00:14:00] think what Amanda mentioned too, around promo codes is really important to figure out how to weave. Promo codes into your strategy is super important. It has to be considered in the context of how you use promo codes broadly, just beyond affiliate as well. I think that sort of limited use case of promo codes is, is really the best approach we see.

And certainly creators that they use promo codes and we've studied this data. [00:14:20] They do drive an incremental result, especially if they're creators that are not your top performing creators, right? That are the ones that are sort of in the middle of the pack, you know, that really drives Their performance, some incremental performance out of them.

So I would say those are the two couple of things that really need to be considered for a long term to help scale and grow your program.

[00:14:38]Sam: Yeah, definitely. I mean, Amanda, I [00:14:40] know we've sort of talked about this through other people at Awin before, but Mike brought up a great point about promo codes and feeling that there is a place for them in Influencer.

What, what are your thoughts on this topic?

[00:14:50]Amanda Houston: Yeah, I think it's a really tricky place to figure out where it fits within your brand. We at McGee & Co really try to protect our discounting [00:15:00] of our brand as, as we don't have a crazy amount of promotional codes, sales, or like codes that are ever green, we only offer codes to the top tier of our program.

So we have under 20 influencer codes that are live and they're very exclusive. They're very sought after, but it's something that a lot of the influencers work towards knowing that. [00:15:20] If they're able to get a code, then like they're going to be able to drive even more sales. So it's something that they work for within the program.

I think like creators would love a world in which we were able to give promo codes out to everyone. I think a lot of brands are able to do that. It's not something we're currently doing, but I think there's certainly a place for it. You just have to figure [00:15:40] out. Your brand strategy and how it fits within that strategy.

[00:15:47]Rob: Awin-Win Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Awin, pun intended. Awin's a global affiliate marketing platform that helps e-commerce brands called advertisers and online trusted authorities called [00:16:00] publishers Connect and create partnerships to deliver huge commercial benefits that are a win-win for all a win advertisers.

of 13 for every dollar they invest in their programs. And they see those returns while achieving a variety of marketing goals. Acquiring new customers, increasing their AOVs, boosting retention, growing [00:16:20] brand awareness. So what are you waiting for? Start your Awin affiliate program today by visiting awin.com.

[00:16:34]Sam: Are there any examples of creators that maybe started at the lowest tier and, and worked their way up? If [00:16:40] you could talk us through maybe some of their, their successes and challenges.

[00:16:43]Amanda Houston: Yeah. So we had a creator who joined the program maybe two or three months ago and she had emailed me and she said something along the lines of, I'm a small creator.

I'm not really sure how to hit these goals. Do you have any advice for me? And I said, share the things that you like that you [00:17:00] would love to have in your own home. If you don't already have them, a lot of creators like to post like vignettes of, I would style these pieces together. And I said, and just link everything and your audience will catch on and you'll start to see sales coming through.

So our first sale that followed that conversation, she moved from our first to second tier and she was our first [00:17:20] creator to do so. And now she's almost into our top tier. And again, this is a creator with I think she's under 30, 000 followers. She's not by any means one of our larger creators that we work with.

However, she gets it and she's posting and she's doing phenomenally well. And she's up there with our creators who have hundreds of thousands of followers. So I think [00:17:40] it also doesn't matter like the size of the creator, but I think once they figure out the strategy and what works for them and their audience for affiliates, they can be really successful.

[00:17:48]Sam: Yeah, definitely. I know this is a newer partnership, but question for you both. Mike, I'll start with you. Over the course of the partnership thus far, what have you enjoyed most about working together?

[00:17:58]Mike Balducci: It seems like Amanda and I have been on a lot of [00:18:00] panels together. So I'm really enjoying our time together on the panel.

I mean, we're just so happy that they're seeing success. And Amanda mentioned at the, uh, you know, beginning of the podcast was that, you know, she comes from initially the world of, of influencer marketing. And also starting to master the world of affiliate marketing and happens to own both those channels at McGee and co.

[00:18:20] And that's, that's the recipe for success. So you're a VP of marketing or a CMO, you know, and you're running, you know, multi channel marketing strategy and affiliate and influencer part of that strategy, you got to get those teams working together to really maximize the value you can get from influencer and affiliate and expanding affiliate with influencers.

