w/ Noah Tucker, Social Snowball
Get the inside scoop on how to revolutionize your affiliate content game. It's not just about what you say, but how you say it. Dive into the strategies that are setting today's affiliate marketers apart from the pack.
Forget what you thought you knew about affiliate marketing; it's not just bloggers and review sites anymore. We're talking influencers, social media creators, and yes, even your own customers turning into affiliate powerhouses.
Noah breaks down the nuts and bolts of setting up a modern affiliate program. We dive into the mechanics and the mindset needed to turn your customers into your biggest advocates. Think about it: customers who love your brand can now champion it, and get a piece of the pie too. And if you're wondering how TikTok fits into this puzzle, we've got you covered. Noah shares insights on leveraging this platform to manufacture virality through short-form content, a strategy that's as intriguing as it is effective.
But wait, there's more. We tackle the nuances of tracking sales, using landing pages effectively, and why engagement with smaller influencers might just be your golden ticket.
Tune in to unravel the secrets of modern affiliate marketing and discover how you can turn your e-commerce store into a magnet for both customers and affiliates.
Kurt Elster (00:17):
Alright, going into that new year, we all want want the hot tip strategy, whatever that golden unlock insight that is going to help scale up our businesses or help us grow our fledgling audiences. I don't know what form it will take for you. And I know we've covered many of these channels, topics, strategies in the past over the years, done this many years, but it changes over time and that's why I like to revisit things. And so far we've talked Google ads this year with Ham and some other marketing strategies. I want to talk today about affiliate marketing because as obviously social media just keeps getting bigger, faster, stranger. But the opportunity there is huge. And one of the ways for an e-commerce brand to get in front of that money, that audience, those eyeballs is through affiliate marketing with influencers. But there's further reach for it.
(01:28):
But I don't know, I ton about affiliate marketing. I've implemented it. That part, the technical side, that part doesn't seem that hard, but I think the soft skills, the softer side of it, there's a lot of nuance to it. And so I need somebody who's an expert to explain it, to break it down for me. And we've got today with us, Noah Tucker. Noah Tucker founded an app called Social Snowball. I see this thing recommended regularly. I've never used it, but I know it's legit. Just through osmosis, through association to it on Twitter. And I think he's been at that three years, you know, why should I explain it to you? We'll have him tell us about us. Noah Tucker, welcome to the show.
Noah Tucker (02:10):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
Kurt Elster (02:12):
Social snowball. Give me the elevator pitch.
Noah Tucker (02:16):
Sure. So at the highest level overview, we are an affiliate and referral platform for e-commerce brands. More specifically, we help e-commerce brands partner with what I like to call the more modern affiliate. So when we use the word affiliate, I think especially in e-commerce, it can have different meanings and it can mean very different channels for different types of brands when they use that word affiliate. And I think if you were to zoom back 10 years ago, let's say, or maybe even five, but let's say 10 years ago, and you said the word affiliate 10 in the e-commerce space, the type of affiliate that they'd be thinking of back then is very different than what a lot of brands are focused on now. So what I mean by that is back then the word affiliate to brands meant publishers, review sites, bloggers list of goals, media buyers, that's of what affiliate meant. And today, those types of,
Kurt Elster (03:02):
I think, yeah, like blog reviews. Years ago there was mattresses, verticals, industries, certain things get huge in, there's trends for sure. I'm sure for a while everybody was trying to sell fidget spinners, like mattresses, big purchase. How do you figure that out? You Google it, well at least I'm a 41. You Google it and then you end up on a blog like the wire cutter. Oh man, I love the wire cutter. But that's all affiliate links, right? Those are affiliates. So that's like traditional and then you used it in air quotes, modern affiliates. Tell me about the difference there.
Noah Tucker (03:37):
Yeah, exactly. I like to call those the older ones, like the legacy affiliates. But even though they are legacy slash additional, they're still important today. I don't think Branch ignore them, it's just also undeniable to acknowledge that there's also this modern affiliate that exists. And under that umbrella I'm talking about influencers, social media creators, ambassadors, and even a brand's own customers can be affiliates. And so there's these two very different types of affiliates and the only thing that's similar about them is that you're partnering with them on a performance only deal. So you're paying them a commission or the sales that they could generate you, which is great because less risky. But the thing is, these modern affiliates, the functionality and the user experience and the tools and automations that you would need as a brand owner to have a successful partnership with a modern affiliate is super different than what you would need for a successful partnership with the Legacy affiliate.
