Influencer Advisory

Your end-to-end playbook on an influencer community

Most brands partner with influencers for one to three months. This video shows you how to turn that into three to 18 months without having to go bankrupt in the process.

Dennis Ksendzov
Dennis KsendzovVerified

Founder · September 28, 2026 · 22 min read

What NeuroGum's creator community produced

How NeuroGum developed 5 billion+ impressions in 2025 through its TikTok Shop influencers. This was not for vanity; it led to a multi-billion-dollar brand (in terms of valuation).

Couple things they figured out:

  • How to get influencers interested, but most importantly, how to retain them.
  • How to get influencers promoting their brand through group exclusivity.
  • How to reward their influencers so that they continue to promote for years to come.
  • How to manage their exclusive group of 500 influencers, and then their total of 17,000 active affiliates (as of summer 2026).
Kent Yoshimura and Ryan Chen, the NeuroGum founders
Michael Knowles holds a NeuroGum pack in his sponsor read
Anna Cramling's chess match, NeuroGum branding on the table

There's a lot to cover on the community topic, but I'm going to show you some other benefits that I'll explain.

How you can get it uplifted in all your channels with affiliates

  • Bloom built a creator network of 54,000+ TikTok Shop affiliates.
  • Bloom's creator network brings in over 500 million views a month and brings in over $8.8 million of TikTok Shop sales directly. However, that's not even a focus. That's just breakeven. The main sales come from the attention going onto Amazon, Shopify, retailers, and other channels. From Zipchat AI's Bloom breakdown, March 2026.
A creator holds a Bloom jar in her sponsor read

How you can get investment and acquisition through simply having communities

  • Nutrabolt invested in Bloom partly for the community it built.
  • Doss Cunningham, CEO of Nutrabolt, the company behind C4 and Cellucor, invested in Bloom partly because it had done such a good job building a community. From PricePlow, June 2026.
  • His reason is that with that community, Nutrabolt could move into the energy space and go after the female shopper, whom he calls wildly underrepresented up to that point. From PricePlow, June 2026.
Bloom's own HQ studio

How you can get unlimited ad creatives for testing through the right reward terms

  • Taking a Goli reward lets Goli run the creator's video on Meta, unless the creator asks to opt out. That allowed them to secure mass amounts of content, thousands of pieces, tens of thousands of pieces, to test in the ad creatives. From Goli's reward campaign terms, April 2026.
Goli's own reward-campaign terms page, the 'Content Usage' clause marked: 'you grant us usage rights to use your videos on Meta'

What you'll learn

If you're someone who is running an influencer program, you want to scale it, and you might have done things with affiliates, with communities, with influencers, but you want to have a clear playbook, things that have already worked for the biggest brands out there, then just keep watching, and I'll explain.

Why most brand communities fail

But first, we have to look into why some of the brands that do this don't succeed, so that we know to avoid their mistakes.

And it's clear that, in most cases:

Creators only post when you keep paying.

So when you do start a community, what tends to happen is:

Getting influencers is the easy part

  • A lot of people will do mass outreach.
  • They'll get some yeses. Those affiliates or those influencers will stay for a bit of time, and then they'll churn.

Mass seeding doesn't last

Some companies resort to doing mass seeding, but it doesn't end up really being efficient, because after the influencer posts, there's no way to capture them and get them in their repos, especially smaller creators, and especially nowadays with the algorithm. Most views come from external channels, not from the followers, which is especially true on Instagram.

