In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley introduces his “TikTok Creator Engine,” a structured system for turning product samples into loyal brand evangelists. Josh outlines five creator stages—Inactivated, Activated, Emerging, Performing, and Evangelist—and explains how to move creators through each using personalized outreach, gamification, community building, and targeted ad spend. He also details key team roles, essential KPIs, and onboarding strategies to replace the ineffective “spray and pray” approach with a scalable, relationship-driven affiliate program that generates consistent revenue.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“TikTok Creator Engine”: “00:01:12”
“Shopify“: “00:01:12”
“Amazon“: “00:01:12”
“WhatsApp“: “00:09:34”
“CRM (Creator Relationship Management System)”: “00:11:42”
“TikTok Shop“: “00:10:40”
“Fulfilled by TikTok“: “00:13:55”
“Amazon MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfillment)”: “00:13:55”
“Beehive”: “21:31”
“Discord“: “22:31”
“ChatGPT“: “23:39”

Videos and Playlists
“YouTube Onboarding Videos”: “00:18:51”
“YouTube Playlist for New Creators”: “24:27”

Concepts and Strategies
“Creative Briefs”: “23:39”
“Creative Brief”: “00:42:53”
“Bingo Card Game”: “28:51”
“Ad Spend Strategy”: “00:39:18”
“Performance Coach Role”: “00:41:54”
“Affiliate Support Specialist Role”: “00:41:54”
“VIP Program”: “00:43:50”
“Monthly Contests”: “00:44:43”
“Personalized Contests”: “00:48:19”
“Weekly Creator Calls”: “26:10”

Metrics and KPIs
“Contact Information Capture”: “00:51:08”
“Performance Metrics”: “00:52:56”
“Pareto Principle”: “00:45:38”
“Gamification”: “00:44:43”

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introducing the TikTok Creator Engine
A systematic process to turn product samples into loyal brand evangelists, focusing on consistent revenue over viral moments.

00:01:12 Host Introduction
Josh Hadley shares his background as an e-commerce entrepreneur, father, and host of the E-com Breakthrough podcast.

00:02:17 Core Principles of the System
The system focuses on inspiring creators, tracking behavior, doubling down on winners, and ignoring the rest based on performance.

00:04:10 Common Problems with Creator Programs
Outlines issues brands face, such as creators not posting, one-off videos, wasted samples, and overreliance on TikTok DMs.

00:06:49 The Five Stages of the Creator Engine
An overview of the five distinct stages creators move through: Inactivated, Activated, Emerging, Performing, and Brand Evangelist.

00:10:40 The Required Team Structure
Details the three essential team roles needed to run the engine: Affiliate Support Specialist, Performance Coach, and Store Operations.

00:15:03 Stage 1: Inactivated Creators
Focuses on approving samples and, most importantly, capturing the creator’s contact information to move them out of TikTok DMs.

00:17:53 The 30-Day Onboarding Sequence
A detailed breakdown of the first 30 days of communication, including emails and WhatsApp messages for new creators.

00:21:31 Tools for the Activation Program
Discusses essential tools for creator activation, including email newsletters, community platforms like WhatsApp, and detailed creative briefs.

00:24:27 The YouTube Onboarding Playlist
Outlines a mini-course for creators covering mindset, hook strategy, lighting, audio, and success stories to build relationships.

00:28:51 Gamifying Onboarding: The Bingo Card
A gamified “bingo card” system that incentivizes new creators to complete key tasks like posting multiple videos.

00:30:42 Stage 2: Activated Creators
Covers the team’s actions once a creator posts their first video, including congratulations and providing initial feedback.

00:33:29 High ROI Move: Boosting Videos with Ads
A strategy to use small, targeted ad spend on new creators’ videos to generate initial views and sales.

00:35:29 Stage 3: Emerging Creators
The goal for this stage is to build consistency with creators who have momentum but aren’t posting regularly.

00:40:13 Stage 4: Performing Creators
Focuses on scaling the output of consistent creators by building a personal relationship and offering exclusive VIP program invitations.

00:45:38 Stage 5: Brand Evangelists
A high-touch strategy to retain top creators through personalized contests, gifts, and exclusive access to new products.

00:50:16 Collecting Creator Contact Info
Emphasizes the critical importance of capturing creator contact information and offers creative methods like auto-DMs and product inserts.

00:51:58 Key Metrics to Measure
A breakdown of the essential KPIs to track weekly, including samples sent, post rates, and GMV per stage.

00:54:48 Daily Roles of the Team
A summary of the daily action items for the Affiliate Support Specialist and the Performance Coach within the system.

00:55:50 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
A summary of the system’s benefits, emphasizing that consistent action, refinement, and focus are the keys to success.

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  That activation stage is honestly the biggest miss that I see most brands like just completely skipping and they just go from inactivated creator to somebody went viral and it’s as simple as that. And and that’s all they’re relying upon. Whereas we’re going to methodically walk all of these creators through these five different stages. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. Today, I want to share with you all the TikTok Creator Engine. This is how we’re turning thousands of samples into thousands of brand evangelists. This isn’t just about like sending out as many samples as you possibly can. The spray and pray approach, just hoping that somebody will go viral. Rather, this is a systematic process that we follow to ensure that every sample we send out actually has the chance of helping some of these creators become loyal brand evangelists that absolutely love the brand and will continue to post about our products time and time again.

Josh Hadley 00:01:12  Who am I? My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I am a man of faith. I am a father of four and husband to a beautiful wife. I have been selling in the E-comm space for over a decade now, and doing multi-million in revenue on multiple sales channels across to Amazon, TikTok, shop and Shopify. And I am also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce, which is E-com breakthrough. Today, I want to dive straight into our creator system and how we turn thousands of samples into thousands of brand evangelists. So why this system exists in the first place? Number one, we actually want the samples that we send out to generate real revenue for the business, not just sending out samples just for the heck of it. We also want a system in place to be able to identify and then scale the winner creators that are actually doing well for the business. Thirdly, we want to eliminate waste. Like how do we keep our team focused on the the best creators and how do we eliminate the waste of like sending out additional samples to maybe creators that didn’t perform well the first go round? And last but not least, this is the key thing.

Josh Hadley 00:02:17  How do you build an affiliate army that absolutely loves your brand, and this becomes your moat to ensure or protect against them? Just jumping around from brand to brand to brand, or especially your competitors because they love your brand so much. We’re going to dive into the exact system that we have rolled out with all of our creators. So here’s the core principle of the system. We are not about actually managing the creators. If you think about, like managing your creator, it almost sounds like you’re like telling them what to do and like they have to follow your rules or else they get cut or something like that. Rather, we have flipped this model on its head. And so what it is all about is number one inspiring those creators, giving them the tools and the resources that they need to, like, just succeed. And you want to, like, inspire their mindset, help them know and almost like manifest their own success to where this could become their full time job. The second thing is we want a system to just be able to track behavior.