(04:26):
They're just two different of channels. Everything from onboarding those partners to generating their codes and links, sending payments, et cetera, et cetera, is just very different for each type of affiliate. So Social Snowball is the first affiliate platform for e-commerce that's just laser focused on this new type of affiliate and helping brands enable partnership with this new type of affiliate and making that whole user experience for both the brands managing it and for the affiliates on the receiving end of the program just as smooth, frictionless, and intuitive as possible. So to make that a reality, we sort of had to rebuild a lot of pieces of the traditional affiliate model so that when you do roll out a program like this for your creators or your customers, it's a very smooth and just positive experience all around.
Kurt Elster (05:10):
Oh for sure. You said social snowball, you started this about three years ago, that's not that long ago. What'd you do before that, out of curiosity?
Noah Tucker (05:18):
Yeah, I was on the brand side of the e-commerce world for a while. Literally actually right after I graduated high school, I started kind of getting sucked into this world out of a couple friends who were building stores and I thought it was super cool. So they helped me build a store and then I got really into the marketing side of things. So I was rental paid ads and building some of my own stores. I was consulting with some other brands and I really just got deep into this whole marketing world. And a piece of what I would help any brand implement would be an ambassador strategy, like affiliate ambassador, referral, whatever you want to call it. And so having that experience, I used basically every other existing affiliate ambassador, et cetera tool that existed in the Shopify. And at the time I was just like, wow, these all suck.
(06:00):
What I learned is that they didn't suck, they were just built for that legacy affiliate. So if I was partnering with publishers, maybe it would've actually been exactly what I needed, but I was reaching out to people on Instagram, I was reaching out to customers, I was reaching out to influencers on other channels. I was just trying to find what I now call the modern affiliate. And I was trying to onboard them to a platform that wasn't built for that. And when you try to do that, it's a nightmare of user experience. Everything breaks. So that's kind of where the ideas first started.
Kurt Elster (06:30):
Alright. I've heard affiliate and referral program mentioned they're similar but different. What's the difference? Break it down for me.
Noah Tucker (06:40):
Sure. So I think when people use the word referral, they're usually, and everyone has different meanings from these words, so things with a grain of salt. But in general, when people use the word referral, they're talking about their customer base. The thing is usually customers are not treated as affiliates the same way an influencer would be. They're usually treated as just in a loyalty program where they could maybe get a coupon if they were for a friend or get points. So that's actually something that we're working to change with social snowball. We want to turn customers into actual affiliates, be able to incentivize them to really drive revenue, not just kind of throw them into a half bake rewards program. But usually when people use the word referral, they're just talking about a program for their customers to refer friends, not necessarily influencers or creators.
Kurt Elster (07:27):
And the functionality there, the way those things are implemented, so similar that often an affiliate and a referral program, it's the same thing. And I know social snowball, I mean just the title tag, it's affiliate and referral, right? So what's from a technical standpoint, what changes there?
Noah Tucker (07:51):
So we are kind of the first company to kind of blend them together. Believe it or not, most brands are keeping these programs very separate. Most brands have just a referral program for customers that's more of a loyalty program. Maybe it's actually part of their loyalty program app is allowing them to have a referral feature and then they have a separate affiliate program that's either for influencers or for legacy affiliates. Like publishers Social Snowball is the first company to really merge them together because the way that we view it is a referral program should be treated like an affiliate program because the goal of a referral program is driving customer acquisition and it's driving revenue. But when you treat a referral program as part of a loyalty program, and the only incentive for a customer to refer their friend is a loyalty gates incentive, like a coupon or points or store credit.
(08:39):
You're basically saying that if you have a customer that's a huge fan of yours but isn't planning their next purchase, they don't really have that incentive to refer a friend because the only incentive is loyalty based. The incentive only holds value if they're planning the next purchase. So maybe you have a lower LTD brand like furniture or something and people just aren't buying more than once, but your customer base still loves you and they still want to refer friends, but your incentive only is a coupon. So they don't really have that incentive to drive a referral or you're a more standard LTD brand. People are making repeat purchases and your customer refers one or two friends, but then after three referrals, they have three coupons sitting in their account. Do they really have an incentive to drive that fourth, fifth and beyond referral? It's a little bit of a mixed, it's kind of blurring the area between loyalty and customer acquisition and you end up not maximizing either, but when you turn your customers into actual affiliates and the incentives for them to refer, friends are aligned with the end goal of customer acquisition, you're paying them in cash, right?