  • Before Spacegoods built its community, an external agency shipped 200-300 free products a month.
  • Posts trickled in, then nothing: no relationships and no way to measure it. So they didn't know if it was an effective channel, and it had to be restarted every month. And at the end of the day, it didn't have a compounding effect. From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
  • The same thing happened to NeuroGum when they started. They budgeted 300 creators to get free product with a one-page brief, and January, February, March and April brought nothing. From Ryan Chen on Sweat Equity, June 2026.
The vendor's own Spacegoods case study page, marked: 'An external agency was shipping 200-300 free products monthly'

Keeping creators is the hard part, and most brands neglect it

  • Keeping them retained is the gold nugget. From How to use Influencers for Product Launches.
  • Most creators are dropped because they are actually used for too short of a time. Their prices mismatch with what their actual value is, which is why without a great community and without incentives other than just paying them out, you're losing a lot of goodwill that you could build with creators. From your webinar pitch V4.
  • Bloom's Joel Contartese: retention, meaning creator experience and relationships, is the pillar most brands treat as an afterthought, and usually why creators leave. From Joel Contartese on LinkedIn, September 2026.

Two beliefs to drop first

Belief 1: a Discord is not a community

Most communities don't work because they don't run by themselves. You need it to actually be facilitated, and you need there to be proper perks.

  • NeuroGum put in perks like bringing creators out to dinners with Kim Kardashian, et cetera: investing in content creators, education with coaches, gaming them, and entering them into contests to win Rolexes.
  • They have a dedicated team managing this community, actually multiple teams, who make sure that all influencers, whether it's affiliates, celebrities, whoever it is, everyone ends up in the community. Even consumers.
  • This is much bigger than just getting affiliate TikTok Shop people in the community, and that's it.

Belief 2: creators don't need a fee for every post

Belief shift 2: you don't have to pay creators a fee for every post. That's not the only way to incentivize them to post.

Force Factor and NeuroGum get posts without paying a fee for each one.

Force Factor's own creator-rewards page on growi.io, marked: 'you must post at least 15 new videos' to keep earning on older ones

If you don't have a relationship with creators built and you're solely doing things on a financial basis, it's not sustainable. You're not going to create a compounding effect, and they're not going to perform nearly as well because they don't fully believe in the brand.

  • Not having connections with the creators because money will only motivate creators so far. But that's why when you have a community, it compounds itself.

  • Put plainly: the small creators inside use your product, talk to you, and tell you what to fix in it.

  • You're closer to your customer because that's the community you're building, and your community is giving you feedback, man.

The 4 steps at a glance

For warming them up, I would just include getting the ones that you already have.

So whether they're affiliates, whether they're customers, whatever, those are the main ones. Tools like Outer Radar to find them, scraping tagged posts on Instagram, and lots of other mechanisms.

So if we break it down into first steps, the first step is to warm them up. So that's doing seeding, PR boxes, outreach to get familiar with additional faces or TikTok affiliates. There are always ways to do contests.

The second is actually bringing them into the community with a deal for the ones that are approved. Then third is running the community, and fourth is then whitelisting, which puts gas on the fire.

Step 1: Warm creators up before you ask for anything

  • Once this step is done, you have creators who know and like you before you make them an offer.

Start with the creators and customers you have

Your first ambassadors can be the customers, fans and staff you already have.

Send a PR box with a community invite

If you've done a good job with the PR boxes and you have good brand association, you will get a lot of influencers who want to join the community.

SugarBearHair, a creator's video on YouTube
A creator's own unboxing of a SugarBearHair PR box: vitamin bottles, a hair brush and a detangling-brush box, captioned “you won't believe what sugar bear sent me”

Gift every week, at a set number

Automated gifting lets a small team reach hundreds of creators every week.

  • Grüns: about 2 hours a week reaching 500 TikTok and Instagram creators and 150 YouTube creators, through automated gifting. From Archive's page on Grüns.
  • Spacegoods: a lookalike search off its best paid creators finds 100+ similar creators in minutes (vendor's own numbers). From the vendor's own write-up on Spacegoods.
@bossfidence's paid Instagram post for Grüns, the product in hand
@bossfidence's paid Instagram post for Grüns, the product in hand

Put your best early creators on a retainer

One creator on a monthly fee can carry most of your sales.