Josh Hadley 00:03:14  Again, we’re not trying to tell the creators exactly what to do, but we do want to track those that are succeeding and what are the behaviors that they are doing so that we could then scale that out, which then leads to the third. Like we want to be able to double down on those creators that are actually doing well, that like we see good behavior from in terms of like they’re posting regularly, they’re engaging with our brand, they love the products, they’re actually using them. And then last but not least, we want to be able to like have a system where we can confidently say, hey, we’re going to ignore the rest. Because as it relates with affiliates and creators, the Pareto principle is still very true. It is 20% of the creators that generate 80% of the revenue. And I think on TikTok shop especially, I think arguably it’s probably 5% of your creators that drive 95% of your revenue. So the Pareto principle gets scaled up even further in the TikTok space. So let’s dive into this a little bit more.

Josh Hadley 00:04:10  Let’s dive into like, what is the problem that most people face when trying to scale up their TikTok creator program? So the real problem boils down to the following things like these things are genuinely broken across probably 90% of the businesses that I talk to on TikTok shop, and we have dealt with these things a lot. So number one, a lot of creators will get the product, but they never post. That’s definitely a problem. Another problem is you have creators that will take the sample. They’ll post one video and then they’ve moved on to something totally different. And then again, like just one sample for one post. Arguably like gets really expensive if that’s the only strategy that you’re employing. The next thing is like, most people are just kind of like this pray and spray approach where they’re just like throwing out as many samples as they can and just praying that somebody’s going to go viral for them. That’s a problem. It’s not scalable. It’s not an actual system that you can rely upon. The other problem is like as creators come on board or they begin sampling the product like there’s no activation program, which basically means like there’s not a thought out process of email flows or messaging flows to help like the creator understand what’s unique about your product, what’s unique about your brand? How do you join our just like overall program and get inspired and have touches with the entire like team? And then last but not least, like there’s just an overreliance on TikTok DMs and that’s like the bane of everybody’s existence because all of these creators are getting thousands of messages and thousands of spam every day in their DMs.

Josh Hadley 00:05:41  And so, like, good luck if that’s the only way that you’re trying to communicate with these creators. So what ultimately ends up happening? Well, you get wasted samples, you get wasted. Just time of you trying to build relationships with these people because, like, you can’t even, like, barely contact them on TikTok shop. And it’s really difficult to scale because, like, you’re just as good as the last viral video that went out there for you. And so instead, what we’re trying to do is implement a system to where we’re not reliant upon people going viral. Rather, we are reliant upon people falling in love with the brand because we set them up to succeed. And although yes, some people will go viral, at the same token, we have thousands of creators that are generating a few sales a day, and when thousands of people are generating a few sales a day, that adds up to thousands of sales a day happening across the entire portfolio. So here’s the fix, right? You implement a creator engine, you have daily action items that you have not only for your team to go execute, but you’re looking at KPIs and the leading indicators of like, hey, is my affiliate program going in the right direction? So I’m going to be sharing this entire creator engine with you.

Josh Hadley 00:06:49  The nuts and bolts. What does the team look like in order to execute something like this? What are the KPIs that we are tracking? In order to know whether we’re moving in the right direction and onboarding a lot of good creators, or actually we’re moving in the wrong direction and we’re just wasting a lot of money and we’re wasting our time working with the wrong creators. I’m going to share all of that with you today. So we’ve broken our creator engine into five distinct like core stages, and I want to walk you through each of those stages and how we’re basically like segmenting each of these creators. So first let’s start with creator segment number one. This is our activated segment of our creators. So these typically are just like brand new creators. They’ve we have approved their samples on TikTok shop just recently and they have not yet posted for us. So that bucket that stage is just inactivated creators to move on to stage number two. These are going to be our quote unquote activated creators at this point. So what does it take to be in activated creator.

Josh Hadley 00:07:45  Well at this point you’ve obviously posted at least one video for us, and then we also have some additional actions that I’ll be sharing with you that we want these creators to be taking in order to be considered like an activated creator, that they have access to our tools, our resources, their in our community. That activation stage is honestly the biggest miss that I see most brands like just completely skipping and they just go from unaffiliated creator to somebody went viral. And it’s as simple as that. And and that’s all they’re relying upon. Whereas we’re going to methodically walk all of these creators through these five different stages. So once a creator is activated to get to stage number two, which is our emerging creators, this is where they need to be at. They’ve generated at least $50 of GMV. Now this is obviously a really low threshold, but these are emerging creators that the good news is because they’ve made some sales, they’ve made a little bit of commission. It might not be a lot of commission at this point, but like they’re seeing some life.

Josh Hadley 00:08:41  And for all of us that, you know, got started in the e-commerce space. Like, how exciting was it when you saw your first sale? Right. And if you’re on TikTok or if you’re on Shopify and you had like the Shopify app and you had like the notifications turned on, you would hear the kicking sound whenever you made a sound. And like, even just getting like a few sales a day, you were just like, oh, this is awesome. I’m gaining momentum. That’s the exact thing that you want for these emerging creators. So emerging creators have just started to make some money. However, they might be posting very inconsistently for the brand and that’s okay. Our job is to take those emerging creators and turn them into performing creators, where we can rely on them to, you know, actually be consistent with their content. So stage number four is that that is our performing creators. These are creators that are in general creating at least around maybe $100 in GMV per week. Right.

Josh Hadley 00:09:34  So it is like consistent. And they’re posting maybe at least once a week for us at this point. So that’s what we’re going to consider like a performing creator. And then our fifth and final stage. This is our evangelist group. So these are the creators that are posting multiple times a week. They’re also generating a good amount of GMV. And we don’t have like a specific threshold because like we want this to be very fluid, but they are ultimately engaging with the brand. They’re a big advocate for the brand. They’re in fact inspiring other creators that are in our WhatsApp group or in our email threads, etc.. So that’s what you want in these five different stages is like you’re basically going from an inactivated creator all the way to somebody who’s just a loyal brand follower and evangelist that wants to shout out your brand from the rooftops. So let’s talk about what it looks like to actually implement this Creator engine and what is required in order to do this. And lots of people ask me, like, Josh, what does your TikTok team look like? Are you just doing this all yourself? Well, I’m going to pull back the curtain here and let everybody know, like, this is what I this is the current setup that we have on TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:10:40  I’m sure it’s going to evolve over time, but these this is like the minimum that I think you have to have in order to execute, like a really robust creator engine. Like I’m going to share with you today. So the first team member that we need to have here on our TikTok team is our affiliate support specialist. So this affiliate support specialist, they’re they’re executing like the daily messaging. They’re managing the bots that we have set up in UCA reaching out to new creators. They’re also helping these inactivated creators with any issues that they have in getting their samples to begin with. Their job is also to be tracking when somebody posts their first video and then reaching out to that creator to congratulate them, okay, they’re also the person that is like helping construct and help us visualize basically the CRM, the creator relationship management system, to be able to understand where they are in each of these five different stages that I shared with you earlier, and then this. This team member is also responsible for all of the follow ups with these people, especially these unaffiliated creators.

