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Whitelisting: Turning Non-brand Pages Into Your ROAS Engine

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Whitelisting: Turning Non-brand Pages Into Your ROAS Engine

Whitelisting is defined as running advertisements from a page other than a brand's official page, such as an influencer's personal or themed editorial page. A major unlock for businesses has been investing in "partners"—influencers paid a flat monthly fee to produce content solely for ads, without organic posting, while granting whitelisting access to their handles. This approach often yields greater ad scale and performance compared to brand-page ads, as it leverages the influencer's credibility, page theme relevance, and tailored creative. Success depends on testing, starting with basic pages like founder-centric ones or affordable creators, and scaling to aligned, higher-tier influencers. Mismatched partnerships (e.g., celebrities irrelevant to the product) can lead to poor conversion despite high clicks. Tools like Leads facilitate access, and a strategic budget allocation (e.g., 5% of ad spend on partnerships) can drive significant spend growth when combined with clear performance expectations.

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The way this thing in short is basically running ads from a page that is not your brand page. That is a simple version of it. I can send, Zach could send me socks and I could create ads for him as me and we could run ads from Brad Plox Business Page, which I have, by the way, I have very high rates. I mean, one of the biggest unlocks for us in the last, I would say, this year was putting a lot more energy into hiring, what we call partners, which are individual influencers that we pay a flat monthly fee. We send them a unique brief and they shoot content for us. And they don't post that content on their page. None of it is posted organically, but we only get that content to run for ads and we get white listing access to run ads with their handle. So I'd say it's the combination and then the creative is important. We've found that these ads usually will get more scale with the white listing handle than they will with the brand page. They're shooting content anyway. So like, why not make you their main person? I heard somebody say on an agency owner's call the other day that they said to, you know, I guess creators and they said it was doing content across their portfolio of brands essentially. And instead of them, like, we want to be paying you three times as much. So here's what needs happen to do that. Start at the beginning, make up a page, whatever. Brad from X brand, right? Like, start there, start with the founder. One ideally if you're having founder content, try that first, see if there's any incremental. And like, the nice thing about that is you can just run your same ads under a different page. Try that first. If you see some lift in Rose, great. And now let's take a listen to the scalability school podcast. All right, we're welcome to episode six of the scalability school podcast talking all about white listing today. Who is stoked? Anybody? I am. I'm a new creative diversity, right? This is where it lives. Yes, it is. Yeah, so let's go ahead and get just jump right into it about white listing. So what is white listing? I mean, I think we all know, but why does it matter? What is this? And why should we be okay to enter this? Brad? Yeah, I'll kick it off. I have extreme examples of where white listing has worked extremely well and where it's not worked at all. And I think that ultimately it's worth, we're testing for the upside because you can control the downside. And so white listing in short is basically running ads from a page that is not your brand page. Like, that is the simple version of it. I can send, Zach could send me socks and I could create ads for him as me and we could run ads from Brad Plox Business page, which I have by the way, I've very high rates. So, you know, consider that. We can run ads from from my page and it looks like me in partnership with the brand or not in partnership with the brand and we can get into the nuances of it. But it's essentially running ads from a page that is not your brand page. And yeah, that's the simple version of it. Do you want to hear my extreme examples before we dig in deeper? I mean, we might as well. Everybody wants to. Okay. The simplest version, I think people we've actually now that we're recording this, we actually have some episodes live and we've been getting some feedback and people seem to really like the quick tactics video, the very first one. So that's cool. So here's a quick one. We have a brand that we work with. We took a piece of creative. So the question I've had for a long time around white listing is, is it the creative that actually makes a difference when you do the white listing, which of course the answer is yes, like creative matters, or is it the page or is it some combination of both? So a very simple way to test this is taking existing piece of creative that you have running from a brand page and duplicate it to like an unaffiliated page that is named something similar. So I don't know. We always use hollows example because X, deck down gear right now. You know, I don't know. Men go hiking. I don't know. Just riffing off top I had here. Like duplicate the piece of creative running from a men go hiking page if that's what the creative is talking about. So we did something like this and over the time period of doing this, I just went back and grab a screenshot. So for my reference, that same piece of creative like X didn't spend on the white listed page, literally no other changes. That's like an extreme example of where the white listing page was not the brand page, and we're kind of like vibes, but position more as like a specific subgroup of the people that buy the product and when extremely well on the opposite spectrum, this was way quicker. We've had