Once you have a base, stop cold outreach

  • NeuroGum: it pulls from TikTok Affiliate Partner groups and other creator groups instead of cold outreach. From Open Residency, June 2025.

Step 2: Set the deal structure

Set a minimum in sales or followers before a creator gets a sample

Olipop's college ambassador job posting
OLIPOP's own bar: at least 10,000 followers on one platform, marked

Set an open commission, more for your own

Pay an open commission to everyone, and more to creators you work with directly.

Nutrafol's affiliate terms: $40 to $200 per new customer, marked
a creator's paid Instagram post for OLIPOP, the product in hand

Write down the monthly quota and who stays

Write down how many videos a month keep a creator in the room.

Goli's own reward campaign terms: “to qualify to use GMV for past months, you must post 20 new videos in April”
Force Factor's terms: rewards only for verified Discord members, marked

Add a reward ladder, top tier earned

Pay bigger rewards as a creator's sales climb, and make the top tier earned.

Force Factor's own January 2026 GMV Challenge payout ladder on Growi, marked at both ends: $120.00 bonus at $1,000 GMV and $15,350.00 bonus at $100,000 GMV
IM8's ambassador tiers at 1, 20, 75 and 300 orders

Financial incentives are just the starting point

Influencers are not limited to financial incentives only.

  • e.l.f.: a TikTok audition called Eyes. Lips. Famous., and 3 winners each got a $5,000 contract and a year of product. From e.l.f.'s own press release, August 2020.
  • IM8: invites to its events, masterclasses and workshops, on top of free product, merch and 10% on every new customer order. From IM8's ambassador page.
  • Ghost: a different fan every week as its legend of the week, instead of its biggest named creators. From PricePlow, June 2020.
e.l.f. Beauty's own press grid of its named brand ambassadors
an IM8-branded outdoor workout class in Miami, part of the brand's own ambassador events
IM8, own site

Keep the biggest rewards scarce, let trips grow

Keep the top prizes for a few, and let trips grow as the group does.

  • NeuroGum: only 10 top creators go on a trip, prizes like a Rolex, and only 3 were on billboards in Miami or Times Square. From Open Residency, June 2025.
  • Revolve: its trips ran from five or six people to a month in the Hamptons with about 70 influencers, 12 a weekend. From Lewis Howes, 2018.
Revolve Festival: four creators posing at the brand-built Revolve structure at Coachella

Where it goes wrong

Creators stay only if they make money: Kent says so on Mina Elias, and so does NeuroGum's chief commercial officer on the DTC Podcast.

  • Cineshree Media: free samples without rewards attract freebie seekers and can sink a TikTok business. From Cineshree Media, April 2026.

Step 3: Keep the community active

Have dedicated community managers

Put named people from your own team inside the creator room.

NeuroGum's Kent Yoshimura inside its creator Discord
1st Phorm's Legionnaire program training together in person at a branded gym class

Keep the brief simple

Make sure the brief is very simple, because the longer it is, the higher the chance they won't pay attention to the parts that you want.

Give creators one page of product facts, then let them make it their own.

Put your founders in the room, often

Ensure that not only the community managers but also high-level C-suite founders get access to meet the creators, and meet them often.

Meet your creators on a fixed day, whether weekly or quarterly.

Level up the creators who grow

Now, for the creators that are growing, make sure that they level up and have perks. Don't focus on the size; focus on growth, not only in how they are promoting your brand, but also in their own growth.

Move your most promising creators into a smaller group that is harder to join.

  • goPure: a creator posting 5 videos a month who shows promise goes into a Discord or Slack chat, with incentives to get to 20. From goPure on Instant's podcast.
  • Sephora: Sephora Squad is a paid year-long cohort you apply to, with 30,000 applications in 2021, running 8 years. From the Sephora Squad page.
a Sephora Squad member's own brand-trip vlog: a Sephora gift bag, branded swag bags and a SQUAD dinner table

Build launches and events with your creators

A lot of the time, once you start building intimacy, and if the community actually has the right channels and it's actually interesting, then you'll be in a position where you can start collaborating with creators on product launches and events.