(09:39):
Because what an affiliate program is, and when you're paid in cash, it could be a brand that you would only buy ones from furniture, cash is still an incentive to refer a friend. You could have referred 30 previous friends. You still want that 31st cash payout because it's not like a coupon that kind of loses value as you collect more of them. So this is kind of like the shift that we take with social snowball is helping brands actually turn customers into actual affiliates and making that entire process obviously smooth and easy for the payouts and all of that is super important. But the difference is just customers of all kinds, regardless of if they're planning an expert or not. We'll all be engaged in the program, obviously assuming they like your product, but we're hoping that's the majority of your customers.
Kurt Elster (10:20):
I want context. So we've got this idea of modern affiliate marketing. I'd like to point out that when you introduce the phrase modern affiliate marketing, you put it in air quotes. So when you hear modern affiliate marketing, just like picture those air quotes, but I think it's helpful to walk through an example use case. So I want to spin up my affiliate program. I want this modern affiliate to be in my program. Run me through an example.
Noah Tucker (11:00):
Sure. So there's a few different approaches here. One kind of similar to where we're talking about is turning customers into affiliates. And I think turning customers into affiliates is great because it's not a ton of work for the brand. It's not like a huge lift, it's more low hanging fruit, but it can drive meaningful results. And so essentially the way this would work is instead of having to have all of your customers manually enroll and wait for an approval process if they want to join their affiliate program, what we help brands do is turn customers into affiliates automatically as soon as they make a purchase. So whenever a new customer is placing an order on your store, as soon as they make it to the order confirmation page, we've already taken their order data from Shopify checkout and we use that to automatically generate them an affiliate account, automatically generate them a link or code with their name in it, and then given all of that information to them natively on the thank you page as soon as they complete the purchase.
(11:49):
So without any signup page or without any click here to get your code or fill in your email, fill in your friend's email or anything, all their affiliate info is already generated. It's given to them on the thank you page so they can start sharing it instantly. And then of course we could have additional follow-up touch points of the post-purchase journey through email and SMS to remind them to share their code and share them examples of how other affiliates are earning. But it's essentially like throwing a net over your entire audience, bringing everyone into the affiliate program rather than it being something that people might have to seek out and wait for a manual approval. And the result, as I'm sure you can imagine, is just a much higher customer to affiliate activation rate. And at scale, like we've seen brands generate a ton of new customer acquisition by automating this piece of the program,
Kurt Elster (12:31):
What's the, alright, so person purchases and then they're in a flow, so X amount of days, weeks later they get this offer that, hey, we'll give you a cut if you will shield this to your friends and you give them example content or example use case. I think that's the real magic. Sure,
Noah Tucker (12:52):
Totally.
Kurt Elster (12:54):
What does that offer look like? What are we paying here?
Noah Tucker (12:58):
That's a great question. It's usually a two-sided incentive. So there's usually a commission that you're paying to the initial advocate, let's call them the customer that's driving the referral and then that customer is able to offer a discount to their friend. Exactly. So that customer is also able to offer a discount. So I would say standard, there's no magic number. Usually between 10 and 20% of this ference sale is what the advocate is getting paid and then the new customer discount, it just needs to be any welcome offer you have on your website for a email sign up because if it's slower, then people are going to go with a higher discount and it's going to be hard to track sales.
Kurt Elster (13:36):
So no better sales channel, no better acquisition channel than word of mouth marketing here. We're just really, we're incentivizing that. We're trying to add a little oil speed things along.
Noah Tucker (13:49):
Exactly.
Kurt Elster (13:53):
But that's all for existing customers. That sounds like that's the referral program. Many people have audiences now, which that changes things. If we're thinking strictly affiliate, does that change it?
Noah Tucker (14:14):
So influencer affiliate,
Kurt Elster (14:17):
Yes.
Noah Tucker (14:18):
Yeah, I mean it's funny. We all use these words in instead of different ways. So we call it customer affiliate because returning the customers into affiliates, but referral would also be a fine word that obviously influencer affiliate though. I mean there's a lot of really great strategies that we've seen brands implement product seating, for example. So basically brands will reach out to a ton of influencers and they'll just send them an email saying like, Hey, I'd love to send you my product. And then essentially, once an influencer says yes, then you'll be able to gift to the influencer that product. Obviously you'll also generate them an code and link and then you're just having a ton of content be created at scale and posted on these influencers accounts. So not only are you driving organic traffic and organic revenue from the audiences of these influencers, but you're also generating a ton of content that you could reuse and repurpose in other channels. So if you need a content for paid ads or do you use in your emails or put on your website by gifting influencers at scale, it kind of is providing your business with a lot of positive impact beyond just driving revenue.
Kurt Elster (15:19):
Did you say gifting influencers at scale? Yeah.