clients work with like, I say this delicately, but like washed up celebrities basically the way to position it. And it's like click the rates are through the roof and you're like, wow, this is going to be sick. And it's like, conversion rates are horrible. It's like the reason people are clicking the ad is because it's the person they don't care about the product at all. And it's gone horribly for those same reasons. And when it's like, okay, it's an athlete and this product makes sense for like the person using it. I don't know how you control for that ahead of time, but those are my extreme examples. The upside example where you can really quickly change the page. Super exciting. I think that makes for doing. I think we can definitely talk about washed up celebrities like some of them might be in our hundreds of listens. Fans of listens that we have on this podcast. So thank you. So yeah, I mean, I agree. Like it is actually, it's more important than you think a lot of times if you're working with a creator and white listing like to who you're going to be partnering with, right? I've made the same mistake of thinking that we got somebody for cheap and it didn't go the way that we thought it was going to go. So 100% understand that. So the options for running these are just like brand page, the creator page, a non branded to like an editorial meme style problem solution storytelling type thing and then a partnership versus non partnership, which of these has worked the best in your opinion, Zach, that you guys have done because I know you've done a lot of experimenting too with the editorial memes tile stuff or like, advertorial type pieces. Yeah, I mean, for us, the advertorial stuff works primarily if like the buyers are women more than men. So we found that and again, this is just like based on a lot of spends, you know, hundreds of millions of spend across homestead clients are own brands now that we've run a lot of traffic. I've talked to Ryan Doney about this, like a lot of ad spend is proven this that if it's a male demo, usually like they're going to want shorter copy. So usually these like, advertorial things don't work as well or like a, you know, hunt for men page to a hunt for men, advertorial or something like that, right? It doesn't work as well as like what we do, for example, as we, there are founder ads that I've shot where we run ads as Zach from hollow and that currently is our third highest spending page that we run ads through for the brand. So one other just like super quick hack for everyone that doesn't know how to do this, but when you're looking at ads and ads library, if you just search the brand name and you click on the brand, you actually will not see any of these white listed ads. The hack is actually just typing in the name of the brands and hitting enter, not clicking on the brand page and by typing the name and just hitting enter, you will start to see ads that use that phrase or that brand name in them. You know, again, we can use hollows and example, like don't go steal all my like white listing partners, but yeah, you could, you could search hollow and you're going to see a bunch of random ads that have the word hollow in it from like skin care brands and whatever, but then you're also going to see hollow ads that we run the white listing pages. So I think just in case anyone wasn't sure how to look those up, that's like the quickest way to go to go see those and kind of see pages that other other brands are using. But yeah, I mean, like for us, we've put a lot of energy into this. I know like probably Brad and I will go into this deeper in the episode of like picking white listing partners and like how to grade them. But I mean, one of the biggest unlocks for us in the last, I would say this year was putting a lot more energy into hiring what we call partners, which are individual influencers that we pay a flat monthly fee. We've hired a few people in the like 100 K to 200 K followers and we've also, you know, now hired a few people in the like 800 K to a million plus followers. Those are the top performing ads in our account outside of like very direct response problem solution ads. So we actually had one ad that broke out. That was a white listed ad in, I think it was February that ended up becoming 50% of the one single ad that was white listed became 50% of the ad spent in February for hollow, which is just mental. There's definitely a good opportunity here. But you know, as I'm sure we'll get into more, it's not just like one and done. It's not like the first one's going to be perfect. So, but yeah, that's that's been the biggest unlock for us. So, so let me just let's just back up for one second. So the going through this like and you're finding these folks, how are you determining which ones are going to be good? Like how do you, how do you even begin to search that? Because the other thing gets interesting is just like just from a baseline, it's clear that but the strategic moves that meta is making, obviously predominantly most of us are spending on meta. That's the biggest channel. These ads and partnership ads and like white listing ads are really the an angle that they want everybody to be pushing on. So and algorithmically, I think they're favored. So I think that does help one just from a baseline. But as you start to go through this and start to find folks like how do I mean, how do you even start to to to to calculate that totally? I mean, I think there's two things to break down. One is how to search for them too is like how we grade them, judge them and how much we are willing to spend on them. So the first is like how we find them. These are the initial ones were people that were following the brands that just had a bunch of followers that were like, hey, oh wow, there's like this individual that's like super into our brand that you know, potentially even bought from us, which one of the individuals that we ended up hiring did and had bought from us that has like 