The Fanjoy Playbook: How Creator-Led Brands Leverage Data to Drive Real-Time Growth Outcomes

The creator economy has exploded in stature over the past few years. At the leading edge of this cultural wave is Fanjoy, which partners with 40+ creators ranging from Addison Rae to The Try Guys to build, manage, and scale their branded eCommerce storefronts. 

We sat down with Chris Vaccarino, CEO and Founder at Fanjoy, to better understand how the company uses Tydo to help creators grow their audience, revenue, and personal brand. 

“At Fanjoy, we’re constantly analyzing information across 40+ digital channels. To successfully navigate these channels and amplify our creator partners, we need access to accurate, real-time data. That’s where Tydo comes in.”

The Early Days: Information Overload

Before onboarding with Tydo, the team at Fanjoy was stuck in an endless cycle of information overwhelm. They were using another tool that analyzed too much of the wrong data. Stefan’s team would often leave the tool without any actionable client takeaways. 

Google Analytics. Shopify. Data Studios. Lately. The Fanjoy team searched high and low for an automated tool that aggregated their eCom data across 40+ stores in a single place, so they could quickly make smart, informed decisions on behalf of their creators.

“Our data needed to be rapidly consolidated. Critically, it needed to be easily digestible by our internal teams as well as the creators that we partner with.”

Phase One: The Quest for Real-Time Data 

Due to the rapidly evolving nature of the digital creator economy itself, the Fanjoy team needed to be able to make big calls in a short window of time. At any second, they might have to pivot or change their strategy based on the constantly shifting needs of an influencer. 

Managing 40+ stores isn’t easy from a data perspective. Fanjoy works with a wide variety of creators and influencers, some are more well-established while others are in the early stages of launching their own brands. Across every client, Fanjoy tracks revenue, acquisition costs, and lifetime value. As storefronts increase in volume, more data sets are quickly needed.

For example, if Fanjoy partners with a new creator and is only just starting to run ads, they won’t look at acquisition costs for about two weeks. They know that search and social algorithms take time to yield actionable insights, so they’ll hold off on aggregating those data sets.

After pivoting away from antiquated data management tools, Fanjoy onboarded with Tydo and began to quickly leverage two core products: the multi-store dashboard to view and manage more detailed data across 40+ stores, and Report Cards to get a glimpse of performance sent to Stefan’s team on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Now, using Tydo’s platform, Fanjoy is able to clearly define the most relevant data points for stores of any size. With that real-time data in hand, they can quickly pivot and change strategy on the go. 

“With Tydo, our data is right there. It’s clean. I can just take that and run with it.” 

Phase Two: Navigating Rapid Feedback Loops

The timeframe in which Fanjoy can strategize, ideate, and execute for creators and influencers is much shorter than that of a traditional DTC brand. Because of these short feedback loops, data analytics become even more important to make informed decisions on the go.

For example, an influencer that Fanjoy works with can jump on social media, drop a new video, and immediately get 500K+ click throughs to a given link. In turn, the creator’s storefront will get overwhelmed by organic traffic, which completely changes the performance of existing paid campaigns. As a result, Fanjoy needs to be able to quickly tweak campaigns to course correct.

Imagine waking up to your brand’s Instagram having gained 1M followers overnight due to a creator’s newest post, story, or video about your company. In Fanjoy’s case, this is a reality. 

Due to common occurrences like these, Fanjoy focuses heavily on retargeting strategies across new paid acquisition channels. These retargeting campaigns are executed in compressed time windows due to the nature of the influencer space. Using Tydo, Fanjoy is able to aggregate performance data across each campaign in real-time and pivot ad strategies accordingly.

“That’s just part of the fun of working in this space. It moves insanely fast.”

Phase Three: Translating Insight into Action 

At its core, Fanjoy takes data inputs and translates them into revenue-driving outputs.

To accomplish this, the team will look at what ads are running, dive into what’s performing and what’s not, and alter course to execute accordingly. Every morning, Stefan uses Tydo’s Report Cards to quickly sync into 40+ store accounts and review core performance metrics.

This birds-eye view gives Stefan the ability to clearly communicate high-level performance to the brand managers in charge of individual client accounts.

In order to gauge outcomes and ideate on new campaigns, the two groups lean into this query framework together:

1. When did the last paid social campaign run?  
2. What was the core creative thematic focus?
3. How can we improve our creative assets?
4. What paid ad formats did we lean into?
5. What can we do similarly for creative?
6. What should we change for creative?
   

“If we choose to alter course, push a new ad campaign, and drive a positive ROI, that outcome is directly due to the fact that we have Tydo at our disposal.” 

Finding Clarity & Taking Action

At Fanjoy, every action taken by the team needs to be grounded in clear, real-time data.

Most creators and influencers that Fanjoy partners with don’t want to be in the weeds of the data. Rather, they prefer to have access to high-level revenue performance, paired with clarity around next steps to drive meaningful outcomes for their brand. 

Tydo acts as conduit, of sorts, that enables Fanjoy’s internal team to quickly dive deep on the performance data and zoom back out with actionable insights in hand. In turn, Fanjoy leverages this data to help their partners increase overall revenue streams. With that in mind, creators can continue to focus on connecting with their fans and reach new audiences. 

“We needed actionable data at our fingertips to inform critical decisions. With Tydo, we finally were able to gain access to those real-time insights.”