Outer

Outer is revolutionizing the outdoor furniture industry, from their eco-friendly products to their marketing strategies. With a focus on community and sustainability, the brand has a unique retail model called Neighborhood Showroom, through which 1,000+ customers have become advocates for Outer by turning their backyards into accessible showrooms. Prospective customers can meet their neighbors and check out Outer products in action, reducing the need for brick and mortar showrooms and the unpleasant “salesy” experience that often comes with furniture shopping. Since debuting on Shark Tank, the furniture brand recently closed a $50M Series B investment round with the goal of helping people live better outside. 

Shae Sattler, Partnerships and Community lead at Outer, closely followed the rapid growth of the creator economy and wanted to scale their brand ambassador community online; she looked to Aspire to help build a strong roster of creators to increase Outer’s brand awareness and get in front of their target audience while simultaneously expanding their reach.

Upleveling from spreadsheet to platform

Until the spring of 2021, Shae was managing Outer’s entire influencer marketing program through spreadsheets, manually tracking everything from agreements to deliverables to budget. Despite these challenges, Shae was able to successfully build strong, high-touch relationships with creators and generate massive brand awareness, valuable content, and revenue for the Outer team. But when she tried to scale Outer’s influencer marketing program, the manual process of tracking influencers and managing everything through increasingly complex spreadsheets slowed her down significantly and made it difficult for her to accomplish her day-to-day tasks. 

After partnering with Aspire, Shae quickly saw the value of the platform and easily began to scale her influencer marketing programs to meet her new volume goals set by leadership. Now, Shae seamlessly communicates with hundreds of creators at scale through Aspire’s Creator Marketplace and is able to activate partnerships and campaigns in a fraction of the time. Before onboarding Aspire, the team partnered with around 50 influencers from 2019 through April 2021. Now with Aspire, that number is closer to 300 influencers who closely align with Outer’s brand values and principles. 

With Aspire, Shae has also been able to spend more time cultivating deeper relationships with creators—something she wouldn’t have been able to do at this scale before Aspire. 

Product-seeding at scale

Shae and the team at Outer partner with a wide range of influencers, from interior designers to local moms and lifestyle bloggers. All of their influencers are compensated with free products or commission and are asked to post authentic content about their experience using the product to their social platforms. This has proven to be incredibly successful, not only because their products are high-value, but also because of the quality content that’s been created and the organic interest this type of content has driven.

Learn more about running product seeding campaigns with Aspire → 

Repurposing IGC across multiple touchpoints

By partnering with Aspire, Shae has not only created a new sales channel through affiliate marketing, but the team is driving more sales through their ads when they use influencer content. This multi-pronged strategy ensures that they are getting as much value as possible across channels from this program, and proves that Shae’s hard work pays off. Because Shae vets her partners thoroughly for quality and authenticity, she is able to generate high-quality influencer-generated content (IGC); in 2022, this accounted for 17% of the ads used and 25% of the conversations from paid advertising. 

These IGC-based paid ads — which are selected using a scoring process Shae created based on adQuadrant’s guidelines and then fine tuned and managed by the agency’s team — grew the brand’s ROAS from 749% to 2,238%. Outer’s cost per action (CPA) also decreased by more than 3x. 

Outer is able to use IGC across multiple platforms, including paid ads, organic social, email marketing, and their website. Because creators who work with Outer have a genuine connection with the product and brand, they repeatedly create authentic content that brings their products’ benefits and brand values to life.

‍Full-funnel influencer impact 

The team at Outer tracks all aspects of their influencer program closely and has seen significant successes at every level of the marketing funnel. The campaigns have performed extremely well in terms of engagement, and affiliates have been very successful in helping push conversions. 

According to Shae, Aspire paid for itself within the first month of using the platform. 

By partnering with talented creators through Aspire’s marketplace, Shae has been able to work with large micro- through mega-influencers, many of whom have generated hundreds of thousands of impressions each with CPMs 100x-1000x less than industry standard.

Shae explained that to create content that performs at these levels on their own, Outer would have had to invest more than 1000x of what each partnership has cost them.