Josh Hadley 00:11:42  It’s trying to just like, continue to reach out to them until we get them into our system and actually becoming an activated creator, because when we ultimately get an activated creator, this is where roll number two is required. So again, if you just have a lot of like new creators that you’re just giving a lot of samples out to, like, you first need to start with your affiliate support specialist. Their job ultimately is to find new creators for you, get them approved for samples, and then help them get their first post out there. That’s the main job of that affiliate support specialist. Now, once somebody is activated and maybe they start making some money, this is where roll number two becomes really important. And this is our affiliate performance coach. And what this affiliate performance coach needs to be able to do is they’re looking at the videos and they are giving feedback. They know what does well. They’re looking at the trending audio. They’re looking at the trending hooks. And their job is just to continue to inspire, to motivate and to be able to, like, just be another key support person for these creators.

Josh Hadley 00:12:43  And it’s helping, just like enable their content to get that much better. Okay. This performance coach is also somebody that like, knows what’s working right now for other brands on TikTok shop, and they’re baking it into our overall system. Okay. And ultimately they’re the person that is responsible for doubling down and scaling the winners and encouraging them to continue to post more and become brand evangelists. Whereas the role of the affiliate support specialist is just like volume, volume, volume, volume, kind of hurting the cattle, so to speak, you’re hurting massive amounts of crowds and creators. The performance coach gets really niche, spending most of the time with the emerging creators, the performing creators, and helping them become brand evangelists. That’s the key role of that performance coach. And then last but not least, you need to have your store operations just cleaned up. Somebody needs to be focused on your product listings, okay. And the SEO that is baked into those listings. Also your main images and the secondary images for your content there on TikTok shop, you need to have somebody that’s responsible for your inventory forecasting and getting your shipments into fulfilled by TikTok, or managing the process from orders coming in to TikTok and then being fulfilled.

Josh Hadley 00:13:55  If you’re using Amazon MCF. Okay. You want this person also responsible for tracking your profitability. How much money are you spending on samples and what are the costs associated with that? And ultimately creating like a mini like profit and loss statement for your brand. And then they’re also going to be the person responsible for your ads on TikTok shop running GMV max ads, measuring those, monitoring them, increasing that the ROI threshold to ensure that you remain profitable and you’re going to give the support and love that you need to very specific creators that we’ll talk about here. And then last but not least, like making sure that you are participating in all of the promotions that TikTok has. TikTok has a lot of those, like vouchers and kind of like co-funded campaigns that you definitely want to take advantage of. And so that’s their job is to make sure that you’re participating, that you’re giving the appropriate discounts, managing the prices to ensure that you’re profitable. So like these three roles all working together is what’s really essential. If you want to scale from again, I think you could probably get things started with an affiliate support specialist to begin generating your first like maybe 50 to 100 K per month on TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:15:03  But as soon as you want to, like, go further than that. That’s where I think, like these two rolls of performance coach and a store operations manager becomes really vital to your future success. We’re going to dive right into each of these stages. We’re going to talk about what is required for each stage, the actions that we are we are taking in each of these stages, and how you can go replicate this for your own creator funnel. So for stage number one, we’ve got our unaffiliated creator at this point. So ultimately we’ve acquired a new creator and we have sent out a sample. So what are we doing in this inactivated stage? Well, it’s pretty darn simple. Number one, we’re just simply approving samples. And again, we’re not approving samples for all creators that request samples. We only want to work with creators that actually have like good videos that have a decent track record. That conversation’s meant for another video, i.e. go check out some of my other content that I’ve put out there for TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:15:57  But the most important thing that you want after approving a sample for a creator, is you want to get them to share their contact information with you. And so here’s basically what we’re doing. We have an auto responder. As soon as we approve a sample, we’re immediately going to say, hey, congrats, we just approved your sample. This is going to be a TikTok team. It’s going to be arriving in the next few days. In the meantime, by the way, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads every single month, and we have chosen you. And we want to promote your videos when you start posting your videos. If you want us to put some of that ad spend behind your videos, go ahead and fill out this form letting us know you’re interested. Now guess what? When they fill out this form, they are going to give us their email address, their shipping address, and we’re also going to get their cell phone number when we have that level of contact for those those creators.

Josh Hadley 00:16:49  This is where it all begins. Because if you don’t have that contact info, they only they fall into kind of two buckets at this point. If somebody fills out the form they go into our reachable bucket. Right. So now they’re basically an inactivated creator but they’re now reachable. But if they ignore our message or they never complete the form, we’re tagging them as just like unreachable. And until they become reachable. Here’s the exact process you follow. You continue to send them a DM literally every single day saying, hey, how about now? How about now? Do you want to fill out this form? Hey, can we get your email? Can we get your phone number? Because nothing else happens until you get their contact information off of TikTok shop. Okay, because the TikTok DMs are like the death of creators and the death of this entire engine. So step number two, let’s assume now we have an activated creator that has given us their contact information. So what are we doing with them at this point? Well, we’re ultimately going to add them into our email newsletter flow and add them into our WhatsApp, you know, kind of onboarding flow that we have for our brand as well for our unreachable creators.

Josh Hadley 00:17:53  As I mentioned, we’re just going to continue to send DM after DM after DM every single day until we just get their contact information, because again, nothing good happens until we get their contact information from these creators. So what does it look like for these these creators that are they’re unaffiliated, but they’re in kind of this like onboarding stage where they’ve given us their contact info. What are we doing with them? So here’s kind of like our first 30 day sequence that we follow. So day one immediately or day zero, whenever they fill out that form like we are sending them there. We’re adding their email into our email newsletter and this is what the sequence looks like. Day zero. It’s like, hey, welcome to the brand. This is our brand story. This is who we are. Get to know us as persons, right? Get to know us as human beings. There is a relationship, and especially with AI and all the garbage happening and all the noise with that right now and a lot of AI content, guess what? This personal relationship that you have with these creators becomes gold.

