Scaling influencer marketing into a DTC channel

There’s been a tectonic shift in 2024, moving from ecommerce to social commerce. 

The old way → influencer as a tactic 

The new way → influencer as a channel

What does this mean?

It means that using influencer marketing used to be limited to a single tactic for brand awareness. 

Now, with the emergence of TikTok Shop (and Meta and Amazon building similar storefronts), it’s becoming its own direct-to-consumer channel for sales. 

Typically, the brand team owns influencer relationships. And they measure success by awareness and impressions. 

But the media buying landscape has shifted. 

A few weeks ago, we had the chance to learn about the future of influencer marketing from two of the top experts in the field… and it got our heads spinning. 🤯

ZeroTo1’s Micah Whitehead and Meredith Singer convinced us to think about ‘influencer’ as its own DTC channel, not just a branding tactic. 

As the creative performance agency behind some of the most iconic brands’ (Instacart, Lowe's, and Huel, to name a few) influencer marketing and UGC — they’re speaking from experience. 

It’s a genius idea, and a necessary shift — TikTok Shops generated $363 million dollars in 2023 … and they only launched in September of that year. Now, Meta and Amazon are working on their own versions to keep conversions in-platform. 

So today, let’s focus on the mechanics of DTC selling and explore how to run successful influencer programs at scale. 

The benefits of using influencer marketing as a sales channel

With erratic acquisition costs and media buyers struggling to build a content pipeline, building out influencer marketing as a channel can be the key to scaling accounts and supporting a testing structure. 

Plus, it’s a solution to the siloed and often bloated P&Ls that account for multiple creative agencies, production budgets, creator budgets, and manual coordination and logistics. 

Way more cross collaboration can happen when you focus on building influencer as its own channel, rather than just thinking of it as a tactic to achieve a set of deliverables under brand marketing. A campaign starts and then a campaign ends. This results in…

• Team efforts and costs that scale, linearly, alongside required content volume; often silo’d efforts that are inefficient at best
• Creators & influencers that dis-engage after completed deliverables.
• Creative insights that aren’t being shared across departments to create compounding benefit.

This is why many brands are seeing mixed or limited success. Campaigns have a start and end date. And influencers are disengaged after their deliverables are complete. 

To combat this, we’re going to reframe how you think about influencers.  Rather than a tactic, now it’s → influencer as a channel. 

Shifting from a tactic to a channel, you’ll see a longer horizon of growth — not just campaign start and end date, but a 6 to 12 to 18 month horizon that compounds upon itself. Along with an increase in ROAS.

Setting goals for your creator community 

Building a brand-owned community of influencers connects three key aspects of DTC marketing:

• Growth
• Brand
• Partnerships 

And merges the goals aligned with each of those aspects in regards to influencer performance:

• Brand & loyalty
• Affiliates
• Performance content

Huge flagship brands like Target, Amazon, and Walmart are investing into influencer as a channel. Along with traditional ecommerce brands like Hexclad, Obvi, and Sakara. 

But you don’t need tons of money or resources to make this work. It comes to a defined strategy and a plan to scale your influencer marketing into a sustainable creator program.

It’s important to understand that creating influencer as a channel means a shift from brand awareness into direct response advertising. 

The goal of influencer campaigns is to provide a good introduction to the brand, but ends at that point. 

So, rather than picking one of these influencer tactics and working with an individual influencer, you combine all four of them into an owned community. 

The customer journey is also evolving…

We used to see:

• Omnichannel: Billboard → Google → Website → Checkout
• Pre iOS-14: Facebook Ad → Website → Retargeting Ad → Checkout
• Post iOS-14: Influencer → Website → Retargeting Ad → Checkout

Now, with the rise of social commerce:

• Influencer → Checkout

Meta and Amazon are working on social commerce too, aiming to keep conversion in-platform. 

With $725 Billion spent on Global Social Commerce in 2022, and $55B predicted for Live Shopping in 2026, this is the biggest advertising shift of our generation.  

Teeth whitenting brand Guru Nanda revealed they made $16.5MM in TikTok shop sales. 

MySmile saw $4.2MM in revenue. 

And Body Glaze made $9MM in revenue. 

Meanwhile, Amazon reported $1.28B in revenue from Affiliates in Q1-2023. 

The goal is to make influencer sales repeatable and sustainable – that’s where the community flywheel comes in. 

Building a creator community flywheel

Start with a strong branded community.

This give influencer affiliates a center of gravity and an anchor point. Offering a community where they can network, infoshare, and deepen their relationship with the brand can be of immense value. 

Next, focus on core mechanics including offers and incentives.

Influencers are businesses in themselves – your program must deliver value. Whether it be earlier access to products, community infoshare, or offering them a ladder of ways to deepen their relationship with the brand. 

In terms of measurement, you want to frame it like a new channel. Compared to paid media as a channel, influencer-affiliate programs offer tremendous ROI potential and long term growth.

With paid media, costs and sales scale alongside one another. Whereas, with influencer channels, your costs plateau while your sales continue to increase. 

