Major brands spend millions securing rights to influencer content, then use it once. This costly inefficiency caught Aliza Freud’s attention back when influencer marketing was still called “blogger outreach”—and it became the foundation for a business model now serving clients like Hershey’s, Prudential, and Coca-Cola.

Founded in 2008, SheSpeaks began as a consumer research company helping brands understand female consumers. The company’s direction changed when Aliza noticed many research panel participants were bloggers—early influencers—whose opinions could do more than just inform product development.

“Companies are negotiating for the rights to use content in other places, but then they’re not using it,” Aliza explains. “If a brand has good content, they should use it in paid social, organically on their channels, in programmatic advertising, on their owned sites, and on their retail partners. They’re paying for these rights but leaving value on the table, and it’s such a waste.”

This observation—that high-quality creator content was being siloed and abandoned despite brands having paid for broader usage rights—led to SheSpeaks’ development of a content amplification strategy. Today, with a community of 250,000 predominantly female influencers, the company has positioned itself as an efficiency specialist in the creator economy.

As a former VP of Global Marketing and Brand Management at American Express, Aliza understands the true value proposition for brands—reaching audiences efficiently with content that resonates and drives action.

SheSpeaks’ method identifies top-performing organic creator content and strategically amplifies it across multiple channels, including paid social, programmatic advertising, and retail media platforms. The goal is to extract maximum value from every piece of creator content by strategically placing it where it can drive awareness, engagement, and, ultimately, sales.

Extensions: InfluenCTV™ and Sampling+™

As SheSpeaks continues to identify untapped channels for creator content, it has developed practical extensions of its content maximization strategy. 

One such offering is InfluenCTV™, which brings creator content to Connected TV advertising—a medium traditionally dominated by high-cost, studio-produced commercials.

“It was so clear to me that CTV would be a great opportunity to show good video content from an influencer,” Aliza explains. “Content that tells you what the product is, why it’s great, how the influencer uses it, and why they love it, and then has a call to action where you can click and go buy it.”

This approach stems from Aliza’s experience at American Express, where she worked on DirectTV marketing. “We’d film this spot, it would cost a ton of money to film it, and then you would push it,” she recalls, contrasting it with InfluenCTV™, with which SheSpeaks delivers comparable quality at lower production costs while maintaining the genuine feel that makes creator content effective.

The second service that exemplifies SheSpeaks’ integrated approach is their Sampling+™ program. Recognizing that “the number one thing that converts is a positive experience with the product,” SheSpeaks combined two powerful marketing tactics: influencer recommendations and direct product sampling.

“What if we could allow the influencers to talk about what they loved and then offer their audience who were getting interested in the product the chance to sample it?” Aliza explains. This combination, she adds, creates a practical conversion path from awareness through consideration to trial, ultimately driving purchasing decisions.

Results Through Content Optimization

For SheSpeaks and its clients, content maximization translates to improving performance, reflecting Aliza’s experience managing a portfolio of products at American Express before founding SheSpeaks.

“Having worked in marketing prior to doing this and having had to manage a portfolio of products in my old job, marketing has to be trackable and it has to be measurable,” Aliza emphasizes. “If you can’t measure and you can’t really show what the value or impact is of what you’re doing, what are you doing? It’s a waste of money.”

The Sampling+™ program demonstrates these outcomes. “Every single time we offer it, we have to stop the request because we run out of the samples so fast,” Aliza reveals. “We’re doing brand lift studies as part of it. We’re doing sales lift studies, and the results are unbelievable.”

A recent campaign for a food brand with underperforming flavor variants highlights the approach’s effectiveness. “The brand was able to show sales lifts for those flavors that had been stuck,” Aliza explains. “By giving people the chance to try these flavors that maybe they wouldn’t have considered because they aren’t intuitively American flavors that they would buy, they were able to really grow the brand portfolio.”

Beyond sampling, Aliza notes that SheSpeaks’ overall content maximization strategy creates efficiencies that benefit both brands and creators. The creator receives fair compensation for their work, while the brand extracts more value from that same content investment by strategically deploying it across multiple channels and formats.

Rethinking Influencer Strategy

SheSpeaks’ approach to content maximization also challenges another industry practice: the overvaluation of follower counts. Rather than focusing exclusively on reach, Aliza advocates for prioritizing content quality and creator fit regardless of audience size.

“The approach of working with the biggest influencers, like the largest following, is something that is overused,” Aliza argues. “It’s very expensive, and I think you get a lot more value from working with people who may not be as large in their audience size but are really good at creating content.”

This perspective aligns with SheSpeaks’ content maximization strategy. Aliza notes that when excellent content from micro- and mid-tier creators is properly amplified through paid channels, it can outperform celebrity endorsements at a fraction of the cost.

“Just because you’re a celebrity and you have a large audience doesn’t mean you’re going to get great engagement,” Aliza observes. “The better approach is you get good content and you get that in front of a large enough audience, the influencer’s audience, but then you take it and then you do that paid distribution that’s highly targeted.”

Rather than focusing exclusively on follower numbers, the company evaluates potential creators based on their ability to produce engaging content that resonates with specific target audiences across multiple distribution channels.

“We work with people who are good at creating content,” Aliza explains. “They understand their audience and focus on why the product is going to make their audience’s life better, more interesting, all of those things. That’s the thing that works.”

Content Maximization

As a 2x Inc. 5000 fastest-growing company, SheSpeaks continues to improve content optimization in the creator economy. Aliza, who hosts the “Women of Influence” podcast, sees untapped potential in more strategic content utilization.

“The things that I would keep are the focus on measurement,” Aliza says when discussing changes in influencer marketing. “That has to be the thing. You can’t do marketing that isn’t trackable and measurable.”

But she remains frustrated by the widespread inefficiency of brands paying for content rights without fully utilizing them. “You still get so many brands who think that it’s fine to just engage influencers, have them post organically, and then that’s it. Like, ‘Oh, great, we did it.’ No, there’s so much more you can do with that content.”

Aliza envisions a future where creator content is systematically optimized across all possible touchpoints. “Are you using it on your owned and operated sites? Are you using it on your retail partner sites? Have you put it on your Amazon page? Have you put it on your Walmart page? If a brand has good content, they should use it everywhere they care about conversion.”

She points out that this thorough approach maximizes ROI for brands and better respects the value creators bring to the marketing ecosystem. As someone who founded SheSpeaks with the mission of “building a stage for influencers and women in particular,” Aliza remains focused on ensuring creators can “be heard and monetize what they’ve built.”

“I am a big believer in the voice of the customer. I always have been,” Aliza concludes. “What influencer marketing does is it bottles the voice of the customer in a way that then reaches scale. That’s the magic and beauty of the space we get to work in.”