800,000 followers on Instagram and like a million plus on YouTube. And we just reached out to them through DMs because it like went straight through and just said, hey, we'd love an opportunity to like talk to you about a partnership. We see you don't do these with anyone else. Would you be open to it? That led to an email thread, which then led to me meeting this individual and having like a couple conversations, kind of about the brand, what we're doing, what we're up to. The biggest expectation, I think that a lot of these people, especially if they're going to be a bigger influencer that they like this for a reason is that they don't have to post the content on their page organically. No one wants to shell stuff like if you're a genuine creator and you have feel like you have a genuine following. The last thing you want to be seen as is just someone that just like shills crap through your page to your followers. They wanted to be something that they've like genuinely used, like enjoy. And so we had a couple people like this that we've reached out to through DMs that were following us and then others that we just would reach out to through DMs that we aspired to work with, right? And that led to that, that kind of sequence. It's like a couple emails that leads to a phone call and then now because this has become such a big part of our business, we have had partnerships who handles all of that interaction versus me being the one that like talks directly to the creator. I have a couple of maybe rapid fire questions that are slightly related. Yeah. So unless you want to go into higher judging first. No, let's talk about finding them because I think the finding them part is an important piece because I think a lot of you are like, I don't know how to do it. You have to hire a full time person. Like, there's just a lot there. Yeah. Well, okay. So one step before that is like if so we laid out the options which are like you can run from a brand page, you can run from the creator page, whatever. My question before we dig into running it from the, I guess getting creator partnerships in general is like, have you noticed it? Is there a meaningful difference? Like, well, I guess your opinion is like, is it the content? Is it the whitelist thing? Is it both what kind of what we started with? I am really curious about that. And do you like are you running it across the, their page, the hollow page and like a third unaffiliated page kind of like I started with? Yeah. So it's the combination of all of it from my perspective. So it's okay. You see an ad from someone and you're like, oh, maybe I recognize them from YouTube. I recognize them from Instagram real or TikTok real that I saw because they're just like someone of influence, right? This is like the higher tier influencer people. That definitely carries weight, right? Because they're like, I've seen this person before. They click through to the profile. This person has even a hundred thousand followers are like, oh, and they are talking about like they've a themed page that maybe they're into, I don't know, golfing, they're into, you know, hunting, they're into hiking, they're into running, they're into cycling, whatever they're having, they're into cooking, whatever it ends up being. If they have that theme page, it's like, oh, this is a person that knows what they're talking about. Go back to the ad, watch the ad again. Like we feel like we've seen longer watch times with these white listed ads than we see with like our direct response, more problem solution video ads. To me, that's because they're like going to the page, coming back wanting to see what they have to say. So I'd say it's the combination. And then the creative is important. So this is where like the true secret sauce is kind of the combination of all three. The brand page carries some weight because it has some type of value to the consumer of like, even if it's like a the best gifts page, like that's going to carry a little bit of extra weight versus just a brand that they don't even know who that is. Right. So I think that is the creative and then like the combination of all three elements is kind of what gets gets the sale. What was the second thing that you asked? I don't remember, but I had I had I have a follow up thing. So I've seen the same thing. I think you said something really important there, which was it can add volume to existing ads because kind of what Andrew said at the very beginning is it kind of adds some diversity to it. I think that's a super interesting point. We don't always see it become the top spending thing, but if it adds an additional 20% in volume, cool, dick or what problems about that. And then one more follow up before we go back into the grading thing. If somebody wanted to start this tomorrow, like this simplest version is you can go make a page. Right. And then you can go get maybe like, you know, work with like some content creators who ask if they're they're interested in it. And then you start to get towards what you're saying is which is, okay, we can find somebody who's who's actually notable fits the demo in the space. Are you talked about this stuff? And those are those are the free to expensive options and they all work in some degree. So okay. Yeah, I think I jumped to like the final stage to get to once you're proving that this is working, which thank you Brad for. Final stage is Kim Kardashian. Yeah, I mean, like wait listening Kim K would be absolutely electric. So she might wear socks. I mean, she might bring this back though to like how we've done it. So the first page that we ran was Zach from hollow. Like you can go look it up. There's like a couple of acts of ads underneath it. It gets a lot of spend like that works that it was hiring. Yeah, a creator that I think we paid $1,000 for content that we briefed to them that they shot uniquely for us. They didn't have to post on their page. They had like 30,000 followers. It's like an outdoor enthusiast person