For influencer programs your fixed costs include software and agency or internal resources. Variable costs will rise with community growth, including commissions and payouts.

But isn’t that beautiful? Costs will rise with community growth, rather than rising with Meta’s CPMs!

Plus, in addition to getting new customer acquisition, you're also getting new content that can support other channels (paid media included).  

How to create a social media influencer marketing strategy

Think of it like a content funnel.

Begin with mass influencer outreach.

ZeroTo1 reaches out to 4-5k influencers per month. They start by reaching out to top creators who have 10-20% engagement. This usually gets them 400-500 enrolled influencers. 

After this mass outreach, they move on to activation. Where they nurture opt-ins to create content and coach creators to sell. About 40-50 affiliates reach this level where they’re converting customers. 

Next step involves amplification. Working with these influencers generate around 400+ pieces of tagged media with low CPM. So now they’ve got a library of high-performing ad creative for whitelisting. Plus, a roster of high converting content creators to work with again. 

End result: High-performing influencer content generating 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x ROAS and beyond. 

1. Build a referral & loyalty program

Your recurring customers are pre-qualified & pre-seeded brand advocates.

Simple rewards programs are amazing entry-level tiers for customers and nano-influencers (those with up to 50,000 followers). 

Here are a few offer mechanics that work great for this tier:

• Give X, Get Y 
• Store credits
• Cashback

Automate scale at this stage with post-purchase opt-in offers or pop-ups featuring custom referral links, custom referral codes, and customizable co-branded landing pages. 

2. Recruit more traditional influencers

The goal with influencer recruitment is to drive program opt-ins, compounding EMV (earned media value), and reach break-even on blended program ROI.

Begin with cold outbound & DM strategies. Automate influencer outreach to make it sustainable — ZeroTo1 found that most creators don’t respond until the 4th email. 

Don’t neglect the content. Personalize outreach emails and DMs with voice memos or videos to make it stand out.

Once you find a type of creator you like, you can easily build lookalike lists.  

You’ll want to set up branded accounts for creator communities too. These accounts are great for outreach. The ZeroTo1 team has found that DM typically works better than cold email. 

At the top of the funnel, test aspects like: 

• Influencer archetypes
• Subject lines
• Messaging
• CTA
• Offer strength

Then, optimize for: 

• Open rates 
• Reply rate
• Positive reply rate 
• Opt-ins

Scaled prospecting is the most efficient lever to pull early on. Strategies can be executed using clear SOPs and VA/entry-level labor.

At even a minor scale, your community economics will begin to overcome fixed costs like agency, software, and labor. 

3. Collaborate with your community 

You’ll be able to drive program engagement, grow conversions & revenue per member, and attain ROAS/CAC benchmarks with proper community management.

Achieve this through: 

• 1:1 DMs
• 1:1 Coaching calls
• Social listening & content monitoring
• Weekly & monthly community challenges

Approach creators with very tactical one-to-one opportunities to nurture them to get more conversions for both their own benefit and the brands’. 

Something as simple as encouraging creators to implement chat marketing can help push this forward. 

It’s a low-lift, high reward tactic that helps creators: 

• Drive post engagement
• Support growth & commissions
• Automate link and/or code sharing

The more you can equip your creator community with simple tools and tactics to perform well, the more success you’ll have.  

4. Build your creative strategy & content production

The goal with creative strategy and content production in regards to influencer programs is to support brand guidelines and community optimization.

Be proactive with content and resources. Tap into your customer success brain to create a seamless and easy-to-understand set of onboarding materials.

Here’s a list of must-have content for a high-performing influencer community: 

• Creative briefs
• Grab-and-go content
• Live & recorded webinars
• Training videos & documents
• Resource hub & creator portal
• Case studies & influencer spotlights

Take a peek at Instacart’s tastemakers welcome videos for some inspiration:

5. Create extensions for paid social, whitelisting & Spark

With a constant stream of creators producing for your brand, you can build a massive content pipeline to enable better creative insights and growth feedback loops. 

Unearth new trends, brand messaging points, and CTAs to arm your community with ideas that are proven to convert.

If you’re not regularly analyzing your creatives for feedback yet, we have just the tool to help you do that. 😉

6. Scale with efficiency & automations

Influencers are humans that require human touch. So, it’s critical to automate parts of the program that are rote and otherwise impersonal.

Aligned and specialized agencies can support program goals through fractional expertise.

Partnerships can unlock scale — like brand partners for co-marketing, product partners for limited-releases, or vendor-funded campaigns.

Networks with sub-affiliates are also a great option to maximize your reach without more effort.

Leverage software integrations or simple, event-based APIs (Webhooks, Zapier) to automate emails, SMS, and even DMs.

The next frontier: Influencer marketing campaigns turned DTC channels 

Influencers are becoming 1-click, 1-stop digital storefronts. 

This means we need to think about how to optimize our paid social unit economics and broaden investments into new channels. 

Building out influencer marketing as a channel can be the key to scaling accounts and supporting a testing structure — all while improving cross-collaboration across departments for compounding benefits.