Noah Tucker (15:22):
Yeah. So seed product. So we're doing
Kurt Elster (15:23):
Product seeding.
Noah Tucker (15:24):
Exactly, exactly.
Kurt Elster (15:26):
Wait, so you could do product seeding as well?
Noah Tucker (15:29):
You can. You can. Yeah. So that would also fall under the modern affiliate umbrella as well. As long as you are treating these influencers that you're seeding as affiliates, if you're just sending them the product and then never giving them a link or code to share, you're probably not going to get as much content from them because they have no real motivation to continue posting maybe after one post because there's no upside of it for them.
Kurt Elster (15:52):
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Noah Tucker (17:27):
With exactly
Kurt Elster (17:29):
This affiliate program. Okay, clever. Surely you have TikTok experience and opinions here.
Noah Tucker (17:39):
Definitely. Yeah, there's a lot with TikTok.
Kurt Elster (17:42):
Affiliate marketing in this context has been around a lot longer than TikTok has. How has changed marketing strategies around affiliate?
Noah Tucker (17:54):
That's a really great question. There's so many different ways. I think one strategy that really stands out that I've seen a lot of brands implement, I like to call it manufacturing virality through shortform content. I mean, we've seen brands
Kurt Elster (18:08):
How this is so hard to do consistently.
Noah Tucker (18:10):
It is, it is, but there's a strategy behind it and we've seen brands just low numbers out of the park with this TED strategy. So essentially what we see brands doing now is they're finding, let's say, let's just say 50 influencers, actually, I'm not going to use the word influencers, I'm going to use the word creators, and that's intentional because a creator in the sense is just any individual with the capacity to create good content. An influencer implies that they have an audience and for this strategy, they actually don't need to have an audience at all. So let's say you're a brand, you need to find 50 creators. They could be UGC creators, maybe they could be super, super small influencers on TikTok that could also be a creator for you. What's unique here is that these creators are actually not going to be posting from their own pages.
(18:55):
They're going to be creating a new page just for this partnership that is branded as your brand. So if the brand is Yeti, for example, the influencers would all create a page that's at Yeti or at Shop Yeti. They would all make their own variations of a branded page, and they would do this on TikTok, on Instagram and on YouTube. So each creator would make three brand new pages from scratch, and essentially what they do is they're going to create short form content. So they can post that right on TikTok on Instagram with reels and on YouTube with shorts. They're going to create daily short form content and they're going to post it on all of these channels and they're going to post it with their affiliate links and codes. So it's a way that you're basically getting a lot of content put out on all short form channels, and if you find creators that know how to make good content, which you definitely should be able to, it's not too hard.
(19:48):
You are going to get, let's use the 50 creator example, 50 creators. They're all creating three pages each, right? Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. So across all 50 influencers, you now have 150 new pages that were put out into the internet. If they're creating three pieces of short form content per day and repurposing them across all three channels, that's 450 pieces of content per day of short form video made by high quality creators that know how to make high quality videos going out into the internet. When you do organic content, quality, organic content at that volume, the math works out that just some simply will go viral. And once you start to learn what goes viral, then you obviously have your creators make more content like that and you're creating a content bake of the best performing content and you're sharing that with creators. But the creators are incentivized to do this because they have their codes in all the posts, they have their links, their affiliate links in the bios.
(20:42):
So every time a purchase happens from a creator's video, they're getting a commission off of that sale. So they don't even need to have an audience upfront. It's all basically going viral because of the for you page. And it's just the way these short form platforms work. It's followers don't matter as much, and we've seen brands do this and start with smaller amounts of creators, let's say 20 or 50 and scale to hundreds, maybe even thousands of creators all making their own page, all making it across three platforms and creating short form content daily with their links and codes and posting it everywhere. It's truly incredible the amount of not only content that you get from this type of strategy, but real attributable revenue. I mean, we've seen brands generating literally 25% of all of their revenue and maybe even some brands doing higher that we just haven't interviewed, but just from the strategy alone. So you could think if you're really relying on paid ads, you can make 25% of your sales come from TikTok Organic from these creators. That's obviously really impactful. So
Kurt Elster (21:39):
You're taking that product seeding idea and just supercharging it, identify two dozen people. We get the product into their hands and it's really as simple like DM them, Hey, we love what you're doing. Could we send you this? No strings attached. Send it to them, however many get it follow up. They post about it and then you're like, Hey, that's great here. Would you want to sign up for our affiliate program and get paid for this? At what point does it shift from gifted product seating to here's the affiliate link or sign up for the program?