Josh Hadley 00:18:51  Because most people are just like AI, automation, everything. Whereas if you take the time to actually develop and nurture a relationship with these creators, that’s the most defensible moat that you can create. From there, we also will we’ll have like on day one, we’re going to encourage these people to join our WhatsApp group if they haven’t already, and then so on and so forth. We’re going to be sharing them with our creative briefs. On day three, we are then going to go have them take a look at our YouTube onboarding videos, and I’ll share with you kind of that like YouTube playlist that we created where it’s like, hey, this is how you get to learn more about the brand and learn more about who we are. What? What is success look like for creators, and how do you go replicate that success for yourself? On day number four, we’re then following up and saying, hey, your product should have arrived now. Make sure you post your videos reference back to that creative brief.

Josh Hadley 00:19:41  Day number five. Hey, did you post your video yet? And again, we’re trying to get people to like reply to these emails. There’s a question at the end of every single one of these emails saying, hey, did you get your sample? Hey, did you post your first video yet? Were you able to get access to the WhatsApp community? Were you able? Like and again, it’s really good. Like your deliverability for your emails shoots through the roof when you can have creators that are actually replying to these emails. Okay. It’s literally taking like the best practices for like just email customer management and scaling that out, like taking those same principles but applying them into the creator space. That’s the most important thing that you could apply here. Day six through 30 is where we are going to continue to reach out to them on a daily basis. And there’s one key aspect that we want them to complete now. We want them to complete a little bingo card or a game that we have created.

Josh Hadley 00:20:31  And basically we have gamified the experience so that when we have an activated creator, we want to incentivize them to be able to post not just one video, but to get excited about posting multiple videos and getting into that habit. So once creators complete those first 30 days of like the email onboarding sequence and the WhatsApp onboarding sequence, they now move to stage number two, which is our activated creator stage. In the activated creator stage, what we’re looking for is, like, these creators have gone through all of the emails. Hopefully they’ve read them right, but most importantly, they have posted at least one video, right? A creator is not technically activated until they’ve actually posted something for your brand. But let’s dive into again, this activation is really important. Like it’s not just posting one video. We want them to be able to post multiple videos. So that’s where I’m going to share with you these like key aspects of our onboarding, where we actually activate these creators that I think makes all the difference.

Josh Hadley 00:21:31  So first off, in order to like set this whole activation program up properly, here’s what we’re using for our email newsletters. We utilize beehive. It’s super easy. It’s super cheap and just an easy way to like email all of our creators. Now secondly, you need to have kind of a I don’t know what the best thing to call it is like. It’s a community. It’s a place where all of your creators can gather and share feedback with one another, support one another, have dialogue one with another. And so really, in the TikTok space, I’ve only really heard of like two key like community building platforms that people are using. Number one is discord. And then number two is WhatsApp. As you can see here, there are a good number of brands that use discord. However, if your demographic of creators that are continuously posting videos about your brand if it’s above 30. I’m going to argue that, like WhatsApp is probably the better community for you rather than discord because of this. If the creator is above the age of 30, most likely when they when you tell them like, hey, we need you to download the discord app, they’re like, wait, what is this? This is a brand new app that they’re going to have to download to their phone, whereas the audience that’s above 30.

Josh Hadley 00:22:43  Like most likely, I would say 80% of them already have WhatsApp. They’re already using WhatsApp for their neighborhood or their church or something like that. They’ve already like they’re used to using it. And so we wanted to double down on like the, the lowest amount of friction. And so WhatsApp was that for us. And again, the engagement has been very high there. But there are some there’s pros and cons to each of these different platforms but just wanted to share. Those are like the two different like platforms of choice when it comes to like building the community. Next, the creative briefs that you create are extremely essential to this entire process, because if you are not going to enable your creators to be successful, like why are you doing this to begin with? And guess what? When a creator joins your program and they get a message that says, hey, by the way, we already know all the top hooks and the scripts that work really, really well for these products. We want to share them with you so that you can go replicate them.

Josh Hadley 00:23:39  Add your own like little flavor and spice to it as well, and hopefully you get the same repeat success as them. Creators are dying for that content because most of the time they’re just getting the sample and they’re like, oh crap, what do I do with the sample? They’re going to go to like ChatGPT or something and create some, you know, probably not great hook for your product. And then the video doesn’t really do anything. They posted one video, they didn’t have success, and then they move on to some other brand. Whereas these creative briefs, if they can see that, it’s like, oh wow, you’ve got like ten, 20 different hooks I can test out. Like, great. Yeah, you’ve done half the work for me. I just need to go create these videos. So here’s just like a quick example of what that looks like. And again, if you’re listening to the audio version of this, make sure you come check this out on YouTube where I’m actually presenting all of these slides here for you.

Josh Hadley 00:24:27  We talked about this in this inactivated creator stage where we’re walking them through the email sequence, one of those that we want people to come back to over and over again is this like YouTube playlist for our new creators. And why this is so important is because we are telling the creators like it’s it’s like a mini course, so to speak, but it’s the brand owners that are creating this mini course so that a they get to know the actual, like human beings that live behind the brand, which, by the way, if you’re listening to this and you’re a North American seller, your biggest advantage is you and the culture. And you know these creators and you can communicate easily to them and, well, because like all the other brands that are overseas that are trying to communicate to these creators, they really struggle because like, they don’t know the US customs, they don’t know the US norms. And so when they like oftentimes they don’t want to jump on a video because heaven forbid, like the creators actually find out.

Josh Hadley 00:25:24  They’re like, oh, this is a brand overseas brand. Like, yeah, like this is just cheap crap. Now I’m not even interested. That’s like the perception. And so that’s why I think it’s so, so important. Like build a relationship. So build a little mini course where each of these videos that I have listed out, these are just like five minutes. Okay. So number one we’re going to start with like a mindset training video. This is like guys this can become your full time income. If you manifest good things good things can happen to you with that. The other thing that we’re going to talk about that’s like super important is like, what is the hook strategy that you have and letting people know, like, hey, by the way, here’s all of the creative briefs. Here’s where you can access them. But like doubling down on how important all of those hooks are becomes like just extremely vital. The next thing that we’re going to talk about with them is like lighting and audio.

Josh Hadley 00:26:10  How important it is. Like how they show up and the way the products look in front of the camera. Then we’re going to like share success stories from existing creators. So again, it’s building that relationship. You’re going to literally ask some of your creators that have done well, hey, would you mind recording like a 32nd video about like why you work with Hadley Designs and why it’s worth the effort of continuing to like, post about our products? And again, if you just create a montage of all of those, like, like basically creator testimonials, like it gets the other creators, like super excited. Then we’re going to talk about like the weekly creator calls that we do. It’s like our weekly audit where again, the owner, the brand owner is going to jump on a call. Host a live call on Zoom or Google Meet, whatever it is with the creators, anybody that wants to join, and then they’re going to be breaking down like, hey, here’s working, here’s what’s not working and why.

