Scaling success through diversified partnerships

[00:00:10] Todd Crawford

Welcome back to another season of The Partnership Economy podcast. I’m your host, Todd Crawford, and I’m looking forward to the topics we’ll explore this season, including today’s discussion with Stephanie Harris. Stephanie is the founder and CEO of PartnerCentric, the largest independent partner marketing agency in the U .S. She started her career developing Scholastic’s first affiliate marketing program, then went on to leading award-winning affiliate programs for top brands at Schaaf Consulting. In 2017, as CEO, she rebranded Schaaf into PartnerCentric. Here, she helped brands like Visible and CarGurus transform growth and was recognized as the top U.S. affiliate agency by clutch. With 20 years of experience, Stephanie shares invaluable insights in this episode. Today, we’ll dive into the shifts happening within the industry, including how brands are navigating building trust with consumers through advocates. We’ll also tackle how agencies are helping brands diversify their partner mix and drive incremental value in today’s complex landscape. I hope you enjoy. Hello, everyone. It’s my honor to have Stephanie Harris, the founder and CEO of PartnerCentric on our podcast today. We’re gonna unpack some hot topics in the affiliate and creator economy. So welcome to the podcast, Stephanie. 

[00:01:27] Stephanie Harris

Thanks Todd, happy to be here. 

[00:01:28] Todd Crawford

Yeah, just to kind of level set everybody, why don’t we just dig into who PartnerCentric is, kind of the things that you guys cover for clients, the types of clients that you typically work with. 

[00:01:39] Stephanie Harris

Sure, so PartnerCentric is the largest independent affiliate marketing agency in the US. That’s a picture that’s ever changing in our space, right? All the consolidations and things that are going on, but we’re fiercely independent. And we work with close to 100 different brands of all different verticals and categories from SMB to Fortune 50. And I like to tell people that if you ask kind of, do we specialize in anything that PartnerCentric portfolio kind of looks like a balance sheet of what’s going on in the economy at any given time. So the client mix that we have now looks very different from the one we had during COVID, post COVID, last year, et cetera, but working with a great group of clients to help them grow their affiliate marketing. 

[00:02:35] Todd Crawford

You guys are like typical agencies, fully remote, partially remote. How’s that work? 

[00:02:40] Stephanie Harris

Now it’s like typical agencies fully remote, but I like to think we did it before. It was cool back when I had to explain to really big enterprise businesses how they can trust a company to do their affiliate marketing for them that was fully remote. We used to tell people that, you know, how can we manage all these relationships for you that are fully remote from us if we can’t figure that out amongst our 50 people. So yes, fully remote. 

[00:03:09] Todd Crawford

Yeah, no, that seems to be the standard now, and I think it works. You’re able to hire the right talent in the right place, and they’re more plug and play and get up to speed. Speaking of clients, you know, we’re seeing more and more creator economy bumping up against the affiliate economy, I guess you could call it. I always say, you know, when people started talking about influencers maybe 10 years ago, all the affiliate managers raised their hand and said, You know, we’re working with a lot of these types of partners already, a lot of those were YouTubers, but I think it was really the new social platforms that created more of these social influencers, creators, and so that kinda changed it a little, and obviously the economics in the beginning were pay per post, and some of those payments were pretty high, and the measurements were pretty thin, more engagement metrics as opposed to revenue, and that’s shifted with this bumping into affiliate. So I’m curious, how have your clients kind of been discussing this or, you know, you get early adopters that are jumping in on this ready to do anything. You have people that are more conservative or politics internally. So just kind of get the lay of the land of how you see this. 

