This success story recently featured on Awin-Win Marketing Podcast. Listen to the episode to hear Amanda Houston, Influencer and Affiliate Marketing Manager at McGee & Co., and Mike Balducci, General Manager of Affiliate, Ecommerce and Payment Solutions at CreatorIQ, discuss:

• Blending influencer and affiliate activities
• The core differences between traditional affiliates and content creators
• Top metrics for getting C-suite buy-in for influencer marketing

McGee & Co + CreatorIQ

Explore how this leading home decor retailer is using the influencer management platform to get C-Suite buy in.

About the advertiser

McGee & Co. is an interior brand offering an exquisite range of furniture and home décor, thoughtfully designed through quality craftsmanship and high-end materials.

CreatorIQ is a global influencer marketing platform helping brands like McGee & Co. manage and scale their creator campaigns. Awin’s strategic partnership with CreatorIQ makes it easy for advertisers to connect and combine their affiliate and influencer efforts.

The challenge

“It’s hard to get C-suite buy-in when it comes to influencer. A lot of people who have been in the game for a long time are not familiar with how influencer can optimize their marketing strategy. We knew if we could demonstrate that influencers work really well as affiliates, it opens the doors for all the things they’re capable of towards the top of the funnel.”

Since moving its affiliate program in-house, McGee & Co. has enjoyed exploring new ways to optimize the channel and, concurrently, using affiliate marketing to assist the performance of others.

Despite enjoying early success with influencer marketing, McGee & Co. lacked the numbers to make it an investment priority. It’s a familiar story, with research showing brands’ most common challenges when working with creators are evaluating their performance (32%) and driving a revenue contribution (26%).

By blending affiliate fundamentals like conversion tracking with extensive reach and quality content, McGee & Co. aimed to raise the internal perception of influencer marketing and increase its investment.

The solution

“A couple of years ago, you weren’t seeing many roles combine the two [influencer marketing and affiliate marketing]. Now you see a lot more people using their influencers and their affiliates together… And on a platform like Awin, you’re seeing with influencer metrics that it makes sense to blend them.”

 Though a logical move, merging McGee & Co.’s affiliate and influencer activities required specialist tools.

Content creators are measured and managed in entirely different ways to traditional affiliates. Generally speaking, influencers collaborate and communicate with brands on a more one-to-one level, which requires extra attention when building and maintaining relationships. Their activities also produce a wider range of outcomes, like awareness and engagement, rather than focusing solely on sales. That’s where Awin’s integration with influencer management platform CreatorIQ proved invaluable.

Data collection

While affiliate marketing provided the metrics and scale for influencer activity to flourish, McGee & Co. historically struggled to achieve the right level of granularity with its data – insights that ultimately determine which creators to invest in.

Integrating with CreatorIQ through Awin provided the brand with an influencer-by-influencer view of impressions, engagement, and conversions, right down to configurable metrics like social media value (SMV) and earned media value (EMV) to prove success by McGee & Co.’s definition.

Creators themselves benefited from the same detail, using instant reporting to figure out which products and content translated to results.

Revised program structure

With the insight to push forward, McGee & Co. set up a tiered affiliate program, offering enhanced commission and promotional tools to top performers.

The tiering system encouraged influencers to become brand ambassadors and incentivized them to prioritize McGee & Co. While primarily used to scale influencer efforts, the decision also self-policed the advertiser’s use of voucher codes. Rather than constantly fielding requests for offers, the brand could save its best promotions for high-tier contributors and demonstrate how other creators could earn them.

Recruitment

When identifying potential partners, McGee & Co. used CreatorIQ to build a customized landing page detailing key information about its brand and to capture information on each influencer’s rates, home style, and audience interests.

These details were considered alongside an overview of recent posts and similar brand affinity, making it easier to spot creators with homeware-inspired audiences.

Campaign building

Aware that creators - rather than brands - know their audience best, McGee & Co. used CreatorIQ’s link-building tools to democratize the campaign-building process, allowing influencers to select their own products and create affiliate links to promote them.

As well as saving countless hours on distributing product details and links, the process led to more varied campaigns and an even spread of sales.

The results

“We had a lot of creators… I was unsure what their reaction would be. Their reaction was, ‘this programis awesome, I’m excited to do what I can to scale’.”

McGee and Co.’s merging of affiliate and influencer activity brought several big stories to the C-suite, including:

• +300% growth in influencer-contributed revenue year on year
• +400% increase in impressions year on year
• +67% uplift in monthly influencer post volume (Jan 2024 vs December 2024)

Commissioning each partner based on sales rather than reach also broadened McGee & Co.’s creator network by empowering micro-influencers with high levels of engagement to contribute at the same level as much more followed accounts.

Hard evidence of influencer marketing’s return on investment led to more interest around upper-funnel contributions, like brand positioning and exposure. CreatorIQ is stacked with metrics showing the wider effectiveness of influencer content, like SMV and EMV, which are now making their way up to McGee & Co.’s executive team.

“When we see the bottom-funnel activity, the acknowledgement of upper-funnel activity becomes more visible. People ask, ‘What’s happening for those numbers to come through?’ So now we’re having more conversations about upper-funnel activities that translate to lower funnel and where this awareness is coming from. Working with influencers on an affiliate scale is the entry into all of that.”

These results and conversations have provided vital starting blocks for influencer marketing at McGee & Co., which is now actively exploring ways of blending the affiliate model with flat-fee partnerships for even better results.

Learn how to create successful affiliate-influencer campaigns