Your creators can tell you what to make next, before it launches.

  • Ulta Beauty: creators in the Ulta Beauty Collective feed insight back, "almost like a kind of a mini advisory panel". From CreatorIQ, March 2021.
  • Califia Farms: it works with its ambassadors every month, gets their feedback on all its products, and sends products before they hit the market. From 33voices, August 2016.
  • Hexclad: its Cooking with Hexclad Facebook group gets early access, so its best customers' reviews are on the product page at launch. From Marketing Operators, May 2024.
Ulta Beauty Collective's own ski week: a Milk Makeup tote and a creator posing on the snow

Where it goes wrong

Without a personal relationship, creators may say whatever they want because they are not being guided.

Step 4: Turn the goodwill into posts, deals and ad rights

Step 4: Now, from there, this is the most important part, and it's to actually take all that goodwill and now turn it into posts, deals and ad rights

  • Once this step is done, you get a steady flow of posts, countable sales, and videos to run as ads.

Sample big at launch, then 20 to 30%

Sample big once at launch, then keep it to 20 to 30%.

a creator with the Grüns bag she was sent, in her paid post

Pay more once they post, reward posting too

Our entire goal is to make influencers love your brand so much they're posting without even paying. And sure, you might have to pay a retainer. You might have to pay some lower fees, but all in all, it shouldn't have to be like, "I pay you $20,000 every time I want to make one 30-second integration."

  • The standard way of influencer marketing is I pay $10,000 per video.
two creator emails from our inbox: a flat fee offer next to an affiliate link, and what that link sold

Reward the posting itself, with a climbing commission, points or more product.

Olipop's college ambassador job posting
a creator's paid Instagram post for OLIPOP, the product in hand
an Olipop campus ambassador sampling event in a lecture hall, with a sign-up survey for a $500 gift card

Collect Meta ad content from small affiliates

Great little tip, by the way, especially for UGC for Meta ads: get loads of it inside your affiliate program from very small creators who are purely getting commission. You can have a clause which just allows you to post and use it if they in fact make anything with the seeded content.

Expect tracking to be hard

Now, tracking is going to be very difficult. Attribution is difficult, but you'll see an uplift in all channels, and there are some methods here. We have videos on tracking.

Use community posts to win bigger deals

Use the community posts to now acquire larger deals. This creates the flywheel.

Show the posts to retail buyers, and grow your best creators into bigger roles.

Where it goes wrong

Plan for the videos to become ads, or the work stops at the post.

  • Grüns: its pipeline stopped when creators published, and turning the videos into edited ads stayed slow and manual. From Archive's page on Grüns.
  • Roughly, brands would actually spend 10% of the budget on organic creator marketing, which includes the community's expenses, and then 90% towards amplifying it through paid ads.

Where a creator community breaks

Having the program is not the thing; using it is

  • Notion has an ambassador program everyone points to, and across the 44 brands we measured, its creators are booked again only 29% of the time, the lowest loyalty on the table.
Notion's own ambassador program page

Have multiple communities over different platforms

  • "where we see community develop the most is how we engage with creators and that's, but that's just very organic, that's not owned in any way. We don't have a Facebook group, we don't have a subreddit." From Marketing Operators, April 2024.
  • Squarespace has the most scattered roster measured and the highest loyalty: 91% of its creators booked more than once, eight videos each on average.
  • It has no community, just an affiliate program that has been open and paying for a decade.

Run one initiative at a time

Be careful about many other initiatives. Attribution is hard already. If you're doing a lot of initiatives at the same time, you might have misattribution and not see the real effectiveness of exactly what initiative.