with wireless access. And it was like, oh, this is kind of working. And then we started to say how much of our budget of creative that we spend on like going and sourcing creative to we actually want to spend on what we call partnerships, which is like these people that we will pay a flat fee per month plus white listing access that we can get content, not just like creators, which is like you to see creators. Those are people that we like higher that we just get the content from and run ads with, but we don't get white listed. So for our partner program, we basically said we're willing to spend 5% of our ads bend on hiring these creators. And if that helps us grow our ads bend by an additional 50%. We are the math backs out. So like just to run very quick math like, I know we're not supposed to do like public math on this, but like let's say you're spending $500,000 a month. If you're not running white listing, you're spending $500,000 a month, you have a lot more to unlock by doing this. Even if you're spending a quarter million a month, like there is a lot of unlocks to be had here. So we said 500K. We were spending around that kind of coming out of like Q4, like 5%. So we can go spend $25,000 higher in somewhere between five and 10 partners a month where then we will send them a brief, a unique brief to them. Then we will get white list access their page. And our goal is basically to get them to spend if their fee is 5% of what we can spend. It backs out for us and that's a win. So like if that into each individual person, we can spend 5K with, we want to be able to spend 100 grand with their ads. And then that math actually backs out to us paying them for a flat fee. So I think like the biggest thing is setting the expectation of how much we want to spend on the creators. And then what is the ideal outcome of creators? For us, we actually took that toolkit budget and slash it down to like half of that because we realized, hey, half of these people actually we weren't able to spend through at the raw as targets that we set. So I think the biggest thing of starting is like saying, okay, what percent of my creative budget or percentage of ad spend am I willing to take a bet on to see if I can push up more and spend with this new style of creative? And then setting the expectation of what you want to minimum to be able to spend behind each creator. That's what we've done. That's worked really well for us. Now we're spending 50 grand a month on our partnerships program. Which means that in theory, we should be able to spend a million dollars a month behind these partners. That is like the math that has to back out for us. Pretty interesting. So let's go through one thing I want to talk about briefly is getting once you've connected with them, what were since we were down that road, like one thing that's made it really easy on our end is using like lead to get connected with these people. Obviously, let me just folks aren't tech savvy. It's like a one click solution, right? They just open the link, log in, confirm access, makes it a lot easier for them. Hopefully you guys are using that too if you're not worth calling out. I think because that's like a huge pain in the ass once we've gone through the grading and finding like you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, Andrew, you introduce us to that and it's like a no brainer versus like back and forth emails. You're talking sometimes with assistants for these people to like just gardener access the business account and all that stuff. So yeah, no brainer. And on top of that, like you want to have, and this is probably part of the agreement to act, but like you want to be able to not just run the individual. I guess if they're posting to the page, but like you don't want to get stuck only being able to run that one post with the copy that they wrote, you want to have some flexibility of any change to the hook and things like that. So like actually getting proper access makes it a lot easier as opposed to every single time you need to make a change going back and asking them to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the most interesting stage like to take this, I'm just going to take it one step deeper, which we've just started to do is, okay, let's say you find a partner and you're like, oh my gosh, we can spend a ton of money behind their ads and their content with their handle. Let them on a performance plan that makes them want to go shoot you more content. So we've done this now with a handful of people. We have someone and I want to disclose who it is that we pay like 12 grand a month to, it sounds crazy. Like how are you paying this creator 12 grand a month? We pay them 12 grand a month because this individual is on a 5% of ad spend bonus. So if we break through ad spend of like a quarter million dollars a month behind their ads, they start making 5% of what we spend behind it. And with that, this individual is now shooting content for us throughout the entire month. We send them briefs, they shoot their own content, they want us to spend more money and they're basically feeding us with just content because they're like, hey, I want you to spend more behind my ads. That is like next level stuff. Once you get to this point and you're like, okay, I can spend a bunch of money and I can scale up to that point. I would definitely recommend you taking bets with some of these creators and saying, hey, here's a performance bonus. If your ads can spend so much a month, that's a huge one for our business and we're willing to show you a couple extra grand. I mean, that's like a good creative way to think about these agreements. I think that these folks are inclined. A lot of these people, certainly in the creators that we have in the FoxalThonders community, those that I've interacted with and what I've heard from other members too, is the more that you can align and send as better off as going to be for everyone. And you want to try to get in