[00:04:22] Stephanie Harris

We’ve both been in this space a very long time, more time than I want to admit. And I would say that it’s the same conversation we’ve always had with brands. I think you can insert a different definition for what this looks like to your earlier point that 10 years ago, it was other content sites, blogs, probably even before that. There’s always been a need to get new different audiences through the affiliate channel. There’s always been a desire for brands looking for advice on how they’re going to partner not with just the same quote unquote top 20 percent of the partnership. How do we expand the long tail? How do we bring that more revenue? And so back when I was an account manager, 15, 18, 20, 22 years ago. We were, we were having conversations with, you know, data feed affiliates and bloggers, you know, about how they can do more with the programs. And then that did become content sites that did become YouTube influencers, then it became, you know, you know, with the rise, like you said, of social media and Instagram and more with YouTube and TikTok and all these other guys, you know, how do we tap into them as individual creators to bring that into affiliate. I think that clients, brands continue to wanna have a conversation around how do you push these types of authentic conversations into the affiliate space and pay them on a performance basis. And where we’re able to do performance or hybrid commissionable basis where it’s not just a flat fee, it’s successful, where it’s just flat fee and as you get larger and larger audiences, that’s what the mix often looks like. Then there’s a conversation around is that still affiliate? Is that now influencer or what size and price point do they change hands? And so that’s a lot of conversation over the last few years continues to evolve around where that split is. 

[00:06:36] Todd Crawford

Similar to how you were saying you’d like to have a diversified portfolio of clients. Brands obviously want as much diversification in their partnerships channel, whether that’s solely affiliate or solely creators are trying to reach the right demographic for the right product or service. And the most kind of friction in this shift is there’s a PR team or some team that’s running the influencers more on the macro guys, the pay per posts solely and measuring with social signals, but then there’s this whole mid and micro and mid -tier that are being leveraged as well. And it seems to be dovetailing into the performance or the affiliate channel, like you said, trying to either get them to run on a porous basis or a hybrid, we call it PostPlus, where I think it’s a fair trade-off. Hey, we’ll help support the content creation, but we want to incentivize you to drive sales and we wanna pay you on those sales. And that’s really where I think it’s going because it’s not sustainable. I mean, I guess for the largest ones, that’s just how they’re gonna operate, pay per post. But the other thing I think is a nuance is most people who run the influencer channel are running campaigns and  new product launch, new promotion, new service offering. And so they recruit 10, 20 creators to do something over a short period of time. And so they have to constantly be coming up with new campaigns to sustain that exposure. And when you start putting them more into the performance channel, they can actually sign up and find products they want to promote, possibly request to get a product so they can review it hands on. Or if they bought it themselves, a mommy blogger or something posting on social media wants to share their experience with it. And they can get a commission. without having to go through a whole brief and getting accepted and all of that. So it can create more of that current and undercurrent of transactions, which I think once brands realize this potential, it’s pretty powerful. But now we’ve got kind of a new facet to this voice of the consumer recommending products and services. And that’s the actual customer of the brand, this advocacy. So One of the things that I think is so great about affiliate and creator is that it’s not the brand telling the consumer to buy their product. It’s somebody who’s actually used it, tried it, is recommending it, and that’s really what consumers resonate with, and the typical consumer journey starts at research. So adding that customer voice out there as well really can add that third, I guess, leg to the stool where you can’t really get that through AdWords or, you know, paid search or programmatic and any of these other channels. So wondering if you started hearing any conversations around more of that advocacy part where they’re bringing in their own customer base. 

[00:09:44] Stephanie Harris

Yeah, so I think that’s a great question. And for a long time, we’ve known that, you know, the largest influence to a purchase decision is from someone that someone knows someone that they trust. And that’s part of why I think even post COVID, you saw this big rise in, you know, what people would call like, you know, performance PR, these sort of sites that were acting as this trusted referral source, which would be these sort of listicles online of top couches that you can get delivered to your house, like e-commerce furniture stores. And they would see a big rise in what they could do in affiliate with commissionable links because post-COVID, they were acting as this sort of trusted source and then the more commercialize these properties get the less trust they have with the customer. And so again, having the same conversation with brands all the time about how do we increase our conversion? How do we get more trusted partners to our customers to be in this funnel and pay them on a performance basis? The most direct way is through people who are already their customers, been really excited to try out you know, the tool that you guys have created this sort of special report where we’re going to be able to see who is a current customer of our clients and that is also in the affiliate ecosystems. We can reach out and talk to them about, Hey, you know, you’re already a customer of so-and-so and we run their affiliate program. We’d love to have you join it. You may as well be earning commissions on something that you’re likely already talking about. And those are often the most organic, lowest hanging fruit for high conversion, incremental activity, which is the big buzzword. But that’s where we would really love to see more of our customer activity be driven from. 