And the one thing that I think [00:18:40] Amanda. You'll validate on this point is that you also understand the brand value of what's being generated in this program, right? Because not every post is going to generate a sale, but it does generate media value for McGee & Co. And that media value builds sort of brand awareness over time, right?

Certainly some of your products are a little bit more tentpole type. It's not like a fast [00:19:00] fashion or something like that. Right. So you got to just keep hammering the brand home so that when that consumer decides that they're going to redo a room or whatever, you know, McGee & Co comes to mind, right. For, for a place to look for inspiration and products.

[00:19:12]Sam: Yeah, Amanda, same question for you.

[00:19:14]Amanda Houston: Yeah, kind of going off of what Mike said, CreatorIQ has so many metrics that [00:19:20] allow us to not only prove the effectiveness of the program through revenue, but there's metrics like SMV, EMV, total impressions, total engagements, their content tracking's phenomenal. So I think for us, like, it's nice to be able to tell both sides of the story.

And that's something that I think continually we're working to get C Suite buy in on [00:19:40] is this like. These numbers like EMV, SMV impressions that are maybe not as revenue bottom of funnel focused, but are really, really effective in terms of like brand positioning and exposure. And so CreatorIQ has done a really good job of helping us see the whole story across all the [00:20:00] data.

I think I've personally worked with just about every creator platform there is, and there's That one out there, like CreatorIQ, I think they do the best job when it comes to helping their clients be successful, having all the right data, and we've been really, really happy with the partnership.

[00:20:17]Sam: Yeah, for sure.

Coming back to some of [00:20:20] the top of funnel metrics that Amanda mentioned, SMV and EMV, can you explain a bit more for our listeners, Mike, what those both stand for and kind of what they are?

[00:20:28]Mike Balducci: So we acquired a platform now, a couple of years ago called tribe dynamics, which came out with a metric called earned media value or EMV.

That's not a metric that they invented, but it's a metric that's been [00:20:40] around to try to place a monetary value on media exposure. And they came up with a proprietary calculation for essentially creator media. Right? So based on impressions, based on engagement, likes, follows, all that stuff. And what they did that was pretty unique is they're able to benchmark that metric across [00:21:00] competitive sets.

And so sure, you can get into an argument about how EMV is calculated. And, you know, certainly some people want to try to geek out on that and, you know, get really analytical about it, but that's actually, you're sort of losing the whole point of it. It, the whole point of it is to have a consistent way to measure.

Media outcomes right across the competitive set. So, [00:21:20] you know how you're doing, right? So if you're in the beauty industry per se, like you want to know how you're doing against your competitors, well, ENV is a great way, actually the most popular way to measure that. And so that's ENV, SMV is what we refer to as social media value.

And that's just. Similar to EMV, but you know, it's completely configurable by a client. We have [00:21:40] default settings where they can punch in the assumptions to calculate SMV, or they can punch in their own assumptions. So think about like EMV consistent across all brands. Working with creators, SMV is like maybe a specific metric that the brand wants to calculate related to the media that their program is generating.

[00:21:58]Sam: Yeah, that's great. Amanda, I know you [00:22:00] mentioned that your goal is to get better, like ambient SMV acknowledgement within your own senior organization. How has that conversation been going so far?

[00:22:09]Amanda Houston: I think it starts at the like ground level being in affiliate marketing, if I'm honest, like they're starting to see the numbers come through.

And I recently got feedback [00:22:20] of like. Wow. ROAS of an influencer and affiliate is doing great. How, how do we further invest in these? Then you're able to bring up the conversations of like, Oh, well, we could be increasing our paid collaborations and our flat fee content and all of those things, right? But it's kind of like this [00:22:40] entryway of showing them like, Hey, this works and there's ways that we can do it better.

There's more that can be done, but I think that's starting to enter the conversation of like, Oh, when we see the bottom funnel activity, I think. The acknowledgement of upper funnel activity starts to be a little bit more visible where people are like, [00:23:00] Oh, what's happening in order for these numbers to come through.