Noah Tucker (22:19):
So with this TikTok strategy in particular, I think most of the creators actually upfront know that this is exactly what they're signing up for. It's not like, Hey, would you also want to join this TikTok program? It's more like, let's find creators that want to do this exact strategy. So yes, of course we're still giving them the products so they can fill their content, but we're reaching out to creators who probably aren't getting gifted product frequently because like I said, they're not real influencers. They don't have a big following. The value is just in their ability to create content because with these short form platforms, if they could create good content, it's going to get a lot of traction and views and ultimately lead to sales without them even have any following. So I would say the influencer seating program where you invite them into your affiliate program after is a bit of a separate approach.
(23:06):
I would probably keep those programs separate from each other. Now, of course, there's always a scenario where you gift an influencer product and they're down to join the TikTok manufactured virality program that you're running as well. But oftentimes with bigger influencers aren't going to be super excited to make these three new pages and to post certain deliverables every day because the bigger influencers, they want to leverage their audience. That's kind of the value they can bring. So if you are partnering with them on a performance deal, they know that they could probably generate more sales by posting on their page because they've spent so much time building up that audience. So usually it's a different demographic of creator that's falling into each type of these campaigns.
Kurt Elster (23:52):
I had not considered it or thought that way. That's interesting. So we want, when selecting the right creators, obviously they need, they'll align with us with our brand values. They need to have some vague interest in what we're doing. That's the basic hurdle. But we want micro influencers. People who are viral success don't have huge followings, probably I'm guessing less than 15,000, and then we get them to create the content regardless of who is successful once we identify the stuff that is successful. It sounds like there's a feedback loop here where you're going back to everyone and going, Hey, here's like, this is what's working right now. This is what's trending.
Noah Tucker (24:43):
Yeah, exactly. So when you start to see what kind of content works, obviously you want to try to replicate similar content so that you could continue going viral. If you have these 450 videos going out a day and on average three are going viral and you could make that number go up to 20 by just tweaking the type of content that these creators are putting out, obviously that's super advantageous to everybody that's involved here. So yeah, so the feedback loop consists of finding the content that's going viral, creating a content bank and sending, let's say a weekly newsletter to all of the creators in this program saying, Hey, this is what's been working. This is what's going viral. Here's the content bank to reference. And then some brands have even taken it a step further and they've created discord groups or Slack groups with the creators where they could collaborate, which has been pretty cool to see too.
Kurt Elster (25:28):
That's cool. When you do that now, it really starts to feel more like a community effort, more like a team.
Noah Tucker (25:35):
Yeah, totally. Totally. And they're all helping each
Kurt Elster (25:38):
Other. It makes easier to do. I think the interesting part here is that you're engaging in creator education. You're helping them with like, okay, this is what's working.
Noah Tucker (25:49):
Exactly, exactly.
Kurt Elster (25:50):
Any tips on or tools on finding those creators?
Noah Tucker (25:57):
Yeah, it's really interesting because for these specific creators that you'd want for the TikTok program, you often want people that don't have any social following. They just know how to create good content. So you have to think who are, that's
Kurt Elster (26:08):
Tough. How do you find someone like that?
Noah Tucker (26:10):
It is tough. So you have to think who are the people that know how to make good content but haven't amassed the following yet? And it's usually UGC creators, UGC creators that are not influencers, but UGC creators that are just paid by brands to make content for them. They know how to make great content, but they're not influencers of their own. They just make content for brands so they know what works and what. That is a great place to start. So I mean, Twitter's a great place. If you post look to see creators, I'm sure you'll get a good handful to reply to any post that uses that hashtag. Beyond that, I would say not even micro influencers on TikTok, nano influencers on TikTok, the smallest influencers on TikTok, you could find this is a bit of a manual search. I'm not saying that it's going to be super easy, but you probably would just search through keywords and hashtags at different topics and try to find creators that haven't popped up yet, but are really trying and are making good content. There is a lot out there. There's plenty out there. It's not that hard. And then once you find them, then you do the outreach to them. Once you have 50, we did the math, if you have 50 in the program, that's 450 pieces of content per day. So really, really powerful stuff with a small number of creators to start with.
Kurt Elster (27:20):
These people are willing to just create this amount of content on what's essentially a gamble for them.
Noah Tucker (27:29):
They know that they have the reputation of the brand behind them, and they know that there's a huge opportunity to earn here. And right now, if they have a video go viral, they're going to make $0, right? With their current, where they are right now with their TikTok page, if they have a video go viral with an affiliate link for one of these brands, they can make thousands of dollars for one video. So that's obviously really enticing to these creators.
Kurt Elster (27:50):
And so once I have that content, I post that on my own page, but use their affiliate link or they post or we both post it.
