The Rise of Partner-Led Marketing

Impact.com is a commerce partnership management platform that is increasingly bullish on partner-led marketing, which is the development of communities around brands to drive revenue.

Best Buy is a notable success in this endeavor for Impact.com but the platform also welcomed 700 new clients to its customer portfolio, including New Balance, Hydrojug, and Monzo. Globally, the platform serves more than 4,500 brands.

In April, Best Buy announced the launch of Best Buy Storefronts, powered by impact.com, demonstrating how brands are expanding their influencer strategy in innovative ways. These Storefronts offer a curated shopping experience where customers can shop from their favorite creators and influencers.

The global creator market alone is expected to reach over $32 billion this year, turbo-charging partner-led marketing.

impact.com in Q1 2025 launched a slew of innovations across its Creator, Advocate, and Performance products, designed to make partnership management more seamless and effective for brands, creators, and affiliates.

Cristy Ebert Garcia, Chief Marketing Officer, Impact.com, sat down with StreetFight to talk more in-depth about the company and its work.

What is partner-led marketing?

Partnerships are transforming how brands connect, grow, and build trust with their audiences. They’re scaling customer acquisition, driving revenue, and delivering results that traditional methods can’t match. We know this because we see it—every single day on our platform. The brands leaning in are outpacing their competition, reaching audiences more authentically, and turning trust into growth. Partnerships aren’t just another marketing tactic—they’re the future of marketing. Today’s consumers don’t respond to ads—they actively seek out recommendations, reviews, and content from sources they trust, and this behavioral shift is driving brands to invest in partnerships with creators, publishers, and other advocates who can influence purchase decisions more credibly. Partnerships aren’t just another marketing tactic—they’re the future of marketing.

How does Impact.com work with brands?

Impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, Impact empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform.

As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, mpact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 4,500 global brands—including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, Fanatics, and Levi’s—rely on us to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Tell our readers about Best Buy Storefronts. How did you come up with the idea?

Best Buy’s Storefronts leverages Impact.com’s purpose-built technology, which powers customized, creator-guided shopping experiences for the world’s leading brands and is the foundation for companies’ modern creator and influencer strategy. This customized solution allows brands to significantly scale revenue growth by forging direct relationships with creators, enabling them to build customized storefronts and shoppable posts they promote to their audience.

The technology was initially created and driven by market demand. We were repeatedly hearing from some of our biggest brands about the need to create a community of creators and have it be fully branded and feel unique, rather than just another network or platform. We worked very closely with the first few brands to build and launch the product. Now, several large retailers also leverage this including Walmart, Target, HSN, Foot Locker, and more.

In Q1 2025, Impact.com launched innovations across its Creator, Advocate, and Performance products. Can you describe how each of these work?

Impact.com’s Performance solution helps businesses manage and optimize all types of partnerships, including affiliates, content publishers, news sites and creators, through every stage of the life cycle. Brands can discover and engage with new partners to reach their target audiences, including customers, and contract with partners that fit their objectives effectively.

With Impact.com, brands can capture all customer touchpoints across partners, channels, and devices with universal tracking, reward the right partners using flexible attribution rules, and align objectives through insightful program data. They can also generate and manage any contract with any type of partner, launch, grow and monitor programs and campaigns through robust task management, and streamline invoicing, payments, and tax documentation.

Creator is an influencer marketing platform that allows advertisers to discover, create, manage and scale full-funnel influencer marketing programs from a single interface.

The comprehensive platform helps simplify influencer marketing for seamless creator partnerships. Brands can connect with vetted creators through our marketplace and search tools, discover influencers already engaging the brand, and boost reach and campaign efficiency with end-to-end services including campaign management, contracting and payment and tracking and analyzing performance.

Advocate is a customizable customer referral marketing solution that empowers brands to engage their customers effectively with tailored offers. With custom and highly engaging referral programs that fit their unique business needs, brands can build flexible, fully automated referral marketing programs that are straightforward to manage and easy for their customers to use. Brands can set unique rules and conditions and create custom events. They can choose from multiple incentives, decide whom to reward and when, and for what behavior. They can also track, monitor, and adjust as needed by pulling reports directly from the analytics dashboard to measure the program’s performance, monitor engagement, revenue generated, and more. They also save valuable time by automating everything, from engaging the advocate and the referred person to instantly rewarding both parties.

Also published in: Street Fight Mag