Josh Hadley 00:27:01  Okay, we’re also going to talk about like how long it takes to go viral and some of the like, I guess like case studies where people like continue to post for over nine months before their first video actually hit. And just giving them that mindset. They’re like, guys, this is not just like post once and like you should be like crazy successful. This is like post 20, 30, 40, 50 different videos before. Like maybe you find the one that actually hits. So it’s like just training them on that mindset and like really what it takes to be successful on TikTok. Shop today. Okay. And then we talk about like our monthly contests. We talk about like how we do them, how they want to participate, if they want to earn more money and earn bonuses. These are the contests that they can participate in, which then means they need to be paying attention to their emails where we announce these contests. So again, it’s driving them back to just like wanting to stay engaged with us, making sure that our emails show up in the primary tab and not in like the promo or sponsor tab on Gmail or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:28:01  And then last but not least, we’re going to talk about like, hey, engaging in WhatsApp. Like, what is what what’s apt for for the brand. What are the things that you should talk about? Maybe not talk about maybe somethings better suited for like a one on one conversation. But like, we want to walk everybody through, like these onboarding videos so that they have a really good understanding of like what it takes to be successful and so that they know they have the tools and the resources at their disposal to go succeed. And again, if you do this level of effort for your creators, they will return it tenfold for you. Now, this is probably one of my favorite things that we have in our kind of like inactivated becoming an activated creator stage. This is where you really, like, gamify it, and I have yet to hear anybody else doing something similar. So you’re hearing it first here. If this becomes a thing, you know that I’m the one who started this trend.

Josh Hadley 00:28:51  But we create this kind of like bingo, where when a creator comes in, we walk them through, it’s like, hey, we just need you to complete five tasks and you get bingo. And when you get bingo, you will get a $20, like just a $20 bonus. You could send that in the form of a gift card, or mailing a $20 cheque, or just like a $20 Venmo, whatever it is. But here’s what they need to complete in order to complete bingo. Number one, they’ve got to post at least their first video, right? So that’s an easy one. And again we give them a little dopamine hit. Hey congrats you. You’ve already completed one of the five stages here of our bingo card. Secondly, what we want them to do is like we want them to actually use three different hooks from the creative brief. So again, it requires them to actually go back to that creative brief that you shared with them and then choose three different like hooks that they’re going to use.

Josh Hadley 00:29:44  Next, we’re going to ask people to go through the YouTube playlist that I just shared with you, that onboarding playlist. And then at the end of each video, we want them to comment done. And what was the action item that they learned or the takeaway from that video. And that’s how we know they actually completed those. And then we want them to then post ten videos. And ideally they’re posting ten videos with ten different hooks, but we just want them going from, hey, we posted one video, now we’ve posted ten videos. Okay. And then last but not least, it’s not just sufficient enough because people could game the system, create really, really crappy ten different videos. We do require them to actually generate some GMV. So $50 in GMV, that’s not a lot, but it’s enough to say, hey, this person actually is creating content that’s good enough to generate at least a few sales, and this has to be completed within 14 days so that they have this like sense of urgency to complete it.

Josh Hadley 00:30:42  And if they do that, they get $20. They’ve built some massive momentum. Now it’s going to be your job to help scale that up. Well, let’s dive into the specific roles that your team members should be executing in this activated stage. Again, we’ve got to creator. They’ve posted at least one video. What do we do now. So the affiliate support specialist their critical role here is to be tracking and knowing when somebody posts their first video, they should be one of the first people to congratulate them and to just say thank you for posting, right, and to say, hey, thanks again for posting. Love that video. Would love to see you post a couple more videos. And by the way, don’t forget about the bingo card. And so they need to do this in two spaces. Number one yes, you can send this as a DM in TikTok. That’s fine. 90% of them won’t see it. Ideally you are messaging them this in WhatsApp, right? So that they can see it.

Josh Hadley 00:31:34  They have a personal one on one conversation with you on WhatsApp and you’re just acknowledging like, hey, I know you put forth the effort to actually record that video. Great. And by the way, don’t forget to complete your bingo, which means post more videos and generate some GMV with those videos. So that’s the key of the affiliate support specialist. Let’s talk about what the performance coach does here in this activated stage. Well, in this activated stage on a daily basis. And again, we probably have hundreds of creators coming through our funnel every single week. But this performance coach is only going to look at like maybe just like ten creators per day. And these are creators that are in the activated stage, and they’re just giving them some like high level guidance. They’re reviewing the videos and they’re reaching out with the one on one message to those creators saying, hey, I like what I see, but let me give you a little bit of like feedback. And again, it’s just showing that like, hey, we as a brand, we care about you.

Josh Hadley 00:32:29  We are invested in your success. So here like just kind of like the checklist that our performance coach will go through. These are just they’re very basic. But it’s like hey how’s the lighting? How’s the audio? Are they enthusiastic? Are they showing the product correctly? Are they utilizing a good hook? And how long are these videos? Right. Because sometimes people create like 2 or 3 minute videos, their first video and it’s like, that ain’t going to be a viral trend. So how can we get that tightened up? And again reiterating back to them, Like use the creative brief. Emulate some of these already, like winning videos that have historically done well. Utilize these hooks that have already performed. So again, it’s just giving them more touches. Ultimately, now here is like the highest ROI move that you can make with any creators in this activated stage. So what you’re going to do is this performance coach needs to identify the top seven creators every week that they think they’re like, man, this person is creating some at least decent content for us.

Josh Hadley 00:33:29  They’re may be mildly engaged with us or, you know, responding to us. Take seven of those people and every week a new seven, and you’re going to light up ads, okay. You’re going to give them a $5 per budget day or $5 per day as a budget. And just like you’re going to tell you can do this in GMV Max, like pull the creators video in and give it, you know, $5 of ad spend per day. Now, why do you want to do this? You’re spending $35 in a given week, and then you’re going to turn off that, like boost at the end of the week. So it’s not like you’re doing this in perpetuity otherwise that this compounds really quick. But like every week you’ve got seven new creators. You’re spending 35 bucks a week for them. And here’s what you want. You’re just trying to get them more views and ideally their first sale. Because if you can get them more views and their first sale, and you’re just putting in a little bit of extra love behind their videos to kind of like juice the algorithm, guess what? You’ve triggered this like dopamine hit for them as soon as they get their first sale or they see, oh wow, look, my views are so much better when I feature this brand’s product compared to when I go feature some other supplement or whatever brand that’s reached out to me.

