Today I want to unpack one of the most effective and lowest-cost marketing channels for emerging brands: creator gifting.

I was thinking about this as I got a gift from a friend’s new chocolate milk brand, and how when done right, gifting can drive tens (and hundreds) of thousands in sales, tons of free UGC, super low CPMs, and efficiencies across ad performance.

Now this isn’t quite influencer marketing, which tends to focus on bigger creators and often comes with briefs and five-figure fees to get posts.

This is a far more grassroots approach: getting your product in the hands of your target customer. Think of it as product sampling, but online.

What is it and how do you do it?

At its core, creator gifting is exactly what it sounds like:

1. You find your target customer (through a lot of manual searching)
2. You DM them introducing your product / brand and offer a free product with no strings attached
3. You hope they like it, and maybe share it in a story or do a dedicated post

There’s no contract, no fixed deliverable, nor guaranteed post. You’re just planting seeds.

daria

love this color 🍒 #sneakers #unboxing #fyp #adidasgazelle #fashiontrends #pinterestgirl

♬ Otra vez - ProdMarvin

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Take the video above: a quick unboxing of Adidas shoes with a few different camera angles. That simple clip drove 4.4 million views and 300k likes.

If Adidas had paid for the partnership, that video likely wouldn’t have happened. They would’ve expected a script, more creativity, and a call-to-action.

Instead, because the creator wasn’t bound by rules (or even required to post at all), she shared the product in her own way.

Ironically, that stripped-down, no-frills post probably drove more attention and sales than a polished, paid campaign ever could. That’s the power of smart product gifting.

When I was doing this…

With one of my brands, Oklahoma Smokes, we searched TikTok for people who were posting about quitting smoking, vaping, or nicotine.

We didn’t care if they had 100 followers or 100k, because we knew our product could generate views and engagement when shared authentically from their POV.

We DM’d these creators on Instagram, introduced the product, and sent it free.

Here’s what happened:

- About 75% of people who accepted the product ended up creating content. Some performed great, some OK, everything in between.

- A single video alone drove $30k+ in sales (with no paid spend). That one piece of content paid for the entire program.

- If we had a product that we could run ads behind, we would have paid to spark/whitelisted 20–30 posts. Based on organic performance, I know that would’ve driven serious revenue.

You can see here that we got 4m views, across 255 videos at a CPM of $1.07.

If you want to see more case studies on this kind of process and impact, check out the posts here from Aligned Growth — they're an agency that does this kind of gifting/seeding as a service for brands. (FYI I have no relationship with the aligned growth team - I just follow them on twitter and they seem to know what they're talking about).

Beyond driving sales

Now views and sales are the obvious wins. But there are a few others, too.

1. A UGC review bank: For Oklahoma Smokes, ~300 creators posted videos that now live on TikTok. 62% of TikTok users say they use the app to search for product reviews, so this is a way to quickly build a varied “review bank” on the platform.

2. UGC for ads: When organic content / UGC performs well, you can ask the creator whether they'd be open to whitelisting the ad, so you can put paid behind it. Usually at this juncture it's pay-to-play, but you're already at a point where you know how good/strong the creative is.

2. Diverse perspectives: When hundreds of different creators interact with your product, you start to see it framed in ways you never imagined yourself. One creator might include it in a GRWM before heading to the gym, another showcase it as a great birthday gift for dads, or another tie it to a benefit you hadn’t thought to emphasize.

Each post gives you new language, angles, and stories you can feed back into your own marketing.
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​The downside(s)

Like all things in marketing, seeding isn’t perfect. If you’ve ever tried running it yourself, you know the headaches:

- If COGS are high, it can be expensive to gift lots of product.

- Tracking DMs, addresses, sizes and shipping quickly becomes a spreadsheet nightmare

- Back-and-forth with busy creators makes it hard to actually get your product in their hands

These aren’t dealbreakers, just the messy part of doing seeding at scale.

A solution

I tweeted this frustration about the manual-hell of collecting info, inputting orders, etc. about a year ago, and a freelance developer (shoutout Neil) reached out. After a month of building and iterating, we released Influencer Gift Form.​

It’s nothing fancy, just a simple tool that plugs directly into Shopify. Creators fill out a simple form from a link you send them, you control what’s available, and the orders get placed into shopify automatically. There's also a dashboard that shows you their orders as well as their linked social handles handles (so no manual tracking in shopify).

We use it at my new brand and probably save ~4-5h a week of manual entry.
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No leaked codes, messy spreadsheets or extra work. Just a smoother way to run seeding at scale.

Closing thoughts

Influencer seeding isn’t glamorous. Most of the product you send out will never turn into posts. But the ones that do can spark the kind of authentic content and word-of-mouth no ad budget can replicate. If you’re running a brand of any size, this is one of the most cost-effective, scalable ways to get people talking about you.

- Ashwinn

*and a reminder to check out: https://www.influencergiftform.com/