Building a Seven-Figure YouTube Influencer Growth Funnel

At Tiege Hanley, a subscription-led D2C men’s skincare brand co-founded by Aaron Marino (Alpha M) — the #1 men’s grooming influencer on YouTube — the company had begun to experience diminishing returns from its early-stage growth engine. Three years after launch, the Alpha M channel was showing signs of saturation, and the team was under pressure to diversify acquisition channels and stabilize CAC.

Initially, attempts to replicate YouTube’s success through paid social and in-stream ads struggled to achieve the same CPAs. Influencer integrations had become expensive, and traditional attribution failed to capture their true impact.

To address this, Thomas led a holistic overhaul of the influencer marketing system:

• Built a halo impact model quantifying the incremental lift in branded search, direct, and organic sales following each creator deployment.

• Developed ROI calibration frameworks to price creator partnerships proportionally to real revenue impact, not vanity metrics.

• Automated creator sourcing, outreach, and contract workflows to sign influencers in high-performing content verticals (dating advice, lifestyle, podcasts).

• Partnered with the content team to improve landing page conversion rates and design predictable posting schedules tied to audience engagement data. Instilled constant A/B testing with Intelligems + Replo Tech stack.

With these systems in place, Thomas re-positioned YouTube from a direct-response channel to a full-funnel demand-generation engine — scaling influencer budgets to seven figures while lowering total advertising cost as a percentage of revenue.

The result was sustained revenue growth, improved contribution margin, and record EBITA efficiency, driven by a scalable, data-backed YouTube creator ecosystem that became a durable competitive moat for the brand.