Josh Hadley 00:34:38  So this is the magic that sits behind it. Like you’re just like, artificially giving them like a boost to their views so that they see like, oh man, there is more views coming to this video. Maybe I do need to do something different, and maybe I need to do more with this brand. So I cannot emphasize like how big and how important this like strategy is. This is a massive high ROI move. It does require some like tracking. You’re going to need to create a spreadsheet and track it and turn it on and off in TikTok shop. But obviously that’s why you have your operations manager to coordinate with this performance coach. But the performance coach needs to be the person that can identify the good content, or at least decent content. because like you’re trying to identify these creators early on to be like, hey, let’s these people, I think have some like really, really good potential. Let’s see if we can like, just get them hooked and working with us in a bigger form or fashion.

Josh Hadley 00:35:29  Now we’re getting into stage number three, where we’re focused on our emerging creators. So we’ve gone through the activated stage. We’ve now activated these creators. Ideally they have created or they’ve already completed their bingo card, which means they’ve posted over ten different videos for us. They’ve generated at least $50 in GMV, but they might not be posting consistently for us. So that’s why we call them an emerging creator. They’ve got a little bit of momentum behind them, but maybe it’s not overly consistent. So what is our goal? Our goal here with these creators is just to build consistency, let them know that we are in their corner, that we are rooting for them. Okay, these are our future performers. And so we need these, like these emerging creators to find some success. And that’s how we want to double down with them. So what are the things that we do here. Well our affiliate support specialists, the key thing that they are going to do here is they’re basically now tracking how many posts are happening per week with all of these creators in the emerging bucket, and who posted this week, who didn’t post this week, and basically being able to share that type of content.

Josh Hadley 00:36:35  So they are going to reach out because there are a good number of like engaging, like emerging creators. They’re going to reach out with just a very simple message, just saying like, hey, I love the content. Keep up the great work. By the way. Don’t forget we have our we have our creative briefs that you should be using to just enable your success. By the way, it takes 20 to 30 different videos before somebody ultimately hits, so it’s like reminding them to go back to what they learned in the like the YouTube playlist that was like the onboarding videos, which is, hey, it’s going to take time, but it’s all about consistency. Now this this affiliate support specialist, it’s not like we’re copying and pasting this exact message every single week to every single creator. Rather, they’re choosing the creators to reach out to, and they’ve got a good custom GPT that they can use to be able to, like, modify the message and come out with just like a different but inspiring and encouraging message to these like creators to let them know, like, we’re rooting for you.

Josh Hadley 00:37:31  We are looking at your content. We want you to keep getting better and better and better. And again, you want to be doing this all in like private one on one WhatsApp conversations. All right, so what is the performance coach do then. That’s different than this affiliate specialist. Well the key thing here is that they’re going to be looking at like maybe 5 to 10 videos. Same thing that they were doing with the in the activated creator stage. But again, they’re taking it up a notch because these creators have already proven a little bit of momentum in sales history. So really, it’s replicating the exact same thing. It’s bringing people back to the creative brief. Hey, don’t forget we have these creative briefs, we’ve already done the hard work for you. And then just continuing to give them like the light feedback that they need. Focus on your lighting, the audio. How engaged are you, what is your hook, how long is that video, etc. so like it’s just it’s the same thing but on repeat and you’re working with better and better creators as we scale up these different stages.

Josh Hadley 00:38:24  Now again, last but not least, this performance coach is responsible for instead of identifying seven creators in seven videos that they wanted to promote in ads, now we just need to find five. And the reason why we’re actually going to do a smaller number here is because we arguably you could do more if you want, but like I’m trying to force these people to like generate sales on organic videos because I know we could generate sales on ad spend videos. But like, you want to incentivize these people to like, keep pushing into that next stage. So I’m only going to do five creators. And again, you want to identify the top five videos and creators that you’re probably you’re engaging with the most. They’re replying back to the one on one DMs and their content is actually as good, right? If their content is trash. But they’re like engaging with you a lot. That’s that’s still not a great candidate, right? You want to be able to say like, oh man, I’ve seen creators like this perform pretty well.

Josh Hadley 00:39:18  For whatever reason their videos haven’t hit yet. We’re going to execute the exact same playbook. We’re going to light up ads $5 a day. That gets us another $35 and spend for, you know, another group of five creators. And we’re going to try to push them, try to get their views up, and ideally, again, try to trigger some additional sales behind that. And hopefully then GMV Max picks up their ads on its own after you remove the ad boost. Okay. So that’s all that we’re doing. And this is just like a simple rinse and repeat. So again there’s no new strategies that I shared here that weren’t already executed in the activator stage for these creators. But like you’re just working with better creators. So now we’re going to be moving into stage number four, which are our our performing creators. So what’s the difference between a, you know, an emerging creator and a performing creator? Well, ultimately it’s probably less about the GMV, but it’s about the consistency of posting.

Josh Hadley 00:40:13  That’s what I want to see more than anything. They’re posting at a minimum once a week for the brand. Now, are they going to have a week or two where they miss? Yeah. That’s okay. I’m not you’re not going to demote a creator and they have no idea you’re running these buckets in the background, but you’re you’re not going to technically, quote unquote, demote the creator to an emerging creator just because they didn’t post one week. What you are going to do is you are going to reach out and be like, hey, notice that you didn’t post last week. Hope you’re doing well. Maybe you’re on vacation, maybe it’s your kids spring break, whatever it is. Like, Just like, get to know them as a person because they have life happening to them. So what’s going on with these performing creators? Well, they’re generating ideally $100 in GMV per week, and they’re posting at least once a week for you. Okay. So again, they’re connected to us. They’re engaging with us.

Josh Hadley 00:40:59  They’re performing it mildly. Well, maybe they haven’t yet gone viral. And that’s okay. The most important thing is like they’re just engaging with you. So what is our goal here? Scale output. If they’re posting once a week, how do we get them to two, three, four, five times a week? Because the more content they put out, the more chances for sales. And then it’s a perpetual flywheel, as you can see here. So what is the role of our affiliate support specialist when it comes to working with these performing creators in stage number four? Well, their job is just to simply keep track of where all the creators are and where they’re at in each of these stages, and who posted who did not post this last week and then notify the performance coach. So now my affiliate support specialist is no longer going to be the one reaching out to these creators in bucket number four, which is, you know, the performing creators. This now is just relationship driven with that performance coach.

Josh Hadley 00:41:54  So again, the role of that affiliate support specialist is dealing with the masses in mass scale, reaching out to them, connecting with them. A lot of like copy and paste type of messaging. Whereas the performance coach as you can see here, is going to be much more like tailored content and tailored one on one messages with these creators. And so again, it’s important to like have that human connection with them, understand what’s going on in these creators lives. If they didn’t post for a week or something like that. And again, you’re just continuing to like, build them up, inspire them, give them feedback on their videos, ask them what they need from us as a brand to help them post even more. Do they need more samples? What is it that they need from us? Do they need more ideas, more hook ideas? And again goes back to like again, that creative brief becomes so, so important. And then here’s what you’re going to do. Same thing we were doing in the earlier stages, which you’re now going to select only three of the top videos for the performing creators, and you’re going to light up some ads behind those.

