How to Partner with Affiliates to Build Brand Authority

It’s hard to take social media seriously because everyone can download TikTok and post a video. Everyone can log in to Instagram and share a story. Everyone can create a YouTube channel and share a vlog. So if everyone can do it, it’s not really special… right?

Not quite.

Social Media Strategists are key for digital marketing growth because they can create communities. Much like CRM Specialists know how to segment and target an email or SMS list, social media strategists know how to segment and target your social media platforms (without ad spend!)

Through this case study I’ll showcase how an optimized Social Media Strategy led to a massive boost in engagement and sales for Dr. Josh Axe and his supplement brand’s organic social accounts.

Project Overview

Dr. Josh Axe is a leader in the health & wellness online space, most well-known for his Nashville Private Practice, his website DrAxe.com, and his NYT Bestseller Eat Dirt.

Then, in 2016 Dr. Axe co-founded Ancient Nutrition. This supplement brand has a mission of helping connect modern lifestyles with ancient nutrients (and they created powdered bone broth and collagen which we all know is super trendy these days!)

As you can imagine, because of these amazing accomplishments and innovations, Dr. Axe and team didn’t have much issue growing an engaged following.

However, the did have one big problem.

Creating content that communities engage with on-platform is one thing, while creating content that encourages your community to make a purchase is a different story.

The Dr. Axe brand and the Ancient Nutrition store needed a collaborative social media strategy that built brand authority, engaged users, and drove transactions.

As I was hired to manage their social media full-time, I came up with a few solutions alongside the team.

We set our sights on the community. Their problems, questions, and shared experiences became the inspiration for our strategy and all the content we created. Paired with quick and helpful community management, this strategy grew an engaged following and drove sales from social media.

Project Breakdown

But… where to begin?

We followed the pulse of the brand marketing calendar, planning our social content and promotions against other major marketing initiatives.

Translating a brand campaign into a social campaign takes a little bit of time and a lot of creativity (especially in today’s landscape). Social audiences are more tech-savvy and vocal with a higher media literacy. Sharing ads and promotional materials with educated social audiences takes finesse and a keen understanding of the social space.

In order to merge the brand marketing calendar with necessary social media rizz, we built a social media campaign strategy that took every detail of social media marketing into consideration. Through this campaign format we built brand awareness, drove audience interactions, and increased sales from organic social media posts (tracked direct through UTMs).

Let’s walk through the seven parts of our social media campaign and how each part built on the last while helping us work towards set goals:

Part 1 – Outline Campaign

A campaign outline is a document or resource that compiles all the information you need to bring the campaign to life. It can include a variety of information, but some of the basics we used were: Goals & OKRs, campaign messaging, landing page links, product page links, collection page links, related blog posts or free resources, UTM tags, potential partners, social trends or sounds, etc.

By gathering all this information before working on the campaign, we were able to get a clear understanding of where we were and where we needed to get to hit our goals.

This allowed us to map out when and what we planned to share across all our social platforms for the duration of the campaign, as well as how we’d connect with other partners to increase our reach.

Part 2 – Solidify Collaborations & Partnerships

Since partnerships often revolve around dates and deadlines, we always connected with potential collaborators early on. We gauge their availability, and willingness to create content/share on social.

Once we understood their available level of collaboration, we could begin to fill in the blanks for when and how we’d partner.

Part 3 – Create Content

We completed an outline, we contacted partners, and then we started content creation.

This could include delegating to the appropriate designer, photographer, or videographer, or it could mean getting scrappy on Canva and Capcut– our team took a hybrid approach.

Content used for social, ads, or email might be handed off to a specialized creative team and sent for review, whereas graphics that were only shared on Instagram stories might be created in the app, by a social media manager, right before they were shared.

Part 4 – Curate & Schedule Content

We began this process about two weeks before a launch. It included compiling all our visual assets and pairing them with optimization pieces (like captions, tags, links, etc.). We’d send the full posts for review, would make any edits, and then schedule the content for sharing.