with these people that if it feels good on step one, then where they're sending you stuff, and it feels like natural and you're like what they're doing, then ultimately incentivizing them and aligning it, moving forwards, it's going to be huge. You know, I heard somebody say on an agency owners call the other day that they said to, they have a similar setup with one of their biggest creators and they said who's doing content across their portfolio brands, essentially, and said to them, like, we want to be paying you three times as much. So here's what needs happened to do that. And like, apparently that was through like beginning of the year and now that's almost happened, which is pretty cool, right? Like everybody loves to be incentivized that way. So on the grading thing, like once you go through where you've looked, you know, you've found some of these folks, how are you? How are you grading them? Brad, how do you guys grade them? And then we'll let Zach kind of go through. Yeah. I mean, I think Zach kind of nailed it with like the way that he lays out the person and just spend his similar to how we look at it. I think the simple math is backse out is you have to determine, you do your, you do your break even row as calculation, you figure out how much you need to spend in order to make out for what you paid them on a fix fee and anything above that is like gravy, unless you start to introduce these performance based incentives for us. And transparently, like, I want to do more of this, which is why I love this conversation because I'm stealing Zach's insights. Like I think we could do more like the low end kind of where we are is we're great. We're building out these like non-branded pages and we're working with what we're seeding kind of like content creators as opposed to maybe these like bigger, bigger personalities. So what we do is, yeah, we just basically we go and we seed content. If the content hits even decently well inside of the ad account, then we'll go back and ask for white listing and see what that does does for volume. But basically for us, because we're sourcing it, the calculation is a little bit different than how you do it for the brand. But from the brand side, it's yeah, just making sure that it covers the cost of the content. How much, how much are you guys, Zach? How much do you guys seed product with folks that you want to partner with? Or is it mostly that you're looking, you're big enough that your was this early around thing that you did and then now you try to as much? We tried seeding products, but the issue with seedings, so this is like my gripe and sorry to anyone that does seeding stuff like a lot of the way that that works best. And it's just our brand more specifically. They're younger female creators. Younger female creators are more willing to get seeded product for free and then shoot content for free and then post it than our core demo, which is like 40 plus men, right? So for us, we tried it and all the people that were willing to accept and shoot content for free were just like younger female creators. Now, if that is your customer and like those ads work for your customer base all day, go for seeding first because it's a cheaper route. It just didn't work for us because like our demo isn't that demo that was willing to do it. Getting 40 plus men to shoot content, like you have to usually pay them and they're usually some type of like outdoor influencer before they're willing to do it. So for us, it didn't work. Now, I've seen it work for other brands. Like we, you know, Hackslot has been a kind of homestead for a very long time. They ran a seeding program. I think they still do now and it works great. Oh, the benefit that they have though is that their product suite that they're giving us hundreds of dollars versus maybe like a $30, you know, beauty product or something like that. So I think it depends on the category. I think it depends on the creators that are willing to do it for just seeding for free. But we never really saw this success there, which is kind of why we had to step it up to like, I would call mid grade creators, which is about a thousand dollars a month. They have, you know, 10 to 150,000 followers. We saw some traction there and they were like, okay, let's take a shot of a bigger creator, which we've had one really go really, really well and one kind of not, not hit though. I think the kind of sweet spot is like the, the partnerships that you can spend somewhere between two grand and five grand a month on and those are individuals that you can spend hopefully a hundred K plus behind their ads. That is like kind of the sweet spot from what we found because it's really hard to get individuals that you can spend more than that behind each person. Unless you have a really breakout ad like we got lucky and had one that hit in like February. But that's pretty good. You can be product seeding maybe when you launch your college in sock line. Like I feel like that's like collagen and hands in college in socks. Collagen socks. G.L.P. one socks. Yeah, the G.L.P. one socks is a great idea. Yeah, it's a big, big angle. Brad, when you go through and you're doing the white listing, you have it set up. One of the things I feel like that you taught me is naming conventions within MetaD to like track this more efficiently. How do you guys do that? How do you name that properly? Pretty simple when it comes to white listing. So we try to always include the creator name at least in the ad, even if it's what non-white listed. And then if it's if it's white listed, you just throw the WL in the naming convention, WL_ in the creators name and that kind of simplifies it where it's getting a little bit more complex recently is if we're running it from the brand page versus the non affiliated page versus the creator page, but still pretty easy. You just include the handle of the actual page that it's running from. Similar sidebar quick. I saw that Meta introduced the ability to