Some of the brands we work with.
Past and current clients, across categories
353K people already trust you, and that trust is making real money. The next job: scale what already converts, acquire qualified followers who keep earning for months, and build the engine that compounds both.
Heidi and Chris,
First off, I really appreciate you reaching out to us. I'm genuinely excited about this opportunity and honored that you'd consider Cyclone to help take GGM to the next level.
I also want to be upfront...we've worked with some incredible consumer brands over the years, but we've never worked with a creator-led affiliate business quite like yours. I think there will be things we learn together, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.
That said, I have an incredible amount of confidence in our team. We've spent more than a decade building Cyclone around a pretty simple philosophy...do great work, be honest, take ownership, and care about our clients' businesses like they're our own. We don't hide behind reports or make excuses when something isn't working. We figure it out and keep pushing.
And that's what excites me about GGM. You've already built something really special, and I think there's a tremendous opportunity to build on that success. We have some big ideas, a talented team, and a genuine desire to help you get where you want to go.
I'll let the rest of the proposal speak to the strategy...but I wanted you both to know how much we'd value the opportunity to be part of what's next.
Let's go!
Tap any one to open it up.
Analyze a year of your affiliate data before we spend a dollar on media.
What are we actually looking at?+In plain English: we pull every piece of affiliate reporting we can get access to across Walmart, LTK and your other partners, and line it up by product, category, content type, retailer, commission rate, reversals and seasonality. The output is the initial economic model that shows which commercial opportunities are strongest, plus the testing priorities that fall out of it.
This isn't a static deliverable. We update it monthly as new data comes in and tests complete. Every paid decision we make from day one onward runs on this foundation.
The posts that get the most views aren't always the posts that make the most money. Without that baseline, every paid dollar is a guess, and this is a business too established to run on guesses.
Direct conversion on content that already works. Qualified audience acquisition that keeps earning through organic for months.
What are the two plays?+Play one: direct conversion. Put paid behind the Walmart content that's already converting organically. Run product-led variations against creator-led variations on the same post. Judge every test on commission generated, not cost per follower. The point is to pull more earnings out of the content you've already made.
Play two: qualified audience acquisition. Run paid specifically to attract followers who match your buyer profile: people whose shopping behavior fits what you earn commission on. Those followers then shop through your organic content for months after the ad spend has stopped. A $1.50 cost per qualified follower who earns commission across twelve months of your content delivers very different economics than a $1.50 cost per direct ad purchase.
The plays answer different questions. Direct conversion asks "how do I earn more from this post?" Audience acquisition asks "how do I build a more valuable audience that keeps earning?" Run together, they compound each other, and both get measured against the business's real commercial signals.
Test the shopping journeys that actually convert for your audience. Direct retailer, LTK, comment-to-DM where permitted.
What are we testing exactly?+In plain English: there are a few ways to move someone from "I saw a reel" to "I bought the thing," and each has friction and advantages. We build each path and test them against each other for your audience.
Direct retailer links take viewers straight to a product page. LTK consolidates the shopping context. Comment-to-DM (the format Kristen Niblett and others are running at scale) delivers the shopping link in a DM after a comment on an ad. These are formats worth building, testing, and letting your audience's conversion data pick the winners.
This step also covers the operational pieces that get overlooked: making sure links point to in-stock products, catching expired items, keeping the catalog current. Operationally boring, commercially important.
Once initial results tell us what's working, we expand. Bigger budgets, more categories, additional retailers where the data supports it.
What might expansion look like?+In plain English: this step is only possible after steps one through three have given us real data. We're not going to project the exact shape of expansion today, because the honest shape of it depends on what step one tells us.
What we expect to consider based on what emerges: scaling media behind the categories showing the strongest return, adding Amazon as a tested second retailer channel, expanding into new content formats, and widening the acquisition pool with lookalike audiences built from your highest-value buyer segments.
Timing note: we're inside the window where our standing rule with clients is to lock in for the rest of the retail year and avoid major account changes that could cause slippage. If we expand in Q4, it's deliberate and on your call. We can move fast when the data earns it. We'll also know when to wait.
Two connected growth opportunities sit inside this business. Immediate affiliate commissions from paid distribution on the content that already converts. And future commissions earned over the months that follow, as newly acquired followers continue engaging with and shopping through your organic content.
Illustrative, not a tracking promise. We don't claim every future purchase from a paid-acquired follower is cleanly measurable. Actual performance gets validated against available affiliate reporting and practical incrementality tests through the pilot.
Meta is where this business lives right now, and that's where the majority of pilot spend goes. We build Partnership Ads on top of your organic winners, run direct conversion campaigns on your Walmart content, and launch qualified audience acquisition campaigns in parallel. Hooks, formats, destinations and audiences all get tested, and budget shifts to what the data earns. TikTok sits in reserve for when it earns its way in.