[00:11:54] Todd Crawford

Talking to a lot of clients when we launched our advocate product, I was pretty surprised at how many brands don’t have anything in place for customer referrals. And then the few that did, it’s kind of like a tick box. It exists, they log in when they buy something from me or check on their order status and there’s a little thing that says you can join, but there’s not really a lot of proactive motion to you know, recruit and engage and activate customers. And I think that’s really the potential. And again, we’re talking about getting out in front of the customer with that trusted voice, which, I mean, I buy all the time online and I look for those reviews and opinions and, you know, it can be the difference between spending 150 dollars more on something that I was only gonna spend a hundred on. But after seeing some reviews, I decided it was worth spending more twice as much to get you know, the final product that I thought I wanted to buy. So a lot of times this is steering you either to a product that you weren’t sure you wanted to buy and now you are, or it’s upselling you because it’s showing you there’s even better versions of that, you know, like even with the couch, right? You can get a cheap couch, but here’s this next better one and why it’s better to last longer, whatever meet your needs different. So to me, it’s those trusted voices and this adding this advocacy component, again, just creates more diversification, which again, I think gives you that kind of peace of mind, right? That you have so many ways to reach a customer in an authentic way. 

[00:13:29] Stephanie Harris

A referral program or tapping into a current customer and bringing that back into your affiliate program may be one of the few ways in 2025 that you may be able to chatGPT proof some of your marketing spend because in 2025 we know that you know many of our clients and affiliate is doing really strongly for them, Paid search is also doing really strongly for them or programmatic and we know that at least on the paid search side, that they’re gonna be hit pretty hard and have already been seeing some rumblings of this that their effectiveness at their spend for paid search is going down and will go down precipitously over the next year because a lot of searches are going to now originate as people become more and more familiar with chatGPT and start their searches there affects the effectiveness of using that for a marketing vehicle for brands. And so tapping into your customers and being able to utilize them as a third party trusted source to speak well of your product and they’re already using it to find your newest influencers, your newest creators is probably a great way to prove your marketing spend off of something that AI can’t replicate easily. 

[00:14:48] Todd Crawford

You know, it sounds simple, and I’m sure a lot of people are already doing this, but the taking that user generated content from the creators, getting rights to that, and using it in your own social media posts, really gives you far more sales than just creating your own content, similar to, you know, paid search and programmatic. They’re just your ads. So I think where a lot of brands that I’ve talked with, they see a lot of the value in working, especially even with some of the MAC pro ones where they pay a lot is being able to reuse that content in their own or amplify it and getting, you know, again, more attributable sales that way. So I see this as, you know, inevitable. And I think it’s again, it’s just different companies move at different paces. And of course, there’s, you know, politics involved, you know, wait, why does this other team want what I’m doing? But a lot of times it’s just, you know, the partnerships team that’s running affiliate, they’re so used to working at the relationship level, talking to people every day, they’re not using a machine and plugging budget into it and getting reports out, that they’ve got that skill set to identify, recruit, engage, you know, activate and manage these relationships on behalf of other teams. The macro team could be running them on the same platform through us and they’re just having the affiliate team pull the levers and push the buttons and give them the data and they’re the ones doing the, you know, the brief and the back and forth there and getting, you know, the output that they want, but they don’t have to get their hands as dirty with all the mechanics and then they can still track the sales, which I think is another important aspect of spending all this money. So I think it’s getting there and, you know, when we were doing the prep call, you referenced a survey that we did with URL Genius, which I hadn’t even read, and I obviously researched it. I was really excited to hear that, you know, 66 percent of brands report respondents are overseeing both affiliate and influencer. And, you know, I knew it was snowballing that way, but I was surprised that it was that high, and I think that was out of 143 respondents. So it was a pretty good data set. That to me is is telling that the companies are seeing synergies there. And that’s really what this is about. It’s not about necessarily cost savings or something. It’s just about doing more. 