Part 5 – Live Share Content (as needed)

Some content, like stories with stickers or reels with collaborators, must be shared natively in app. When we had to share live, we made sure to optimize posts with incredible detail.

Part 6 – Engage with the Community

We followed a key strategy for engagement that required us to interact with incoming notifications as well as similar brands and creators in our vertical. This helped increase our reach on the platform because the activity mirrored that of a standard user.

This is why I always say that brands should use social platforms like they were created to be used!

Part 7 – Report on the Data

The end of each campaign meant a full campaign performance review.

We referenced the goals and OKRs set in the campaign outline and compared them our final numbers so we could make hypothesis about why some strategies succeeded or failed. Then we would brainstorm ways to stoke the fire or offset the problem in future campaigns.

Part 8 – Rinse & Repeat

Iterating on this campaign process will allow you to spot trends and make accurate forecasts about social media performance without spending additional money on boosting.

Project Impact & Analysis

Over two years of optimizing this campaign formula, we were able to:

• Increase Brand Awareness – 800M+ impressions gained
• Increase Community Size – 2M+ net new followers (filtering spam)
• Increase Consumer Interactions – average engagement rate increased from 3% to 6%
• Expand Our Team – 2 new hires, 3 promotions

Conclusion

Driving conversions from social isn’t as easy as, “wouldn’t a TikTok like [insert idea here] be fun?”.

The good news is that you CAN follow a standard social media campaign SOP to align brand goals with consumer wants and needs, then iterate on it to increase your impact.

This alignment results in massive engagement and revenue boost, as you can see from these results.

---

Want social media results like these?

Hey there! I’m Carlisle Russell, a seasoned marketing strategist with more than 10 years of experience in e-commerce marketing. Tap here to learn more about how we can work together to grow your health & wellness brand.

Free (and subscriber-based) communities are all the rage among direct-to-consumer businesses.

The key to separating your community from the groups that members never check is solving their problem at each stage of the customer journey.

Through this case study I’ll share how we were able to engage an Online Bible Study Community at HarperCollins Christian Publishing that provides high-LTV customers with a space to connect with like-minded users.

Project Overview

The Problem: This direct-to-consumer brand has an amazing event-based marketing funnel that supports some of their best sellers, but they don’t have away to connect the registrants for these events.

Our Solution: Create an owned online community that gives registrants a place to connect while providing a platform for the brand to talk directly to their most engaged audience members.

Breaking It Down

Building a community is no small feat, but by divvying up the work and creating a realistic timeline we were able to make it work. Our community is robust, sales-driven, and allows members to connect with leaders in the industry.

Here’s how we did it:

Step 1 – Research Competitor Communities

We identified the best things about each community, what we wished the community offered, and the communication pattern related to the content inside.

Step 2 – Set Goals and OKRs

In order to have alignment in this project, we created set goals and OKRs that we would track and optimize toward while executing this project. These goals included things like revenue within 90 & 180 days of community launch, community engagement, active vs. inactive users, and more.

Step 3 – Build a Community Outline

Next we brainstormed to create an outline of what our community should include, any promotions or free offers, education relevant to our audience, engaging content, and anything we thought would make a community appealing to our ideal audience.

Step 4 – Create a Project Timeline

Once we understood everything that we needed to create, we could divvy up the work. Team members took on some aspects while we outsourced others (like graphic creation or video production.)

Step 5 – Curate the Community

After creating all the content, we needed to transfer it into the community in a format that made sense. We created 8 mini-courses, 3 challenges, and 11 courses to help our community reach their goals.

Step 6 – Launch the Community

We launched our community and after 90 days we gained 9k new members and $5k in revenue. This was huge because our community wasn’t a Facebook Group– it required 99% of our members to create a new account.

Step 7 – Maintain the Community

From launch we’ve been maintaining this community by sharing content, releasing new courses and challenges, and hosting live events featuring industry leaders. Our revenue has been doubling each month and we’re on track to become a six-figure revenue stream for the business by end-of-year.