Noah Tucker (27:57):
They post it on their pages, so they would just post it on their branded pages with their affiliate link. So they're doing all the posting for you. You don't have to post any of it yourself. Obviously, if you wanted usage rights to repurpose it, that's a different story. But I'm just saying with this specific strategy, they would be posting it on the new pages for your brand that they've created on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with their affiliate link code, and they'd be posting roughly, let's say three pieces of content per day across all three channels.
Kurt Elster (28:24):
You can see where very quickly this would amass quite the library of stuff.
Noah Tucker (28:28):
Yes,
Kurt Elster (28:29):
It's a process of trial and error too, where you're very quickly, you're going to start figuring out, Hey, this is what resonates. This is what connects Certainly having done this, there are going to be some commonalities, some, I'm sure it's unique depending on product offer and audience, but what makes content resonate? What gets it to connect? Are there some common elements?
Noah Tucker (28:57):
Yeah, I mean, I think the overarching theme is capturing attention and keeping attention. So a lot of focus goes into the hook for short form videos. Just grabbing attention in the beginning is really hard and really important. The whole thumb stop. Once you have that, you need to maintain that attention, and that's where the actual content styles come in. So I mean, the biggest piece is you want to create content that's not too much, especially for this type of strategy. It doesn't want to feel too much like an ad. You want it to feel just like something that people would genuinely be entertained by in your niche. So you kind of have to do some homework on people that are your ideal customer. Let's say it's people who are into yoga. What kind of videos are they watching on their own time? What videos are showing up organically on their short form feeds? Once you have a sense of that, then you need to figure out, okay, this is the type of content people like that are my ideal customer. How could I incorporate my product into here naturally that doesn't feel like, of course. And when you're able to kind of crack that code, which definitely takes a little bit of trial and error, that's when you see the best results. If you're just sitting down saying like, oh, this product's so great. Obviously people can just swipe right past that and might not get interested.
Kurt Elster (30:13):
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(31:40):
Certainly there's got to be particular categories that just lend themselves to it that work better. I assume consumer packaged goods stuff that is visual, that is appealing. If I could show it in video, inherently stuff that includes motion, is it immediately more attractive?
Noah Tucker (32:00):
Yeah, I mean, you're definitely right about all of that. I think I've seen supplements do really well. I think just people talking about stories of supplements like, oh, this was my 30 day transformation or something. Storytelling really goes a long way on these short form platforms as well. But yeah, I mean consumer packaged goods, totally. Things that are visual. I very much agree. Anything that involves showcasing the product and whatever. With the supplement, you have to get more to storytelling, not much to see, right? It's a gummy or a pill or a powder with a product that's maybe a fitness equipment. There's a lot more you could show and actually impress people with how things, so it's going to depend on your product, and it's going to depend on what your ideal customer already is watching in the short form. Once you can find that sweet spot, that's usually when you start to see traction.
Kurt Elster (32:51):
Yeah, I did one I got, I've got the classic, the TV too high, my TV's above my fireplace, and so I got one of those cantilever mounts where you could grab the TV and it'll come out on an arm down. Nice. And it was pretty sweet, and I got it for this company. And so I, I talk about it all day on a podcasts, put my money where my mouth is. I'm like, I'll make my own portrait video, my own UGC of this. And so it's like before and after, and I cut it real tight and sped it up, and it did extremely well when I did it as a reel, when I did that on Twitter and I uploaded this UGC and I tagged them, and then I'd hear one word from these people. And so I'm like, Hey, congrats on your successful business that you could completely ignore all this content and opportunity. Because when I looked like they had zero social presence, I was really surprised by that.
Noah Tucker (33:40):
It's missed opportunity for sure. Yeah,
Kurt Elster (33:42):
It felt like a missed opportunity. And in my head, I've been with your advice like, wow, I'm thinking of all the brands that have those libraries and aren't leveraging it or have stuff that just tends to video. Well, I think the other thing, TikTok and social media in general, but like TikTok for sure, very trend-based, and sometimes those trends can be longer lasting. The tiny mic, the tiny mic's been around for years now or just whatever the recent song or fad is. I dunno, I sound so old now, but does my UGC content, does it exist independent of trends? Should I be leveraging trends? How should I be approaching trends here?
Noah Tucker (34:31):
That's a good question. I think it's just another angle to test. I wouldn't say trends are necessary. I wouldn't say they hurt either. I think sometimes if you could figure out how to actually incorporate your product into a trend, it could definitely do an incredibly well, I mean, it does do incredibly well, but just because there is a trend doesn't mean you need to force it if there's no way. But that being said, there's no reason to not test it. So if these creators are creating three pieces of content a day, they have a lot of wiggle room with what they can test. They can really get creative trying new content angles. So it's something worth testing. But I wouldn't be devastated if it didn't work for every product because it's not always going to work for every product.