[00:17:23] Stephanie Harris

Well, these teams and the decision makers behind these teams, and I think part of why you see these things go together is the decision makers here are tasked with the same age old question, which is how am I going to get to customers I was never going to get to otherwise? Is it going to be through these creators? Is it going to be through these affiliates? Is it going to be through these customers of mine? Is it going to be through something else? It’s going to be through a toolbar. We know how they feel about that. So, you know, I think that is always the question. And they utilize this channel to try and explore that and test those theories because it is a performance-based channel. And there’s a high return on that spend on that effort and energy. And that’s where, you know, if you have an aggressive or even a test theory for new net new customer acquisition and how you’re defining incriminetality, you know, we could spend like, five hours on that affiliate and affiliate adjacent marketing ventures that you can put into this channel are really going to be the place to play with that. 

[00:18:38] Todd Crawford

The one thing I always say is the C-suite’s sole job is to increase the value of the company, increase the metrics, right? And so a lot of that is revenue, it’s a new customer, it’s retention of customers. And there’s only so many levers you can pull, you can keep plowing money into some traditional channels. There’s a little bit of that legacy affiliate wasn’t as multi-dimensional or as up or funnel and that certainly changed and now with addition of some creators being in the mix and potentially advocacy. It should be pretty appealing to explore, you know? I mean, having the discussion doesn’t mean you have to do it. And part of the discussion is kind of playing the seeds like how would this work? What would we do? What are some of the considerations and just having that open discussion or kind of pre-planning, whether it’s a 2025 initiative or not. The thing is, is your competitors are going that route. I mean, if we’re talking that 66 percent in one survey said that they’ve consolidated to a certain extent, maybe not 100 percent, like I said, the PR still might be doing the macro guys, but they’re consolidating that for efficiency and effect, right? That’s not just someone told us to do it. And the other part of that survey, you know, is that 86 percent of the respondents leverage an agency to support one or both of those channels. So that to me is really where the rubber meets the road because a lot of times the internal teams, it sounds good on paper, but they don’t really have that efficiency, the network, the contacts, the experience to just roll that out efficiently and successfully. And I think that’s where I’ve seen, as we work with a lot of agencies and this is happening across the board, the agencies are able to make things happen faster, which obviously is a better return on investment. 

[00:20:26] Stephanie Harris

Faster, better return on investment, more experience. Look, if you’re in-house, you’re probably handling many different channels or  your handling depending on the size of your business, you’re either handling many different channels or you’re handling one channel at many different facets. You work with an agency, you’re getting a lot of expertise, a lot of breadth. So you’re getting to really understand trends that are happening across all different verticals and segments so you can understand sort of context of where you are versus others, not just within your own small ecosystem. We like to say that a client is going to be the expert at the thing that they do. And our job is to be at the very least serviceable at the thing that they do to be able to speak to it. But we’re expert at the thing that we do, which is this channel. And so you know, anyone can get you, anyone even in-house can, you know, get their brand onto some of these top sites and get the eyeballs and if they have the budget and want to pay to, you know, pay to play to get onto these to integrate onto the top sites. But again, it goes back to what are my incremental sales, where are my partners coming to me that are going to bring me sales I’m not going to get in other places and have that nuanced conversation because these things are not like the incrementality conversation, attribution conversations are not black and white as much as some marketers would like to think that it is. And so to have access to a nuanced conversation in context and data, and often in our channel, getting data is not as straightforward as data in programmatic data and paid search, then you know, being able to pair that information to make actionable decisions is something that you often need, you know, a partner for. 

[00:22:27] Todd Crawford

When a brand is in-housing a program, it kind of devolves to the lowest common denominator and they end up working with a lot of the affiliates that maybe they’re not as excited about. They don’t have that diversification, but it’s easy because they’ve got a handful and they don’t have to worry about recruiting and finding others and act doing all the other work. It’s just they work with kind of a small number. Maybe they’re a lot of the last click lower funnel partners and they’re able to hit their numbers, but they’re not diversified, they’re not growing at the rate that they could, and they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that growing 5 percent or 10 percent in the affiliate channel is subpar, but they think it’s great. So I think that’s another thing that you get perspective from an agency on what they should expect, what they should be budgeting for, how they should budget for placements versus commissions, and what’s the types of ranges that they’re going to have to work with. You’re going into that, you know, with your own, in your own silo. You kind of put yourself at a disadvantage to the competitors. 