We analyze available affiliate data across your retailers and partners, score it by product, category and content, and build the economic model that frames every paid decision. MER as a business-level view, commission-per-visitor and acquisition-side metrics on the paid campaigns we control, and a running picture of what the acquired audience is compounding through organic.
Your content stays yours. We don't take over the calendar and we don't ask you to film more. What we do: cut, caption and rework what you've already shot into paid-ready variations, approved in batches. For ad-hoc creative needs beyond that, we have an in-house team available. Significant new productions get scoped separately.
Where paid traffic lands matters more than people think. We build and test the destinations that actually convert for your audience: your LTK storefront, direct retailer product pages, and (where it earns) owned destinations. The path that produces the strongest commission-per-visitor is where paid traffic goes. We measure what we control directly and triangulate where retailer-side data is partial.
Reporting cadence built around how real decisions get made. Quarterly, we build the next quarter's plan with you (in person when it works, remote when it doesn't). Monthly, we recalibrate against the economic model. Weekly, a standing meeting catches anything moving. Reports focus on commercial signals, not vanity metrics.
The retainer covers the growth partnership as a whole, not a locked list of deliverables. The team reallocates effort toward whatever is producing the most commercial value in a given month. Significant new filming, major development, custom builds or third-party platform costs get scoped separately as they come up. Bring them to us when they do.
Pull affiliate and platform data, build the economic model, prioritize creative and products, and get the first paid campaigns live: direct conversion on your top-earning Walmart content and qualified audience acquisition in parallel. By day 30, paid is in-market and generating signal.
Evaluate performance by creative, product, retailer, destination and acquisition type. Cut what isn't working, double down on what is, and expand creative volume behind the formats pulling hardest. By day 60, the shape of what scales is clear.
Scale what proved itself. Build the quarter-ahead plan with you: budget levels, retailer expansion, additional categories to test. Day 90 ends with a running engine and a plan for Q2, not a question.
Three people own the day-to-day: Emily on the relationship, Eric on strategy, Joey on execution. The rest of the team supports the account as needs come up.
A flat retainer, a deliberately controlled initial media budget, and a transparent pathway for scaling spend as results earn it.
A marketing agency Andrew started in 2012. Thirteen years, a couple hundred clients across consumer brands, ecommerce and lifestyle categories. Named to the Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest-growing agencies in the country.
Creative is produced in house: photographers, videographers, designers and art directors. We're a Meta Business Partner, which gives our team structured access to Meta's partner resources.
Our deep experience is running paid media at scale for consumer brands and ecommerce clients, including creator-driven campaigns inside those programs. GGM's monetization model (revenue earned as affiliate commissions on retailer platforms rather than on your own site) is a distinct structure that benefits from careful measurement. The paid, creative, operational and commercial-analysis work is the same muscle we exercise every day.
Start at cyclonesocial.com/work for case studies with real numbers, and cyclonesocial.com/agency to meet the team. We're @cyclone_social on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.
We're also happy to put you on the phone with any brand we've worked with. Tell us which one on the call and we'll make the introduction.
90-day initial engagement at the agreed retainer. After that, we continue month-to-month at the same rate. Any change to pricing, media management structure or scope gets agreed in writing before it takes effect. Any media spend above the agreed initial test budget goes through your approval before launch.
Your content, audience, ad accounts and reporting assets stay in your name throughout. The contract covers confidentiality, content ownership and standard liability.
Not during the pilot. All media management for the initial 90-day engagement is included in the retainer. As budgets scale beyond the pilot range, a tiered percentage-based structure typically becomes the right model, which is standard at larger spend levels. If we get there, we agree the structure in writing before anything takes effect.
Disciplined paid media. Our paid team runs real volume across consumer brands and brings that discipline, analysis and testing cadence here.
Commercial analysis built in. Every paid decision is grounded in an economic model, not platform-reported conversions.
Creative iteration from in-house people. No outsourced white-label work.
Senior team per account. Director-level paid, creative and ops people on your account, not one generalist juggling everything.
We won't promise a specific return number. Anyone who does is guessing.
What we will do is run the first 90 days against a clear question: is paid distribution generating enough incremental commission (direct and through the compounding audience) to justify the investment? Our paid team runs real volume for consumer brands precisely because they're good at building toward a yes answer. If the data supports scaling, we scale with you. If a different approach is needed, we course-correct together. Either way, we come in expecting to build.
Reply and we send the agreement over.
One agreement, 90-day initial engagement, the clock starts.
Sixty minutes with both of you. We collect access, affiliate data and compliance confirmations.
First tests go live once access, approvals and tracking checks are complete. Two weeks is the target.
If you'd like to talk this through, email or either of the numbers below.
Scope for the 90-day pilot at the $6,800 monthly retainer. The team reallocates effort toward whatever is producing the most commercial value in a given month.
90-day initial engagement, then month-to-month. Any change to pricing, media management structure or scope gets agreed in writing before taking effect. Your content, audience, accounts and data stay yours. Standard confidentiality, content ownership and liability language applies.