Kurt Elster (35:13):
If I've got my creator army, which when you phrase it like that, it sounds awesome, right? Yes, I got my creator army, I'm a discord, and I'm like, Hey guys, here's the content that's working. Here's trending. Here's what you're promoting. Can I tell them, Hey, we've got this sale coming up. Help us promote that. Can I give them themes? Does it not look organic then?
Noah Tucker (35:35):
No, I think that's totally fine. I think that's totally fine. It doesn't have to be the sale period. Let's say you're doing this over BFCF, it doesn't have to be the main focus of the video. It can be right, but it doesn't have to be the main focus of the video. It could be included in the caption or in the call to action at the end of the video. I would definitely involve your affiliates in promoting offers because not only are they going to probably have an easier time getting customers when there's a larger discount that they could help share, but we have a lot of brands that will during these, let's say BFCM sale periods, also increase the commission that they're paying out to influencers. Because during sale periods is the most competitive time to work with an influencer, just like it's the most competitive time to bid on the same ad inventory.
(36:18):
So with that being said, influencers have a lot of choices over the brands that they could partner with. And if there's another brand that's offering a higher commission, you obviously want to be the most competitive offer for this influencer to promote during that sale period. They only have so much inventory of their own feed and story or wherever they're sharing that they can deliver to their audience, not be too spammy during the sale period. So yeah, I think getting them involved in really increasing the incentives to keep them engaged during those sale periods is definitely really impactful as well.
Kurt Elster (36:50):
So good idea to include them on that. And I could even try and increase my reach by upping my payout to further incentivize affiliates. We have talked about, well, we need a way to track these sales to pay these people out performance based, and so we could do links or we could do discount codes. What's your preference or pros and cons? What's the right way to do it?
Noah Tucker (37:24):
Yeah, it's a good question. I would say there's a few factors to consider. Codes obviously can be saved, and you could watch an Instagram with a code and then buy later on your laptop, and we're still going to be able to track that sale because the code hopped from one device to another. Links don't do that. Links are just kind of stagnant on whatever browser that the user first clicks on, it'll apply a cookie, and then if they buy later, there's no attribution for that, which is obviously not ideal. Codes come with their own downsides too. They could leak to coupon sites or browser extensions like honey, and then you could use a lot of sales. One attribution method that we help brands implement is something proprietary to social snowball called safelinks. It's essentially a coupon code replacement that still allows affiliates to share a discount with their audience without the risk of the code getting leaked.
(38:15):
So essentially it's just a replacement for coupon codes. Wherever an affiliate would say, use my code for 10% off, they would say, use my link for 10% off, and it looks just like a normal affiliate link. But what's unique about it is when a shopper clicks on that link and makes it to your store in real time, they'll have a unique single use code generated from your Shopify and then given to them in their shopping session for them to use. But the next time a different shopper clicks on the same link, they'll get a different single use code to use during their shopping session. So everyone that clicks on the same link, it's a different code. Every code is single use. So if any of the codes linked to a coupon site or Reddit or anywhere, it doesn't matter because they're all single use and there's no value for it to be on honey or anything like that. And the affiliate still has a mechanism that they can share with their audience that passes along a discount, but you just don't have to worry about the codes getting leaked and spammed everywhere.
Kurt Elster (39:06):
That's sweet. Yeah, it's such a pain when you're like, oh, I'm getting all these sales, and then you realize, oh, it's because it sub Chrome extension just went ahead and stole that coupon code for me. Thanks for that. And then it's frustrating for the affiliate too. They're like, oh, I'm getting all these sales. I mean, they get this payout. Oh, a whole bunch of these end up being fraudulent. Do we make landing pages? We got to send the, if we're using links, we got to send the traffic somewhere.
Noah Tucker (39:34):
I would say for bigger influencers, it's worth the time to make a landing page for customer or smaller affiliates. There's not a need. I think it's a bit confusing for you to refer your friend to buy something and then you have a landing page for that. It's just is maybe adding more confusion to the buying experience than necessary. But for bigger influencers, I think it can definitely be impactful for sure. It's just a more cohesive experience from the influencer all the way to checkout
Kurt Elster (40:05):
It. Yeah, I think I was overthinking it. You're right. That does make sense. It'd be weird if I was like, Hey, oh, you got too much recycling piled up. You should buy these electric scissors. And then I send a link with an affiliate, the quarry string in there and the UTM tags, and I send that to my brother-in-Law with a landing page. It's got my face on it. It'd be like, what in the heck? What are you doing?
