The Low-Hanging Fruit You’re Ignoring: Your Client’s Influencer Roster Is Your Secret Affiliate Weapon
Why influencers are your easiest affiliates — and why most teams overlook them.
How many times have you onboarded a client only to realize later they forgot to tell you something important?
Or worse a longstanding client:
moved a launch date back/up you’ve been asking about for ages.
participated in Prime Day after they said it wouldn’t.
Discounted a product they said would “never be discounted”
It magically shows up 25% off while you’re pulling a link for a new pitch...
This was actual footage of me on Cyber Monday.
It happens more than we care to admit, and it almost always comes back to the same thing: no one is sharing information across teams.
So this week’s Substack is focused on the one area where that lack of communication shows up the most.
Influencers and creators.
Brands spend real money on them. Beautiful IGC is the result. And if targeted correctly, engagement rolls in. But then what? The partnership just… ends. No one thinks to invite these creators into the affiliate program, even though they are the most logical people to recruit. They already like the brand enough to work and bet their audience credibility on them. Yet the affiliate team is usually kept completely out of the loop.
Here’s the scenario I see constantly in consulting calls. A brand has a successful influencer campaign with dozens of posts. The social media team does their thing, files everything away, and moves on. Meanwhile the PR and affiliate teams start from scratch. Cold pitching creators, trying to build CPA only relationships which no creator who knows their worth actually goes for. This is the equivalent of starting from scratch. And the result is usually getting ignored because creators don’t naturally gravitate toward CPA models unless it’s tied to a paid partnership. The warmest leads are never contacted simply because they live inside someone else’s Google Sheet and there is a Silo between the departments.
We live in marketing silos and
We.
Need.
To.
Break.
Them.
Down.
And this is where the silo problem becomes painfully obvious.
Social is in their world managing gifting, briefs, posting calendars, and platform dashboards.
PR is somewhere else entirely trying to land editorial coverage.
The affiliate team is forecasting CPA partnerships and recruiting publishers.
The analytics team is staring at a dashboard chalk full of insights that would help shape the other teams strategies, but no one is asking for them.
Marketing directors are making decisions, their whys never fully making their way downstream.
Everyone is doing their job, but no one is connecting the dots.
So let’s make it simple. Influencers should be a large portion of your affiliate pool if you want it to be top and mid funnel heavy. In fact, they often become your best affiliates because they have already proven they know how to talk about the product in a way that resonates. This matters because it increases your ability to drive performance. It adds new revenue channels without needing to cold pitch and court strangers. It strengthens both PR and affiliate outcomes with partners who are already bought in.
Here’s what you can do this week to close the gap:
1. Audit the influencers your client has worked with in 2025.
Get the full list from the social team, their agency or the client directly. Identify who posted, who performed well, and who had a good partnership experience. Prioritize those creators first. They often convert more quickly because they already know and trust the brand. It’s best to onboard them before the paid partnership is over, but if you have to go above and beyond and provide them a meaningful CPA…15% will not cut it here.
2. Ask the analytics team to share the information they already have.
Top referring domains. Traffic changes. Best sellers. AOV by category. Products with the highest conversion rates. PR can pitch more effectively with this data, and this also allows affiliates to optimize their content around what actually sells.
3. Ask better questions. Often. And verify the answers.
Also known as Trust, but Verify. Clients are juggling a million things and often forget what they told you two meetings ago. Double check that sale they said wasn’t happening actually isn’t happening (Yes, this happened to me during Black Friday and I missed out on LOTS of coverage because of it.) Check for yourself if the brand is running a Creator Connections campaign on Amazon. They may not know that their Amazon team set it up, or worse that it has ended and they didn’t tell you. All of these details matter and yet they’re rarely volunteered. If you’re unsure what to ask, tell your LLM of choice your unique circumstances, what you’re working on, the time of the year and have it generate a list of questions to bring to your next call.
The point is that influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and PR are not separate islands. They touch each other constantly, and when the right people share the right information, the tide, and as a result the whole ship rises.
Your client’s influencer roster is not just a list of past partnerships. It’s a ready-made group of warm, aligned, high-trust potential affiliates who can strengthen every part of your program the moment you bring them in.