[00:23:31] Stephanie Harris

Right. And also, if you’re a 1-800-Flowers.com, so your email domain is @1-800-Flowers.com, chances are most of the partners will respond to something that you send them because they know you as a well-known player and you’re a vertical. If you’re an upstart or a challenger brand or you’re gaining exposure, and a new customer acquisition strategy is of utmost importance to your brand, you’re gonna need people who are known in the space and who get their emails addressed, their phone calls addressed and all of that to get your to get you more exposure. 

[00:24:14] Todd Crawford

The other thing is when you, when most brands look across their marketing mix, affiliate is still has the best return on ad spend, which to me, you know, means you, you wish that would be bigger. And so putting more resources towards it is the only way to really, it doesn’t just get bigger. You’re beholden to the, the, the partners you’re working with growing their business with your brand. If, if you don’t have, you know, the right resources, because recruitment and activation re-engagement, it’s exactly how you treat customers, right? You just don’t let customers buy from you and hope they come back. It’s the same with affiliate, it’s a lot of work and it’s not as programmatic from like email sends based on, you know, you haven’t bought from me in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, but it’s still part of the game plan and we do a lot of benchmarking, you know, of programs and you see a lot of high potential partners that have just stopped promoting them for one reason or another and the brand doesn’t know why, so you need to pay attention to that and get that reactivate, reengage, whatever it takes to, it’s only getting more competitive. 

[00:25:20] Stephanie Harris

We do affiliate marketing just to find our next customer, PartnerCentric next customers, right? In our marketing mix, we do paid search, we do influencer, we have referrals, right? All the things that businesses much larger than us are doing in our microcosm. We have to drink our own Kool-Aid, right? We have to try out our own stuff to make sure that it’s as advertised. 

[00:25:44] Todd Crawford

I think there’s so much potential here and it’s been really exciting as we both have said we’ve been in this industry for more than 20 years and how it’s matured and what it can do for a brand has just been astounding and I say this repeatedly but right now I feel like it’s the most exciting times in this industry since the late 90s when I jumped in because there is so much more diversification, there’s more consolidation, there’s more opportunity. A lot of this is driven by that the publishers and the creators, right? It’s not the brands or the platforms that are making the industry grow as much as it is these partners. They’re very adaptive, they’re very crafty, they’re innovative, come out of the ether with a new business model, they change their business model, they expand their business model, they find a dead end, they turn around. They’re very good at overcoming adversity and taking advantage of opportunities. And I think that’s what makes this space so dynamic compared to, I mean, paid search, it’s just a rate you gotta pay to be at the rank you want, programmatic, it’s where do you wanna be and what are you willing, what’s your budget? And so there’s not as much dynamics there. And if anything, there’s a lot of the pricing is auction based. So as you pointed out, it’s going up. And so that’s driving your return on ad spend down and affiliate has kind of been the saving grace, which I think, you know, a lot of brands look across it and say, well, when we cost average it, affiliate brings it down a little. So we like that, where to be honest, I think they could be spending similar rates and getting far better returns because you are dealing, you know, with this advocacy, this third-party voice driving real considerate sales, making the buying decision and you’re still getting a great return on ad spend, it’s just not cost averaging your other channels down, which I think is understandable, but. 

[00:27:50] Stephanie Harris

Yeah. And I think also if you, you know, talking about these are exciting times, you know, if the conversation that brands have with us have to do with finding their next great partner and diversifying their mix and expanding their long tail and turning some of that long tail into higher performers then there’s been no greater time than right now for the quantity of potential partners out there. If you were around 10 years ago, I mean, we couldn’t have the millions. You couldn’t have millions of blogs that had commissionable links. It just, we didn’t have that quantity if you look at the social media platforms today and you look at how many of these creators have been able to make full-time living out of doing this, and more than half have commissionable links that they’re earning money off of as part of their income, then the ecosystem of potential partners for any number of different interests and niche audiences is so much greater for us than it ever was. We used to spend a lot of time thinking through the problem years ago like how do you expand the partnership ecosystem. 