Noah Tucker (40:30):
Yeah, exactly. But if it was Kim Kardashian, then it might make a little more sense.
Kurt Elster (40:36):
Yeah, well, Kim sends me those links all the time, so
Noah Tucker (40:39):
Exactly. Yeah, I'm used to it
Kurt Elster (40:40):
From
Noah Tucker (40:40):
Her. Yeah, it's kind annoying how often she does it.
Kurt Elster (40:44):
Well, in our group chat you see too. So let's bring it back to the beginning. Go to someone who, I have a Shopify store. It's making sales. We're seeing success. We want to start with your modern affiliate strategies. Where do we begin?
Noah Tucker (41:05):
I really think the best starting strategy, the low hanging fruit, the least lift as far as work needed, but the biggest ROI is a customer to affiliate program. If you have that post-purchase sequence running on the thank you page and your post-purchase emails and it's clear messaging and it's well and great incentive, you can generate really meaningful revenue from turning customers into affiliates without a lot of management work. The only thing you need to do is maybe go in and send the payouts once a week, which is super easy. It's two clicks from within social snowball. It's not a ton of work, but it can be really meaningful revenue. Now, if you want to start another program that's doing massive outreach to influencers or this created or TikTok strategy that we're talking about, it's a great strategy, and I think every brand should try it. That can, but it just either requires more bandwidth on your side. So either you need more time freed up or you need a team member to do it, or you have to maybe partner with an agency that specializes in this. But the customer affiliate program is just super hands off and easy to launch. So that's why I usually recommend brands start with that if they're strapped on bandwidth availability,
Kurt Elster (42:12):
You're right. I mean, one is like you set it up and the majority of the work is upfront. The other just is ongoing work. There's no way around it, but the potential there is pretty huge. So your site, social snowball.io, you have some cool resources here, some playbooks, some guides, and I ended up, that's why you got this interview is because I read those and I was like, oh, this is really good. I want to pick a brain on these. Tell me about some of these free resources.
Noah Tucker (42:47):
So this is just instead of marketing, we just do this kind of stuff. We just create really cool content that teaches strategies. We could build the coolest software ever for affiliate and influencer, but if nobody knows how to execute any strategy, then it's almost useless to them. So we put a lot of time and effort and resources into creating these content pieces. So yeah, on our website, we have a really cool one going over the TikTok manufactured virality strategy. We have one that's more of just a general influencer marketing playbook with a lot of different strategies in there. And something that we're working on now is what we're calling Social Snowball Academy, which is going to be a video course series of basically a bunch of experts in influencer marketing and e-commerce, going and telling their strategies and what they've done that's been successful and teaching that in a long form video course. So we love this kind of the stuff. It's really fun for us to create these pieces of content and people really like it. So it's something that we're going to just do a lot more of next year for sure.
Kurt Elster (43:52):
That's fun. Creating the content is fun. And I like doing creative work. I like being productive. I like helping people. When you make educational content, it's all of that combined and it's tough to predict what will and won't resonate, and that's where it's nice to have experience and go easy on yourself and be able to repurpose stuff. But when it does land and it does get that reaction you were hoping for, man, a few things are as satisfying.
Noah Tucker (44:25):
Agreed. Totally agreed.
Kurt Elster (44:29):
I linked to all that stuff in the show, otherwise, it's on your website. What's your website?
Noah Tucker (44:35):
Social snowball.io
Kurt Elster (44:38):
And social snowball. Also available in the Shopify app store.
Noah Tucker (44:41):
Yes.
Kurt Elster (44:44):
Mr. Noah Tucker. Any other notes? Anything else you'd like to include or leave our listeners with?
Noah Tucker (44:50):
No, but thank you so much for the time. This was a lot of fun, and I hope the listeners find these strategies valuable.
Kurt Elster (44:57):
My pleasure. I'm so glad I booked you and went over this with me. I learned a lot. I'm just, that mantle company needs to get on it. I'm even right now. Here's the PDFs you got to download. Read these. We'll see if we could get them. I didn't even know these people. I'm just giving 'em a hard time.
Noah Tucker (45:15):
Let's just cold email them with the guides.
Kurt Elster (45:18):
Here's some guides. Just read these. Get back to me.
Noah Tucker (45:21):
We can have Kim do. Anyway,
Kurt Elster (45:25):
Noah, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Noah Tucker (45:27):
Talk soon. Thank you.