like let them decide if it shows the brand first or the creator first or just shows the creator or just shows the brand. I think Dave recog tweeted, I feel like Dave's name comes up every time we have these podcasts and a Taylor, Taylor, how they responded and was like, this is Meta saying we are going to do what's better. Just let it give us the control and get out of the way, which is how you're doing. You're not going to have a choice in like six months. Exactly, exactly. It's just trust of black box and I do, I do. But yeah, just throw it in the naming convention, throw the creator name, notify what page is actually coming from and then I'll allow you to pull those reports. Yeah. I mean, I think just to like really nail down on the simplest form here, if you run any founder style content, which I think most brands should try to do or at least like your own UGC version that your team shoots, that's like an employee of, I thought I saw that on Twitter, it was like not whatever founder content, but employee content, whatever. Create a page around that. Create a page around the founder's name, create a page around like whatever. John from brand XYZ, whatever, those pages are always in historically the top performing one, even beyond any other type of like, like white listing partner that we've seen for all of our brands in our portfolio and from, you know, some clients of ours at home stud. You leaking, this is you telling us you're the 12k month creator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, besides Zach from Holla, the number one that's that's been holding for a while. Yeah. It's a great point because like that's the, that's the easiest, the easiest one is if you're willing to get on camera, which you should be, right? Like that's the first one. And then the second one is an unaffiliated page of like pick your top demo, throw it in a chat, you be throw it your top demo, the name of your brand in a chat, you be T and say I'm creating a Facebook page. Give me 10 options and then just go pick a couple. Yeah. I mean, like that is, that is the no brainer. If you want the lowest cost, quickest way to like give us a shot, that's, that's the way. So if you're going, so we've gone through kind of payment and like how we structure a lot of these agreements, do you have it? Do you guys have contracts with them typically? And is it, and then also is the best we talked about, obviously doing incentive based pricing structure or payment structure rather. But do you, I think out of the gates, most of the time it's like a fixed one time payment when you're starting to work with these people and then it shifts into something else. But have you seen another payment method that seems to work? So the sweet spot that we found is a 60 day contract. It's basically the first 30 days to like get access, send them product, write a custom brief for them, send them the brief, they shoot the content and then the next 30 days you run the ad and you pay them a one time fee for that 60 day period. I think people think that they can do this like really fast, but some of these people, like if you, especially if you go push up to like bigger creators, they're trying to own the world, they're doing all sorts of stuff. They've got events, they've got whatever. Like it is a couple grand, which they will appreciate, but it's not like life changing amount of money. So give them time, like expect that this will take some time to get the content. So we basically plan 30 days for that 30 days to actually run the content. Then we judge it at the end of that 30 days and it's like, okay, we're able to spend, you know, 20 times what we pay this creator and that's 5% of spend versus what their fee was. And if that backs out, cool, renew them again and we'll do a three month contract with them. That's how we do it. And yeah, we have contracts for it for what it's worth. Similar. I think they have useful. Yeah. No, the one thing that I feel like is like everyone is like, Oh, I'm in. I have to go hire my law firm to go put the Taylor's contract. Like, I think one thing that we could do, Andrew is like for the founder members is I could drop the contract that we use that we've already paid someone to do and you could post that in there. So anyone that's a founder member will like add that extra little value add for you. Save you a couple grand versus hiring a attorney to like, you end up this country. Appreciate that. Don't tell the attorney. Okay. Are there any other, are there metrics that you judge these by outside of different, are they are different than the metrics that you use normally? Like, look, rate, hold rate, CPC, CVR, creative type, Brandon, Don branded, et cetera. What are, are there, are we measuring it the same that we're measuring other pieces? We're measuring it the same. So I'm asking you guys like, we don't necessarily listen to different. Yeah. We're mostly measuring it the same. Like looking at whatever our rise or cack or a both combination target is on seven day click is kind of how we're doing it. I do think an interesting point. Like, I think literally just yesterday, Dara, Denny just did a video with some folks from seed and they said something really interesting towards the end of the video, which was talking about their incrementality of whitelisting, not being any different than the incrementality of their branded content. I would bet a lot of money that that's not true for all brands. So like, there's probably, there's probably an argument to be made that there are different incrementality factors. And I know that's like a huge word this year and last, although we are measuring primarily based on some kind of version of like seven day click efficiency, I'd imagine that there are different types of incrementality, which might also vary across creators for all this work too. Yeah, creators brand. I think the AOV, I mean, like, there's so many, I mean, they're pushing for subscription. Like, there's a lot of other variables at