[00:29:10] Todd Crawford

I remember when affiliate first started and everybody tried to get a piece of that pie, you know, fraternities would create like a banner farm and everybody at the fraternity would buy through the links and they would use it for like beer money or something, you know, not very scalable and probably not what brands were looking for. But, you know, everybody was trying to jump in to make money as affiliates and when this creator economy started, it was the title wave, right? I mean, it’s not even close. So I think it’s still settling. Of course, creators prefer to be paid upfront flat fees. Who wouldn’t, right? But I think as the dust settles in the coming years, this hybrid payment is gonna make sense for everyone and it’s gonna allow these partnerships to grow and expand you know, the always on component, which I really like where, you know, people can come in and find products and services they want to promote. There’s a commission associated with it. Maybe talk about it, promote it, but they are proving themselves to the brand that they can then include them maybe in a brief or a bigger campaign where there is pay per post money, things like that. So it’s kind of like you’re, you’re ingratiating yourself or introducing what you can do to the, to the brand. And you can kind of rise out of that ether and get pulled into some campaigns that you maybe never would have even seen or known about much less I’ve been approved to. 

[00:30:25] Stephanie Harris

Yeah, I agree. And I think that the more we can look at data, and one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing in our, you know, client calls every week, we look at the data from our tools from your tools from all of the available, you know, information we have from the client of how they’re kind of viewing their data, then we can make recommendations as to, you know, pushing us toward working with more of certain types of partners, you know, we had this whole conversation about honey and the other toolbars when we were prepping for this call. And, you know, even painting a wide brush around toolbars doesn’t do each toolbar justice, you know, if it’s Honey or Rakuten or Capital One, shopping each one in our data set shows a different level of incrementality across our clients. And so you know, Hey, if you’re gonna work with this category or to encourage them to work with that category, who within that category is gonna give them the best return for their goals. And so, I mean, that’s like an interesting way to have a conversation today that we couldn’t have five years ago. 

[00:31:38] Todd Crawford

I think data has really played a much bigger role. Affiliate data was pretty two-dimensional in the old days. And today there’s so much granularity and consumer journey and multi-touch points. And just understanding how everything works together is part of that nuance of which partners are really right for our brand. And two seemingly identical brands can take completely different approaches based on data, hopefully, not what they read online or what they feel or what someone tells them, which those are certainly valid opinions, but at the end of the day, the data kind of cuts through all that. We look at data all the time around these things because we wanna make sure everything’s fair and also that there’s nothing creating any challenges or issues. It just, you want everybody to play nice on the playground.  

[00:32:33] Stephanie Harris

The sandbox. 

[00:32:35] Todd Crawford

Holy smokes, this went by fast. We got through everything we wanted to talk about. I mean, we could have gone down, like you said, the incrementality path, but that would have doubled the episode. So maybe that’s another time. 

[00:32:47] Stephanie Harris

Yeah, I was happy to come back and do a whole hour on that one. 

[00:32:50] Todd Crawford

Well, again, we’ll cite the survey that we did, which I think is nice to see with URL genius and just let people get some takeaways there and really appreciate you coming on and talking about all this. It’s like I said, exciting times and look forward to seeing both of our efforts bear more fruit in 2025. 

[00:33:13] Stephanie Harris

Yes, thanks for having me. 

[00:33:15] Todd Crawford

Now is an exciting time to be in the partnership space, especially with the unique shifts taking place. The convergence of influencers and affiliates is opening doors to results-driven campaigns supported by evolving payment models like hybrid structures that can allow partners to grow and expand. Advocates are also coming to the forefront, tapping into current customers as trusted voices provides brands with an authentic cost-effective way to build trust and drive results. Advocates are also a great way to diversify your partnership mix. Expanding your mix to include affiliates, influencers, and advocates can unlock new opportunities to engage niche audiences and boost revenue. Combining these efforts with agency support can help ensure your programs are not only efficient, but also aligned with long-term growth goals. From optimizing budgets to identifying incremental revenue, agencies provide a roadmap for brands looking to grow efficiently and effectively in today’s complex landscape. As the industry continues to evolve, it’s clear that success lies in flexibility, trust, and diversification. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to next time.