Manufactured Virality: Leveraging Modern Affiliates for Explosive DTC Growth

Going viral might seem like a lightning strike, a rare opportunity to get your brand in front of consumers. It’s beneficial to go viral for a bunch of reasons, including having exposure to a larger audience of potential consumers, increased brand recognition, and a low-cost way to market your brand. When a video goes viral, you’re not paying for those views (and, in fact, you may even get paid for them instead!). 

But the short-form content machines that are TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, the platforms where you’re most likely to go viral, may seem unpredictable, if you believe you can only strike lightning once. 

In a recent talk at The Whalies, Noah Tucker, CEO of Social Snowball outlined some ways you can manufacture virality for your brand using what he’s dubbed modern affiliates: the influencers that create content designed for reach. If you can manufacture virality, you can make predictions about how such content will drive your brand forward. Rinse, repeat, and reap the rewards. 

In this blog, we’ll outline how to position your brand for the best chance of going viral, how the influencer landscape has changed over the past decade, and Noah’s two strategies for diversifying customer acquisition channels so you’re not just relying on paid ads to get new customers. 

How to Go Viral: Using Social Media to Drive Sales

Social media algorithms continue to evolve, and brands are left to play catch up. While algorithms are getting smarter, companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok still need to make money off of all of us. The days of tossing ad money into the Meta/Google machine and seeing instant payouts are over, so mastering your social media presence, to hopefully gain some organic reach, should be key to every brand’s advertising strategy. 

To increase your chances of going viral, there are a few things you have to nail down:

1. Target audience: in order to hit your ideal customer, you have to know who they are. What they like, watch, who they follow, where they spend their time, and many other factors can contribute to which creative is used. With further insights, you can create captions that resonate with your target audience and post it at the correct time so that audience is more likely to engage with it. 
2. Get them to stop: Social media is built for mindless scrolling, so your post needs to be something that makes them do a double take before swiping away. Inattentional blindness is defined as “when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits”. People are mindlessly scrolling, so you need to grab their attention to pull them from the doomscrolling abyss. 
3. The hook that keeps their attention: Within those crucial first few seconds, you need to make the viewer think or feel something so they’re more inclined to like, comment, or share the content with others. There’s so much to see and do on the internet, and if you’re not interesting, you’re going to lose them. Hook them in! 
4. Amplify the engagement: Once the social campaign goes viral, you can amp it up using paid media, using influencers to share content, or distribute the content through social publishers across multiple channels. 

Using Modern Affiliates to Go Viral

Affiliates meant something entirely different over a decade ago. Listcicles were ubiquitous. Review sites and bloggers were all the rage. Most consumers who browse the internet now ignore listcicles or click-bait articles on sites (or, at least, I do). Gone are the days when you could make a buck by creating random articles that mention products in an otherwise harmless piece of content.

Today’s marketing almost needs to include affiliates, because there’s been so much stock placed in user-generated content (UGC) in recent years. If you don’t have someone promoting your product on TikTok, is anybody even using it? (Just like the tree falling in the forest).

Over 80% of brands have some sort of affiliate marketing program, and the global affiliate marketing spending is expected to climb to $15.7 billion in 2024. 

Noah Tucker categorizes influencers, creators, ambassadors and even customers as the modern affiliate. While the legacy affiliates are sometimes still useful, the modern affiliates are where we’ve seen many brands create unique content. 

What are Modern Affiliates?

Today’s affiliates include influencers, creators, ambassadors, and even customers. An influencer often has their own large following on social media, and when they post about your product, they can sway over your target audience. 

Content creators work with your brand to produce captivating content for distribution on social channels, usually YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Some content creators can work in-house with a brand, or continue to produce content for their own social channels. 

Brand ambassadors represent and promotes a brand and its products or services to their network, with the objective of creating brand awareness and helping to drive sales. 

Finally, actual customers can be one of the best modern affiliates, because their honest review and word-of-mouth reach can be the secret sauce to expanding your brand’s exposure. With over 93% of marketers agreeing that consumers trust content created by people more than brands, it’s no surprise that trends are leaning in this direction. 

Noah Tucker presented two strategies for utilizing modern affiliates in today’s marketing, which we’ll outline below. 

Strategy #1: Manufacturing Short-Form Virality

Going viral is something we all aspire to do, and the benefits could mean a ton of traffic which hopefully translate into sales. While it used to be a little unpredictable, the rise of short-form content has made it possible to predict the type of content expected to rise to viral status. 

Many brands have been able to utilize creators to essentially use them as a channel to go viral continuously, to the point where it can be a reliable customer acquisition channel. Of course, some products and brands are better-suited to this strategy than others.  