  • "unless they've got to that scale like a gym shark where they're like not comparable to a direct consumer brand like still 60% plus of their new customers come through paid ads." From D2C Diaries, November 2024.
  • The best designed test on this question, a year-long randomised experiment at eBay Germany, found participation had no effect on bids or revenue, and a negative effect on listings and on how much people spent.
about 35 to 40 people posed together at Gymshark's own Muscle Beach event, most wearing Gymshark tees

Hard is the advantage

Now, the best advantage is the fact that it is hard, and many brands are not willing to do it and do it properly.

  • An affiliate program buys the same loyalty faster and cheaper, and anyone can copy it by Friday.
  • A community around a practice takes years and cannot be bought, which is why brands that have one are hard to dislodge and why most attempts fail.

How we build it for you

Who it's for

We focus only on health and wellness enterprises, because that's where we bring the most value.

  • This is for you if you are a health and wellness brand doing over $100 million a year with $1 million or more a month in marketing spend, and you sell a subscription, consumable or repeat-purchase product, so a customer is worth far more than one order.

  • It is also for you if you already have an influencer program with a team running it, you have found Meta ad formats that work and want whitelisted creator content to make them more efficient, and you measure blended CAC, LTV and a 365-day payback rather than just the first order.

  • The people who usually say yes are the brand director, head of social or partnerships manager running the influencer program day to day. This is not for you if you are under $100 million a year or this would be your first influencer campaign, if you judge influencer purely on 7-day ROAS, or if you sell one-time purchase products or sit outside health and wellness.

  • If you're not a fit but like where this is going, message us and we'll refer you to another agency or tool.

Why us, step by step

We bring a specific edge to each of the four steps.

  • For Step 1, warming creators up: we have more than 160,000 tracked creators, all in health and wellness, so the boxes reach the right people. From your webinar pitch V4.
  • For Step 3, running the room: we bring a dedicated community manager and a playbook for trips, perks and local events. One of the most important parts is actually going ahead and putting in the right perks, the right community management, the right flows, because without this, your community is not going to grow. From your webinar pitch V4.
  • Then you have to be able to talk more about the community here.

How it works

1. Levels: an open room, then one you earn

  • Every creator who posts about you gets into the open room.
  • The top room is exclusive, and you have to keep earning to stay in it.
  • Rising creators get pulled into a smaller room on the way up.

2. Every creator who already posted about you comes in

  • The goal is to solve retention, so we start with the creators you already have.
  • Anyone who has posted about you gets added to the room before we go looking for new ones.
  • Getting affiliates is easy, keeping them is the gold nugget.

3. We connect creators with each other & your team

  • We put a dedicated community manager in the room, so creators know who they talk to.
  • We meet creators on a fixed cadence and get them talking to each other and to your team.

4. We learn your brand in and out

  • We sit down with your creative team to learn your product, your story and your goal.
  • That way the brief fits on one page and creators know what to say about you.
  • The systems work best together, because if you leave one out, something breaks, and you either overpay for influencers, lose their trust, or waste the content they make.

The price

The golden question is: how much will it cost?

  • And we tell clients or prospects: to get a new acquisition channel bringing in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars:

  • To invest in more celebrity partnerships, send and develop the system for sending mass personalized PR boxes, build, foster and maintain a community of loyal influencers, and put budget into paid ads with influencer content that brings you a ROAS that puts multiples on your existing one. At minimum, it will cost you $250,000 in the actual marketing expenses.

  • You can do the math. Now, it's hard for us to give numbers before the audit.

  • However, our campaigns are for enterprises.

Your free audit

We are offering this to qualified brands that are planning their next quarter of growth.

  • On the audit, we will map how far you already go on each of the four steps and which goal to point the system at first, so click the link below, apply for your free audit, and tell us the one thing you want your influencer program to accomplish next.

Next: whitelisting

  • You now have creators posting for you, some of them for free, and the deals on the rest are cheaper than a flat fee.
  • Whitelisting: with far more creator content than before, we test it as paid ads, find the winners and put more budget behind them.