Josh Hadley 00:42:53  So again, $5 a day and you’re going to run that for a week. You’re trying to get them more views and again more sales to again hopefully just like kickstart that engine to help them begin seeing some sales, some success so that ultimately they will turn into a brand evangelist with them. So here’s where the performance coach actually needs to, like, pay attention and do something a little different than what has been done in any of these other stages. When somebody is getting close to like generating $1,000 in GMV per month on a consistent basis, they want to be reaching out to those creators saying, hey, by the way, I want to let you know we have an exclusive VIP program that nobody like. We don’t broadcast this to all of the creators because we don’t want people to feel bad. But like, you’re super, super close. I need you generating like an extra $200 a month in GMV, and I can invite you into this like, special VIP only creator program where you’re going to get exclusive benefits, you’re going to get increased affiliate commissions.

Josh Hadley 00:43:50  You’re going to get early access to some of our new products. You’re going to get faster feedback and response times from our team. You’re going to be associating with all the top creators, so you’re going to hear what’s working with them, etc.. Like, you want to make this like an exclusive invitation, but like you’ve got to do it with the creators that like, they’re almost there, they’re maybe not quite there, but like, you’re sending this message out to them and letting them know, like, hey, I want to invite you here, but here’s what I need. And again, you’re giving them feedback. You’re encouraging them to post a little more frequently for you. And so here’s another thing that we do for our emerging. So stage three and stage four creators. We’re going to execute just like monthly contests for them. And these contests are pretty darn straightforward. But like we want them, we want to give them like more bonus or more commission when they cross different GMV thresholds. So again, hey, generate an extra $1,000 in GMV, get a $100 bonus.

Josh Hadley 00:44:43  It doesn’t matter what the contest is, but like you want to be running these sprints on an ongoing basis to these emerging creators and these performing creators, and they need to have like just one contest that they’re all working towards. as you know, in our activated stage, the only contest that we have running for them is just the the bingo game. But then for stage three and for creators, there’s one contest that we’re sending to them. And this contest like, is just there to motivate them to create more content. And if they get close to these GMV tiers to just push a little bit harder. And again, it’s just like this incentivized when you want to gamify all of this so that they want to stick around and keep working with your brand. So now that we’ve identified somebody that is, you know, high video output, I don’t have a specific number of videos that have to be posted every week, but ideally at least 3 to 5 videos per week to be a brand evangelist. And again, they’re producing high GMV.

Josh Hadley 00:45:38  Well, what is high GMV? It’s all going to be relative to like your scale. But like right now target like maybe $1,000 per month in consistent GMV for your brand. And obviously if you’re doing bigger numbers than that, then bump this up to 20 K per month in GMV in order to be considered like a VIP or a brand evangelist. But like, what’s the goal here is like, we want to retain these creators. These are your most valuable creators. This is the Pareto principle. The 20%, or arguably the 5% of creators that are driving 95% of your GMV. They sit here in this bucket. And so this is going to be your high touch. Your performance coach is going to be reaching out to them on a regular basis, you know, arguably at least once a week. But like they’re sharing like hey by the way, just wanted to share with you one of the most viral hooks that that’s gone out there. Wanted to make sure that you saw it first before I add it to the creative brief.

Josh Hadley 00:46:29  Just because I know you’re going to take action on it, you’re going to send them. Here’s one of my favorite things. Send them a gift like surprise and delight them once every six months. Whether it’s just like, you know, it could be like TIFF’s Treats or something like that, and they get like a box of cookies delivered to their doorstep, but something fun to let them know you’re thinking of them. Okay. And when you do these things, this is the work that you do that any overseas brand that wants to try to steal your creators, they can’t because they’re not going to be able to execute any of this stuff. And the gifts they would send them are probably going to be weird gifts, because they don’t understand the culture and things like that. So like, understand that this sits behind it as one of the most important aspects of your entire like evangelist campaign is like getting to know these, these creators on a personal level so that if you if you know that they like Twix candy bars, then you best be sending them a box of cookies that are like Twix flavored cookies or something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:47:25  That’s where you take this thing to the next level, and you ultimately, you just want to be continuing to provide them feedback and asking them, what else can we do to help you find more success? Okay, have them beta test some of your new products. Give them exclusive access to be the first ones to post videos about those new products and get them excited about it. And then ultimately you’re going to run contest sprints for these creators. And these contest sprints are going to be different than what you’re running for the group. The stage four and three creators, these are going to be more tailored to just coming out with more content boosting your GMV, and they can be tailored to each of the individual creators depending on what you need for them. If you need more videos from a creator, give them a specific, personalized contest that is just for them. It’s like, hey Sally, you’ve been posting like ten videos a month for us, which is fine, but like if you’ll hit 30 videos this month, I’ll pay you an extra whatever amount that’s going to be.

Josh Hadley 00:48:19  But like the contest, just become personalized. So you’re no longer like doing these blanket contests. And maybe you can maybe once a quarter or something like that for these creators. They like a little bit of competition here or there. But the most important thing that you can do is personalize, like the contest to fit their need. Maybe they’re already creating tons of different videos for you, and that’s great. But then have them focus on like, hey, I just need you focusing on like, I need you to emulate all of these hooks that are here in the creative brief. And if you can do that, I’ll reward you. Now, this does require you to do a lot more like manual hand-holding and monitoring, but like it’s worth it. This is the 5% of creators that are generating 95% of the GMV. So guess what? That’s where the majority of your time should be spent, is focused on these creators and helping them win. So this entire like life cycle that I walk through, stage 1 to 5 is just all about getting the creator from inactivated to activated to emerging to performance, all for the sole purpose to get them to an like a brand evangelist that absolutely loves you.

Josh Hadley 00:49:20  And then guess what? If you have so many brand evangelists that you’re like, I can’t do this, there’s not enough time in the day for me to reach out and personally invite people personally manage their contests. Guess what? You hire more performance coaches. Okay. And so this is what it looks like as you scale this like brand evangelistic expansion system, you can flip this thing on its head and maybe what you do instead of needing to hire extra performance coaches, your top creators, your top, top creators, you pay them to become the performance coach. So now they are working with your other brand evangelists and maybe some of your emerging and performing creators, and they’re executing the exact same playbook as your internal performance coach. That’s the trick. And that’s the magic. Where this thing really gets to scale is like you. You turn like your best performing affiliates into like, the champions for your brand. And then they’re coaching and providing feedback to the other creators. And it creates this very synergistic flywheel for you.