there. Yeah. Otherwise, no notes from what Brad said. We're looking at ad spend as like ad spend and as fans like our number one KPI lately. I think that this is like a something that we can talk about in another episode. But if you're running growth and you're running the ad account, you shouldn't be spending unless it's hitting goal. So if it has the most spend, if you're looking at spend is like your threshold, that is actually probably the biggest thing for when you're reviewing these. Did they spend the most money and if they spend enough money, then it backs up. So spend obviously, Roaz has to be there to spend more. CPA has to be there to spend more. So that's how we think about it. Yeah, I know. I appreciate that. I think sometimes within this world, within our world, there's always these confusing metrics and shit that comes up that people use it confused people. I don't know if you've heard of my trademark methods called the I velocity. It's infinite. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have it. I don't have that. It's not true. Okay. So let's talk about some more advanced applications of this. I know that you, Zach, have done deployed white listed landers with creator first landing pages. So you're sort of matching them. Tell us about that. That's a pretty cool tactic that for sure people should steal. Yeah. I mean, we've done this now across our brands and hopes like clients a few times. But if you are hiring one of these bigger creators that people will recognize, it's worth testing. Basically taking the main landing page or product page that you're about to push people to duplicate it over and change the hero to be a content section around that creator. So like for us, you know, we take like our these these big creators and we like punch them in, add a custom testimonial from them, a custom headline that relates to them, something that they've said, whatever. And some of these pages have like, you know, a little extra, you know, you can give them a little extra gas and they have a little more volume. But I think it's worth trying because it hasn't worked for every single brand, but like one, I mean, like again, I'll just like reference X-Cug because I said them earlier, but like we would run ads with like Gordon or like landing pages, the Gordon and it's like, okay, like the ads Gordon, the landing pages Gordon, it crushes. We, you know, if they have a certain Jeff Gordon, right? Jeff Gordon, right? Jeff Gordon, right. Yeah. Race car driver. Yep. Yeah. Big NASCAR fans over here at scalability school. Big guys. Yeah. But that's where like sometimes these creators like aren't as recognizable and then that doesn't carry any weight. So like we've kind of learning that if they're like a bigger personality, it can work well, but if not, doesn't, doesn't do that much. Yeah. I have two unrelated, mentally unrelated things. When you go back to like just just step back for a second, like finding the people, like how are you actually finding those? Because like it's easy to go to content platform and like they're already kind of set up on there. Is that what you guys are primarily doing? Are you doing it? Like literally scrolling through Instagram, finding people in the demo and then going that route. We just look for cool people that we'd like represent the brand to be honest. Like people that all follow, people that our team members follow and we're like, hey, we could use this person for maybe a running partner. We could use this person for like someone just makes cool shit on the internet. It's like, okay, let's go hire them. And then we're just trying to build relationships with them. A lot of it comes down if they're a bigger creator is like building a relationship. If they are a call it like mid to your creator that 10k to 100,000 followers, there's definitely platforms that you can use. I'm sure Brad, you probably use some of them. Maybe you can have some to recommend. And our team has a couple times. I can't think of them off top of my head. But most of these people are that we're hiring in the 10 to even 100 are followers of ours or customers of ours that we like look up. And we're like, okay, well, they've either followed us or bought something from us. Let's go reach out to them and see if they're interested in making content. Yeah, I wish there was a platform. And maybe there is. I try to use one of the passwords like you upload your customer database and it connects you with their Instagram profile. And you like, no, obviously you can scroll through who follows you and you can look for the check marks, but now you can pay for check marks. So it's kind of kind of lost the sauce a little bit. Yeah, there's we there was one that existed for a minute and I we haven't. And it's something around the terms of service. It was a Shopify app that could do it, but I don't think it exists anymore. Yeah, a lot of folks we have, I mean, you know, do this, obviously in the Foxville Founders Committee, they'll reach out to Mariah and she'll connect them, who's our creator matchmaker with different creators. And that's like a great way to get started for a lot of folks. And we actually are launching pretty soon here the Foxville creator community, which is four creators to help them build their own businesses, but also brands who our founder members get to come in for zero dollars and get to post and have people say, yeah, I'd like to take you up on that. So we're trying to kind of build a more white glove service around that because a lot of these are like, you're going to go searching and you know, it's like, you can look at the engagement rates and all this, but around those influencers, it doesn't feel right, which is why Zach, I feel the way that you guys are doing it makes some sense to me, right? It's like, who who's cool? Like, who are we actually does this feel right with, which I think, you know, knowing the vibe of your brand like that, that is actually really important because those are going to be the most successful because then you can speak to the content they've created previously, right? Which is like set it on a completely different tone out of the gates. