December 5, 2024
VENICE BEACH, CA – Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2024 is over, but the holiday season sprint is still very much on. Much like the previous 11 months, the difference between good and great sales may well come down to trusted affiliates and influencers who build trust and motivate sales.
Prosper Show sat down once again with Dakota Morse (pictured), founder of the California-based ALT Group, to get a sense of what’s working down the home stretch—as well at what sellers should be cultivating in 2025. Hint: You can compete against cheap alternatives; and TikTok is still hot.
Prosper Show: How have you been advising clients in relation to TikTok?
Morse: We have implemented a multi-fold approach. With TikTok, we really focused with affiliates and influencers—not just having them create content, but content that really educated why the brand that I work with has superior technology. In the case of air purifiers, it was superior filtration. Air filters must be lab-tested to prove that they actually absorb the pollen, contaminants, bacteria, and viruses.
Prosper Show: What kind of competition is out there?
Morse: A lot of Chinese sellers are just basically selling tissue paper. The affiliates are telling that story and educating customers on TikTok.
Prosper Show: How well did that message resonate?
Morse: We started getting really good engagement on the videos and a ton of comments. We had hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. People say things like, ‘Oh I didn’t even know that the filter mattered.’ We are driving that education…and it’s not easy to do on Amazon.
Prosper Show: Why is it tougher on Amazon?
Morse: On Amazon you basically have six photos to tell your whole story. If you don’t fit into six photos, you lose that sale. TikTok became a great channel for that [telling the story].
Prosper Show: What Prosper Show exhibitors have you worked with?
Morse: We started working with a platform called Levanta (booth pictured at Prosper Show 2024), which has been really good. It is an affiliate platform that integrates with Amazon. It basically helps you get connected to people who write blogs and collect affiliate commissions on those blog posts. We talked to them about the promotions that we were running for Prime Day, and then for Black Friday / Cyber Monday. We started this initiative about eight months ago. It’s a multi-fold approach of working with the affiliates, having them tell better stories and working with these affiliate partners a little more closely.
Prosper Show: How has it been working out with the air purifier/filter?
Morse: We told this story of how our filter has superior technology, and then we ran a 20 percent-off sale for Prime Day. We blasted that out to the affiliates on both TikTok and through Levanta.
Prosper Show: What was the result?
Morse: We saw almost a 70 percent increase in year-over-year sales on Prime Day through this approach. I was impressed, because normally I would expect maybe a 30 or 40 percent bump on Prime Day—maybe 50 percent. But to see such a substantial growth on Prime Day was impressive, especially considering that we have a much higher price point than competitors who are doing super aggressive sales.
Prosper Show: How aggressive?
Morse: The Chinese sellers will do something like 80 percent off on Prime Day, which makes no sense to me. They just have infinite margins it seems. We are able to be profitable for our brand, because we’re able to get a lot more awareness. Sales have been substantially trending up year-over-year based on that education piece that we prioritized.
Prosper Show: How has the role of influences and content generators evolved this year?
Morse: My opinion is that content on social media needs to provide value or benefit to the person who’s watching. For example, we have a long term food storage company and we have about 50,000 followers on Instagram, which is pretty good for a brand that sells food storage products. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world.
Prosper Show: What type of content works for that?
Morse: What works really well is tutorial content. We teach people how to store food. In case there is an emergency, they have access to the food supply and it’s really educational. Other brands like the air purifier company have found a really effective route with education around filter quality and air quality.
Prosper Show: Is urgency or even fear a part of that equation?
Morse: It is not creating fear, but just educating people around what is in the air and why they should protect their indoor air quality—because the air quality inside can be so much worse. That being said, customers or consumers who are watching that content are getting education from watching it. That is the benefit. Customers are giving their time to watch this video, so what do they gain? Other pieces of content for other brands that work well are comedic.
Prosper Show: Can you think of an example of one that goes in the comedic direction?
Morse: There’s a water company called Liquid Death. We watch their content and it is pretty comedic. Or you watch Dr. Squatch which is a soap company that blew up. Their content is very comedic and meme-worthy—almost. People follow them because it’s funny and that’s the value that they get.
Prosper Show: What type of content should you aim for with lower-tier influencers?
Morse: If you’re working with influencers who have maybe 100,000 followers or less, you definitely want them creating content that’s going to be engaging and giving value and benefit to customers. That’s typically what’s going to get you the most reach. There’s obviously value, if you have the budget for it, to work with bigger name people.
If you have a good budget, and you’re a pet supplement company for example, you can work with Caesar Milan and he can give you instant reach to millions of people through his network. But that’s going to be more costly. If he was going to do an educational piece of content, that’s even better. We’ve been moving a little bit away from doing that super high-level spokesperson content, just because sometimes it just seems costly for the reach that you get. You can get millions of views essentially from just doing really good educational content. That can be costing more in the tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Prosper Show: Are influencers still powerful?
Morse: I think they are just as powerful as ever, if not becoming more powerful as a result of TikTok.
Prosper Show: What is TikTok doing right?
Morse: TikTok does a really good job of recirculating old videos. Instagram has been doing a better job, but sometimes the argument against influencers for Instagram was that you create one of these videos, a reel, and the video gets shown once throughout the life cycle. It goes live, a bunch of people see it, and then it’s buried in the videos and it never gets seen again. Whereas on TikTok, and even Instagram improving on this, they will recirculate videos.
If it gets posted, it might not be seen for a while, and then another week later it will start to recirculate again. That’s been positive. The channel that does the best job of this is YouTube because people go to YouTube, and it’s more of a search algorithm, whereas TikTok is more of a scrolling algorithm. You can get a lot of videos that get millions of views on TikTok, and that’s just insane exposure.
Sellers are thinking about the cost-per-impression or cost-per-click on Amazon. It’s costly to get impressions on Amazon now. More and more people are fighting for that top spot of placement. Instead of paying Amazon something like 20 cents a click, you’re able to get that impression much cheaper and able to scale on TikTok. Both need to be done in unison. All brands need a strategy for working with influencers and affiliates, and continuing to scale—whether they are doing it in-house or outsourcing that effort. It’s very clearly leading to growth for our partners.
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