Josh Hadley 00:50:16  Obviously, you have private WhatsApp groups for these top creators, and they get private opportunities, exclusive access to new products, etc.. Now as we wrap all of this stuff up, I want to come back to like the key thing that all of this is built upon collecting their contact info, and that email and phone number capture is where everything starts and ends. So here’s some creative ways to do that. Number one, you want to make sure like you have an auto DM that goes out to somebody as soon as you approve their samples. And there’s many different ways that you can incentivize that. Telling them that you’re willing to put ad spend behind their videos is a great way to incentivize them to do that. another really key thing that you know, you can do here, especially if you’re going to send inventory into TikTok shop itself for fulfilled by TikTok, which is using a product insert. So have a little QR code in your product that says, hey, by the way, thank you creator for sampling this.

Josh Hadley 00:51:08  And even if this goes to a customer, that’s okay. But complete this form and we have an extra surprise or free whatever for you. Now again, if you’re in the Amazon space and you’re hearing like a bunch of red flags, yeah, maybe like don’t do that on Amazon. But if you’re sending it in. But it’s still the wild, wild west over there. I would I would consider including a QR code to incentivize these creators to actually reach out, give you their contact info. Now, here are some like the core KPIs. At a minimum, we want at least 25% of our creators. We want to have their contact info. Are we going to be able to get 100% of our creator’s contact info? Like ideally, yes. But like the fact of the matter is like no. So like on the higher threshold, like if I’m targeting 75% of my creators, like I consider that a massive win to have 75% of anybody posting for me. We have their contact information. That’s a massive win.

Josh Hadley 00:51:58  So what are the metrics that we measure here? This is the last, most important thing that you should be measuring on a daily and weekly basis for your affiliate program. So let’s dive into these individual KPIs that you should be tracking. So first and foremost, how many samples did you send out to Unique Creators this past week? Okay, I want to know that metric. On top of that, I want to know the percentage of creators that actually posted their first video after receiving a sample. Then I want to know how many. What percent of these creators are actually reachable? So we sent out 100 samples last week. Great. What percent of them do I have their contact info from? How many completed that form so that I have their email, their phone number? Okay, then I want to know how many posts am I getting per creator for the different buckets that we have. So I want to know what’s the average number of posts for all of the creators in the activated bucket? Then I want to know a separate number.

Josh Hadley 00:52:56  How many posts were created on average for all the creators in my emerging bucket? Then I want a separate metric how many posts were created? Average number of posts per creator for my performing creators. And then last but not least, I want to do the same thing for my brand evangelist. How many posts per creator over the past week were created? So you’re going to do that with those four individual buckets. And then guess what? We’re going to do that exact same thing for each of those buckets to know who generated a sale. But I’m primarily focused at this point on, I want to know what percentage of the creators generated a sale for my emerging performing and my brand evangelist. Okay, obviously the brand evangelist, that metric ideally should be above 90%. Okay. But it is so, so important for you to have these metrics. Last but not least, I want to know how much GMV is being created for each of these different buckets. So specifically emerging, performing and brand evangelists, I want to know like how much GMV is being created for each of those buckets.

Josh Hadley 00:53:57  And if you measure these on a weekly basis, guess what it’s going to do? It’s going to tell you where your weak points are. What, like maybe the whole problem is like you’re not getting people’s contact information, which if that’s the case, test out different strategies. Maybe it’s the QR code, maybe it’s the message that you need to send out to people. But like if you’re not tracking this, you have no idea what’s working and what’s not working. So these metrics become like, this is the lifeblood of what you need to measure on a weekly basis for this to be able to succeed. So as we wrap things up, here’s like a summary of all the action items that the affiliate support specialist is doing on a day to day basis. Again, they’re dealing with the masses. They’re dealing with the Yuka bots. They’re dealing with the sample issues they’re dealing with, like all the new activated creators. As soon as they post their first video, they’re messaging them. They’re encouraging them to keep posting more, and then they’re managing that.

Josh Hadley 00:54:48  The CRM, the creator relationship management system, and being able to track and give the reporting that is needed to know where each of these creators fall in our lifecycle. And then the performance coach, every day they’re analyzing videos. They’re giving feedback to the different, like creators in the different buckets activated emerging performing creators. They’re having a massive amount of high touches with our brand evangelists. They’re creating unique contests to serve and drive performance for those brand evangelists so that they just get better and better and better over time. So it’s all about like understanding the hooks. They’re the also the person that’s responsible for maintaining the creative briefs, keeping them updated, sharing the updated creative briefs with all of the creators. That’s their main job on a day to day basis, and then ultimately identifying the top performing videos to be sent for ad boost placements. Because I still believe that is where the biggest ROI comes. And it’s the high leverage where creators now see more momentum and sales and views happening on their videos, because we’re artificially manufacturing it for them.

Josh Hadley 00:55:50  And so success looks like having to execute this on a day to day basis, right? You have less wasted samples. You have creators that are extremely engaged with you. They love your brand. And you’re you’re inspiring them ultimately, and you’re helping them succeed. This is a system. Is it a foolproof system? No. And it does require people to actually have to work the system. This system is only as good as the actions that are being taken within the system. And guess what? It’s not going to be perfect. You’re going to make a mistake or you’re like, oh, that message wasn’t great. I’m not getting the responses that I was hoping for. Great. Refine the message. Improve it. So guess what? Because this is a system, it’s going to get better and better and better as you make mistakes and you correct the mistakes and you test out this, this new message and or this contest, and then you’re like, this contest worked great. This contest did not work great.

Josh Hadley 00:56:42  Well, you just keep doubling down on what’s working really, really well. And it’s going to be unique for every single brand. But it’s so important to have a process and a system that is ultimately what my tagline is systems and focus scale. While distraction kills, I’m seeing way too many brands that are out there where they’re just distracted. They’re just trying to manage all creators the exact same way and say, I have 5000 creators that have given samples to and I’m managing them or directing them in the same way each of them. But if you get specific and you bucket them and you categorize them into these five different tiers. It now provides you immense clarity and your team to know who should I spend my time with? What are the actions I should take with this creator versus that creator? And when you do that, you will see things begin to like pick up more speed and momentum. And that’s how you begin to scale exponentially with any affiliate program. So if you liked this message, if you liked this presentation, hopefully you got some value.

Josh Hadley 00:57:36  If you would not mind leaving me a review on the podcast platform of your choice, then secondly, if you will take this video or this podcast link and then drop it into your mastermind community and share it with others, share it with an operator that needs to hear it. If you will do that, I will be eternally grateful. It gives me the momentum to actually see, hey, people are actually watching this type of stuff. They do appreciate it. Otherwise, I’m just speaking to myself here, so it goes a long way when you leave those comments and when you share this with other brand owners. And again, as you put out good things into the world, good things come back to you. Thanks again. We’ll see you on the next episode.