What To Look For in a Whitelisting Partner in 2024

Discover what you should look for in a whitelisting partner in 2024

Third-party paid social whitelisting campaigns are known as one of the most effective strategies for DTC brands to drive more volume and lower CACs at scale. When executed properly with the right partner, these campaigns can outperform branded ad campaigns by as much as 20-30% which can be a huge unlock for brands.

These whitelisting campaigns work because you’re leading with authentic creator content, driving traffic to a third-party educational landing page and leveraging social proof throughout the complementary funnel.

With that said – at scale, these campaigns can be challenging to produce and scale with consistency. Managing creators, content production, testing roadmaps, setting up third-party pages and more generally deters DTC brands from launching the strategy. That’s exactly why finding a top tier whitelisting partner is critical to success.

In this article, we will review three key traits of a successful whitelisting partner, why those traits matter and how they can impact your brand’s performance.

Speed Is Key To Scaling and Producing New Campaigns

As with most things when it comes to paid social and digital acquisition – speed is critical to success. With whitelisting specifically and all of the challenges and friction it poses, having a partner that works with speed can be a big reason why a campaign is successful or not. 

For example – when you work with Grapevine, the leading whitelisting partner for DTC brands, you’ll be able to get creative iterations and content tests turned around practically overnight. Plus, the speed in which a campaign goes from “idea” to “launched” is unmatched and can sometimes take less than a week.

Speed is also critical when it comes to the manual tasks associated with whitelisting – things like managing creator page permissions, building out the ads in your ad account, paying creators on time and managing negotiations for content. With a trusted partner, these tasks can be completed through technology like Grapevine’s campaign collaboration platform or through dedicated customer success managers so you’re team doesn’t have to worry about them.

Creative Iteration and Volumes Drives Success

Another key aspect of a top whitelisting partner is their ability to drive the creative and content iteration process for your growth team. This is critical because it helps your growth team focus on their highest leverage work.

A whitelisting partner who prioritizes quality creative and content iteration knows that creative is king when it comes to paid social and whitelisting success – generally speaking, the more creative you have and can test, the more opportunity you give yourself to scale efficiently. 

It’s one thing for a whitelisting partner to deliver you a single iteration of a UGC ad from a creator. It’s a whole other thing for a whitelisting partner to deliver you the first iteration with a hypothesis behind, help you test it and then build out an entire creative iteration roadmap against the data.

A top tier whitelisting partner can take one piece of UGC and turn it into 5-6 unique pieces through robust (and quality) iteration with unique hypotheses for each one.

Content Roadmaps Are Based on Performance & Data

It’s critical for your whitelisting partner to be driven by data at every step of the way. Data and performance results should be what drives and dictates the campaign ideation roadmap, the creative iteration process and marketing messaging strategies.

A top whitelisting partner – like Grapevine – has this instilled in every part of their process and product. For example, with Grapevine, all of the campaign ideas, content testing roadmaps and creative iterations are backed by data and performance history.

Directly in your campaign management account on Grapevine, brands get access to custom reporting that breaks down performance by campaign, ad concept, landing page, creator and more – this attention to performance and data is what fuels the entire whitelisting process and is what drives success for top brands like Seed, Prose and Farmer’s Dog.

Lastly, it’s critical for your whitelisting partner to use performance history to ideate their creative hypotheses at every step – there should be a data-driven reason (or a specific test) for why every piece of creative is being entered into the ad account. A top whitelisting partner like Grapevine develops a robust creative testing roadmap against past performance data and leverages it to drive future iteration so that every piece of content has a higher probability of success than the prior pieces.

Partner With GrapevineAI Today For Success 

Grapevine’s platform is built to eliminate all of the fraction and manual tasks associated with launching and scaling multiple whitelisting campaigns – creator contracts, negotiations, billing, project management, content edits and iterations, page sharing and more.

Grapevine’s team and platform manages all of it for our growth marketing team and allows you to focus on the media buying and management component.

Connect with the Grapevine team or email their co-founder Caroline at caroline@grapevine.ai to learn more and see if you’re eligible for a first time discount.