One example of a brand who executed the use of modern affiliates the right way is Tabs Chocolate. A quick search of Tabs Chocolate on TikTok displays a seemingly endless number of TikTok accounts that appear to be branded or owned by Tabs Chocolate:

This is by design, and each of these profiles are from individual creators that are partnering as affiliates. Individual creators receive a custom link or dedicated URL that identifies the creator for the brand. Sometimes, brands attach a coupon code or discount to the affiliate link. 

In the case of Tabs Chocolate, this affiliate marketing strategy increased revenue by 17%, and consistently and predictably generated revenue at 9.8x ROI. Wouldn’t you like this kind of return on your advertising efforts? 

How to Use Creators to Go Viral 

There’s a few steps required to go viral on TikTok: 

1. Find creators, not influencers: It’s better if they don’t have a big following; because if they do, they often have an ego and expect a lot of money upfront. It’s more beneficial to use UGC creators that know how to create good content. 
2. Creator makes a new page: The page will appear branded as yours on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.
3. Onboard the creator to your Affiliate Program: There needs to be a good incentive for an affiliate to create content for you! Make it worth their while. 
4. Educate creators: It’s important to inform creators which type of content tends to be high-performing for your brand. This way, they’ll make more high-performing content!
5. Affiliate posts content: The content creator should post daily on their branded pages with affiliate links.
6. Go viral! 

With the sheer number of affiliate content videos being posted that is in line with the type of content that normally goes viral for your brand, it’s very likely that at least some of these affiliates will hit the sweet spot. 

Here’s some back of the napkin math to show why this approach can work. Let’s say you start a program with 50 creators, and all 50 of them make 3 new pages on each of the above platforms (TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram). Already, that’s 150 new pages for your brand that have shown up on the internet. 

If you make a stipulation that they should post three times per day, and then repurpose the posts they’re making, you’re getting 450 posts per day with your brand as the subject. With the sheer number of posts, you’re almost guaranteed to go viral - that’s just the way these platforms work. The only way they don’t go viral is if they’re bad creators. And if they’re bad creators, it’s not hurting you since their affiliate link isn’t even being clicked, so no payout. 

For this strategy to be successful, you should be sure to showcase your best performing posts to all creators regularly – this way, they can emulate and recreate the proven formula in new content. Once you find the type of content that continuously crushes, bring on more creators. Repurpose the content into paid ads, email marketing, and more to make the most of the amazing content created by these creative people; it’s a great side-effect to this acquisition channel!

Strategy #2: Turn Customers Into Affiliates

The next strategy for manufacturing virality? Turning your customers into affiliates. Customers make the best affiliates because potential customers trust their opinions, and they are also able to offer unique insights as true customers of your brand and users of your product. If over 92% of global consumers choose to trust word-of-mouth over other forms of advertising, there’s a key channel to be utilized with true customer testimonials. 

A brand that’s hitting the mark with using customers as affiliates is The Pod Company. As the #1 Original IcePod for ice baths company, they have history and brand recognition on their side in what has become a crowded ecommerce space. 

With the strategy described below, The Pod Company increased their top line revenue by $150k per month and consistently and predictably were able to generated revenue at a 31.6x ROI. These numbers are pretty fantastic! How did they do it? 

1. Removed friction: the invitation to make money by referring a friend was inserted directly in the order confirmation page

2. No clunky applications: It’s easy for the customer to share because all they have to do is click the link
3. Cash Incentive: Cash is king, and when it comes to affiliate marketing, this still holds true. You’re not providing a customer a $5 or $10 coupon they can use on their next purchase, which they may not even need for a while. A straight cash incentive can be used by anyone, at any time, and it’s more enticing of a reward that way. 
4. Customer Service team plugs the program: people want to know about money making opportunities! The Pod Company ensures that each touchpoint with a customer has a reminder to join the referral program for sweet rewards. Any time your customer is feeling positive about the product is a good time to remind them!

Wrapping it Up

Manufacturing short-form virality through affiliate creators is a powerful strategy for brands seeking predictable and scalable customer acquisition. By leveraging the creativity of individual content creators, brands can create a continuous stream of engaging and potentially viral content. Leveraging the power of existing customers requires a strategic approach that prioritizes the user experience and offers tangible rewards. Providing easy-to-share links, valuable product discounts, and direct cash incentives are an effective model for encouraging participation in referral programs. Embracing the strategies outlined above can transform your brand's online presence and lead to sustained growth in a competitive market.

Did you have FOMO when you missed out on The Whalies this year? Don’t be in that position again. Sign up here to be the first to know more about the biggest DTC Party of the Year in 2025!