The Impact

This community is a huge win for the business, so far its helped to:

• Curate an Owned Community – we have over 25k members and we don’t have to compete for space on their feeds

• Engage Customers – 20% of our members are active in the community, meaning they’ve signed in and interacted within the last 30 days
• Increase Website Visits – 10k sessions from this community to landing pages and PDPs
• Increase Conversions – 5k opt-ins, 1k purchases, and $15k in revenue

Conclusion

It’s no secret that communities and groups are key to building long-term relationships with a customer base. When we focused on serving a specific audience and providing the solution to their problem, we were able to achieve impressive results for this direct-to-consumer brand.

---

Want community growth results like these?

Hey there! I’m Carlisle Russell, a seasoned marketing strategist with more than 10 years of experience in e-commerce marketing. Tap here to learn more about how we can work together to grow your health & wellness brand.

If you’ve decided that affiliate programs are so 2016, then you’re missing out.

The affiliate marketing industry is expected to surpass $15.5 BILLION (with a B) in 2025, making it one of the most economically beneficial marketing platforms for creators, businesses, and the average person.

Through this case study I’ll share how we increased net sales from affiliates by 100%+ in one year, generating a $500k+ revenue stream for the business.

Project Overview

In 2020, HarperCollins Christian & HarperCollins Focus decided to focus their efforts on growing six direct-to-consumer e-commerce stores. These stores each have a specific audience, and they offer a curated selection of resources for those audiences.

One of the major roadblocks with an online store that has many direct competitors is standing out in a sea of sameness. This roadblock was apparent for these stores, as well.

Through a major brainstorming session, our team decided to spend time optimizing and re-igniting an affiliate program that was created in 2006 and left mostly to it’s own devices.

The problem?

Optimization would take an overhaul, including reviewing the thousands of affiliates to see who was still active, who was making sales, and more. This meant time spent on something with no clue if it would pay off in the long term.

With these pieces of information in mind, we created a re-launch strategy to engage active affiliates, start building a personal relationship with them, and open a clear line of communication (so we can share about promotions and the like!)

Project Breakdown

The affiliate marketing program had been around for about 17 years, but there wasn’t much focus or strategy behind it’s creation.

Through our initial review, we found a program of 1,60+ mostly-coupon-sites that weren’t helping us build brand awareness, weren’t engaging their community with creative content, and weren’t converting at a rate on par with our own e-commerce stores.

We had a lot of work to do.

Program optimization began with a clear checklist:

• Research & Analysis – review the past 17 years of affiliate activity and identify trends, opportunities, and friction points
• Prep & Planning – Inform affiliates that changes are coming, then build a timeline and a list of action items to accomplish the optimization
• Affiliate Updates – remove any inactive affiliates and properly tag those affiliates remaining in the program based on your business goals
• Program Updates – review your program details, legal, commissions, bonus rules, commission rules, and description or profile to align with your new vision and strategy for the program
• Creative Updates – remove any outdated creatives and upload an abundance of new creatives related to current campaigns and initiatives
• Messaging Updates – establish a pattern of regular communication via email, SMS, or other platforms so affiliates begin to expect and engage with messages from the brand program
• Outreach efforts – infuse the program with new high-value affiliates that will help build brand awareness and create UGC

…and after only 30 days we saw a spike in clicks, conversions, and sales from our affiliate program.

Over nine months we slowly checked off each item on the list, working out the details so that our affiliates would have a 5-star experience and litter their digital footprints with links to our stores.

Project Impact & Analysis

This optimized affiliate strategy led to:

• an Increase in Retargeting Audiences – 159k affiliate link clicks, up 490% from previous year
• an Increase in Transactions – 5.6K, up 155% from previous year
• an Increase in Revenue – $500k+ in sales, up 103% from previous year

Conclusion

Affiliate Marketing isn’t a strategy to be written off as “not worth the effort.” With just a few items checked off a list any affiliate program can begin generating revenue for your business.

Want your own affiliate results like these?

Hey there! I’m Carlisle Russell, a seasoned marketing strategist with more than 10 years of experience in e-commerce marketing. Tap here to learn more about how we can work together to grow your health & wellness brand.