How TemplateMonster Engages with Influencers

The Dealspotr Marketplace is a leading platform that helps brands easily and affordably collaborate with over 3,000 influencers. We continue our blog series providing a peek into the merchants that use Dealspotr, sharing their influencer marketing strategies.  

We interviewed John Lucas, an affiliate manager for TemplateMonster, one of the leading digital product providers including website templates and plugins. In this Q&A, John shares some insights into TemplateMonster’s product line and the different ways they work with influencers in their affiliate program.

Hi John! Thanks for joining us. Please introduce yourself and TemplateMonster, we would love to hear your story.

Hi Jimmy! I am an affiliate manager for TemplateMonster and a Mentor of the Web Studios Catalog. We work with influencers directly and are happy to share our experience, advice, and opportunities with TemplateMonster.

TemplateMonster hasn’t always been a powerful giant as the internet community knows it today. Our team started as a small web design studio launched by a couple friends back in 2002. We knew almost nothing about website templates and the way they could be used for web projects around the globe. As the team continued to grow, experiment, and learn, we eventually settled on the idea of building a company to sell ready-made website templates, helping anyone easily launch a site of their own.  

How do you currently work with influencers?

We mainly work with influencers through our affiliate program where influencers earn commissions from template sales. Initially, the program was intended only for resellers but we realized the value of bloggers and influencers and started to work with them directly.

What types of influencers do you Mainly work with (bloggers, YouTubers, social media influencers)?

We primarily work with bloggers since there are plenty of interesting and helpful blogs about web design, web development, and just inspirational resources out there. We look for blogs that create informative, quality content with an authentic voice. One of our partners, CreativeTemplate, is a great example.

How do you approach potential influencer partners?

We try to take a hands-on approach to every partner. This starts with personalized outreach. Once they’re onboard, we have several standard tools to help influencers promote TemplateMonster in different ways, including:

1. Educational articles, guides, and manuals. Here is an example on Visme.
2. Standard roundups featuring different templates like Ben Sibley of CompeteThemes.
3. Non-standard roundups. They may come in handy to web designers, marketers, and just people interested in beautiful design. Here is a good example on BootstrapBay.
4. Banner ads. We have both standard and custom banners for use on their blog. 

Do you also work with social media influencers?

We try to :) We actually have a special program for that - Social Stock. Essentially, influencers sign up and get 10% off promo code to share with their followers. As their personal code gets used, they earn cool prizes including a $100 Paypal credit, an iPad, and even a Tesla (if they generate over 10,000 uses).

We provide different tools to help social influencers promote TemplateMonster and drive conversions. These include email templates, status updates, and even memes. 

We recently launched a new tool to help simplify the influencers’ lives, making sharing on Facebook much easier and quicker. It’s integrated into the tools page of their profile and shares their unique promo code to all their followers with just one click. 

What about YouTubers?

YouTube is a more interesting story :) It’s always exciting to actually hear customers’ feedback. We invite enthusiastic YouTubers to our affiliate program and encourage them to shoot informative videos, adding their affiliate link to the video description.

Here is an example video from Ferdy Korpershoek reviewing Monstroid 2.

What Are Your Main pain points when working with influencers? 

There are two main challenges we struggle with when searching for influencers. First, we do tons of outreach to influencers and only hear back from a few, even with follow ups. While we understand that not all influencers are always open to new opportunities, it can be frustrating to not get a response of any kind. 

Secondly, many influencers are only interested in a large up-front fee and are not even willing to explore performance based partnerships. For the right influencer, an affiliate partnership will almost always pay off more in the long-run. 

If you would like to stay connected with TemplateMonster, you can follow them online at Dealspotr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.  

The Dealspotr Marketplace is a leading influencer marketing platform that better connects merchants with influencers and shoppers. Are you a retailer? Claim your page on Dealspotr to collaborate with over 3,000 influencers, promote exclusive deals, and interact socially with over 3M shoppers.

If you would like more information on the Influencer Marketplace, claiming your merchant page, or to how to get featured on our blog, please feel free to reach me at jimmy@dealspotr.com.