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of brands that say, oh, there's no one though that like is an influencer in our category. I had a conversation with like a brand known that's in pet supplements. I'm like, there's a bunch of, you know, like influencers that love their dog that talk about their dog that talk about products for them. Like, there's a bunch of options. There's, you know, veterinarians, there's all sorts of people out there. So I think, I think question that if you're thinking, hey, there's no creator out there for me. Like, think about who your customers could be or people like your customers. Like, there's definitely influencers out there that you could go. Why, listing from the dog page also works just starting in there. Yeah. I mean, Rufus from whatever sounds like it would rip. So might as well send it down. Do you know about anything else to add? I don't know. I think that's a lot. I had something but it's escaping me. So probably not. Yeah. I mean, I think the last thing is just like to do this, start with the basics. Don't try to send it right away. Don't go spend $12,000 like we are at hollow on your first creator. It's probably not going to work. Like start at the beginning, make up a page, whatever. Like start there. Start with the founder. One, ideally, if you're having founder content, try that first, see if there's any incremental. And like the nice thing about that is you can just run your same ads under a different page. Try that first. If you see some, some lift in Ross, great. Then that's where you can invest in your first $1,000 creator to get whiter listed in access and then start to punch it up. I just think it's like, it can be very overwhelming. It's like, oh, this is a whole new thing in the business. Do we need to hire a head of partnerships? No, you can definitely start basic and give it a shot and kind of work your way up. So that's just the last piece that I have. Very cool. Thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please rate us and email me, Andrew at Foxwood Digital.com if you haven't any feedback. Otherwise, gentlemen, we'll look forward to next time. And thank you for listening to the episode six of scalability. See ya. I can tell you that everybody in the founders community are almost everybody uses leads. It's great product. Everybody loves it. You know, the team over there is always innovating, always improving and it makes your life so much easier. So make sure to check out the exclusive offer that you can, which is at leedsie.com/scalability. That's leedsie.com/scalability to get your white glove on boarding and a nice little look. The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, like review is kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. And so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app. Now anything you can share the better we're going to be guys. Anything else you want to say on this? Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube, rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So please say something nice about all of us. Thank you everyone. Thank you for listening. Honestly.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Whitelisting involves running ads from a page that is not your brand's official page, such as an influencer's or a themed editorial page.
  2. A key strategy is partnering with influencers (called "partners") who are paid a flat monthly fee to create content exclusively for ads, without organic posting, and granting whitelisting access to their handles.
  3. Successful whitelisting combines the influencer's credibility, themed page relevance, and quality creative; it can significantly scale ad spend and outperform brand-page ads.
  4. Testing is crucial
  5. Avoid mismatched partnerships (e.g., "washed-up celebrities") where clicks don't convert, and use tools like Leads to simplify whitelisting access.

Summary:

Whitelisting is defined as running advertisements from a page other than a brand's official page, such as an influencer's personal or themed editorial page. A major unlock for businesses has been investing in "partners"—influencers paid a flat monthly fee to produce content solely for ads, without organic posting, while granting whitelisting access to their handles. This approach often yields greater ad scale and performance compared to brand-page ads, as it leverages the influencer's credibility, page theme relevance, and tailored creative.

Success depends on testing, starting with basic pages like founder-centric ones or affordable creators, and scaling to aligned, higher-tier influencers. , celebrities irrelevant to the product) can lead to poor conversion despite high clicks. , 5% of ad spend on partnerships) can drive significant spend growth when combined with clear performance expectations.

FAQs

Whitelisting is running ads from a page that is not your brand page, such as an influencer's or a partner's page, to leverage their audience and credibility.

Whitelisting can increase ad scale and watch times, as ads from trusted influencers or themed pages often resonate more with audiences than brand-only content.

Success depends on a combination of engaging creative, a relevant influencer or page, and alignment with the target audience's interests.

Look for influencers already following your brand or within your niche, reach out via DMs or email, and prioritize those who genuinely use and enjoy your product.

Create a non-branded page or partner with a small influencer, duplicate existing creative, and run ads from that page to measure incremental lift in performance.

Allocate a percentage of ad spend (e.g., 5%) to pay influencers flat monthly fees, aiming to scale ad spend behind their content to justify the investment.

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