So I think for us, it's been kind of working from the bottom up. Um, and so now we're starting to have a little bit more conversations about. Okay. Well, what is some upper funnel activity that could maybe translate to lower funnel and where is all this awareness coming [00:23:20] from and what does that do for the brand?

So I think working with influencers on an affiliate scale is kind of the entryway to all of that. Yeah, definitely.

[00:23:27]Mike Balducci: I mean, in affiliate marketing, that's always been sort of the Holy Grail for affiliate platforms, right? Because you're like, Hey, we're generating all this media value too. It's harder to see because sometimes you just see the post click results, but.

With CreatorIQ [00:23:40] linked up with Awin in this program. You can see both, you can actually see it. You have the receipts, right? You have the posts, you have the metrics associated with that post from an authenticated social media accounts. Early in my career, I was the head of finance and direct to consumer business.

And I was the guy that came down the hallway and said, Hey, can we put more money to work in affiliate marketing? Because it's [00:24:00] delivering a great result, right? And it was always hard, you know, it was always hard to figure out ways to do that because, you know, you didn't have that sort of, uh, pre click visibility that you have with this configuration.

[00:24:10]Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So obviously this is a newer partnership, but what, what comes next?

[00:24:16]Amanda Houston: From our end, we're finding ways to further invest [00:24:20] in our influencer partnerships. So I think that comes with some strategy alongside CreatorIQ, figuring out the best Direction for that, but I think we'll be exploring a lot more flat fee partnerships and kind of work to show like the blended effort of those flat fee and affiliate partnerships and how those can work.

So seamlessly together

[00:24:39]Mike Balducci: [00:24:40] just reminds me, Sam, when we had the, uh. The creator on that panel a couple of years ago, and he was an affiliate creator, primarily aspiring to be a brand creator, and that's an important part of a program is to give creators those opportunities, those fee based opportunities, right?

Because, you know, that's what many of them are aspiring to. [00:25:00] So that, that's actually a really great strategy. And we try to make it really easy to do that in the platform, right. Peel out some of the top performing creators and give them opportunities for specific promotions, maybe around new product launch or seasonal event.

And, uh, we see clients. In this category, doing that and getting really great outcomes. And, [00:25:20] you know, you still get the affiliate outcome of that, but they also get a little fee baked on top of that. It's a great, great way to grow the partnership.

[00:25:26]Sam: For any business considering getting started in affiliate marketing, influencer integrated affiliate marketing, what is your best advice for them?

[00:25:34]Amanda Houston: I would just say it's really hard to have any program beat the ROAS that [00:25:40] you see in affiliate marketing. It's really hard to plan to spend your budget, and I think affiliate marketing does a wonderful job of giving you a wonderful ROI, and I think that's something we're really seeing. So I would just say, certainly invest what you can, test a lot of things, and with time, the numbers will prove for themselves that it works.

[00:25:59]Mike Balducci: Best [00:26:00] advice is to try to leverage your own data. So if you're a brand and you have customers and emails of those customers, I mean, we can help you use that data to discover creators. That's sort of the low hanging fruit. You know, they may not have reached out to you yet, but they're already using your product.

And when you reach out to them and invite them to be a part of your creator network, many of those folks will register and want to try to partner with [00:26:20] you. So that's a great way to get started. Luckily. With our partnership, it's pretty easy to turn one of these programs on takes a few weeks. Obviously you got to get the contracts in order and some of the legal stuff in order for your affiliate creator agreement.

But once you get all that sorted out, you know, it's pretty easy to turn a program on and see what you can do.[00:26:40]

[00:26:40]Sam: That brings us to the end of today's episode. In two weeks, Rob chats to pet supplies retailer VioVet and affiliate tech Increasingly to learn more about their product bundling campaigns

[00:26:50]Rob: In the meantime, And as ever, we would really welcome your ratings and reviews for the podcast. It massively helps us out in reaching as wide an audience as possible.

So [00:27:00] head on over to Apple or Spotify and give us a five star review.

[00:27:03]Sam: Thanks again for listening to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast, where we show you how affiliate partnerships always offer a win-win.