Did you know that eight in every ten businesses use some form of affiliate marketing to help promote their business? If you want your business to grow in the coming year, it might be the perfect strategy for you.
If the term is familiar, but you aren’t sure about the details, read on.
We’ll reveal all you need to know about affiliate marketing, including its benefits. Plus, we’ll share ideas on the affiliate marketing strategies you can employ to help your brand.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is about using other people and businesses to promote your brand on your behalf. In exchange, you provide performance-based rewards such as payment for each new referral.
The technical way of doing this is through a tracking link or code embedded in the affiliate’s promotion (either on their website or via ads or social media). When that code tracks a sale, the affiliate marketer receives a commission.
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Is affiliate marketing a valuable strategy for your business? Let’s examine some of the benefits.
Low Upfront Cost
Affiliate marketing is cost-effective. You only pay your affiliate the commission once you’ve secured a sale. So the upfront cost is minimal and won’t give you a cash-flow problem.
It’s Scalable
You have the potential to scale any affiliate marketing program by recruiting more affiliates to your offer, and you can do that without any upfront investment.
Brand Awareness
Imagine hundreds of websites and influencers creating buzz about your new product. That’s the power of affiliate marketing, which is an effective method of boosting brand awareness.
Affiliate marketing drives the visibility of your product and business. It’s decentralized, which means you’ll get seen in different corners of the internet rather than trying to spread awareness via one single ad campaign.
You may also secure top influencers to act as affiliates for your product. High-profile online influencers with millions of followers can turn an unknown brand into the next big thing.
It’s Targeted
When you start an affiliate marketing campaign, you can specify which methods affiliates can use to generate sales for your brand.
And many affiliate platforms have granular search options to help the right affiliates find you based on your niche and product types. It means you can target the right audience using methods that work for your business.
Reach
By joining an affiliate marketing program, you’re effectively hiring tens or hundreds of salespeople from around the globe. It will get your brand in front of a broader audience and improve your reach.
Improved ROI
Affiliate marketing is data-driven. You can capture information on your campaigns’ performance and use that to drive improvements. This optimization style will help your business improve its ROI (Return on Investment).
Moreover, many affiliate marketing platforms offer a suite of reporting and analytics via their central dashboard when you log on as a brand.
Different Types of Affiliate Marketing
As a brand, you can set the types of affiliate marketing you allow for your business. Doing so will help you keep control over how affiliates promote your brand online. Here are some of the most common types.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Pay-per-click advertising is where you pay a fee each time your ad is clicked.
In the case of affiliate marketing, it will be your affiliate who runs these ads. If you use this approach, you’ll need to provide brand guidelines and advertising rules (for example, to avoid the ads making wild claims).
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
Cost per acquisition means you pay an affiliate when they bring you a new “acquisition,” which could mean a sale, lead, or sign-up for a trial. This is the most common model used on affiliate network platforms.
SEO
SEO refers to ranking on page one of Google or Bing for your preferred keywords.
However, affiliates can rank for keywords and phrases to drive traffic to their website, promote your content, and refer that traffic to you. It’s a method to get more traffic from Google if you struggle with SEO.
Content Marketing and Blogging
Many bloggers use affiliate marketing as an income stream. They will typically create some content and add an affiliate link to that article.
Consider having 100+ articles about your brand, all linking back to your website, and you can begin to see how powerful this is.
Email Marketing
You can use affiliate marketing to build your email list by driving affiliate traffic to a landing page. You can also pay to get your brand or product onto other people’s email lists.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is about hiring people with thousands of followers on social media or YouTube. You can get them to promote your product on their channel in exchange for a commission for each sale.
Social Media Marketing
You can hire affiliates who run organic promotions on their social media accounts. This is similar to influencer marketing, but you aren’t selecting people with high follower counts.
Social Media Advertising
Affiliates can run ads on your behalf on one or more social media channels. The most popular platforms for social media ads include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.
Referrals and Partnerships
Some affiliates act as equal partners, which tends to be other brands.
For example, you could buy a product from a store. The purchase confirmation email might include an offer for another brand in a similar niche (e.g., you buy pet insurance and get a recommendation for a pet food brand).
Contextual Advertising
Contextual ads are those sponsored ads you sometimes see at the bottom of articles. They often look like additional articles except for a small label telling you they are sponsored.
This is an increasingly popular form of advertising, so it’s worth considering this as part of your affiliate marketing strategy. Since the ads connect to articles, you’ll want to have strict editorial rules about the content.
How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Grow Your Business
The best way to succeed with affiliate marketing is to have a clear strategy. That means focusing on one or two affiliate marketing ideas best suited to your business.
Growth Using CPA (Affiliate) Networks
Affiliate networks might be a good starting point if you’re brand new to affiliate marketing.
An affiliate network is a business that connects brands with affiliates. You can join one or many networks and access thousands of affiliates for your brand.
The upside is that it is a quick and easy way to find affiliates. The downside is that you’ll compete against other brands (and possibly your main competitors) for those affiliates.
Grow an Email List
An excellent long-term growth strategy is to use affiliates to help you grow your email list by incentivizing them to send people to your landing page.
You’ll pay for each lead, but once someone is on your email list, you can send them as many promotions as you like.
Grow Using a Branded Referral Program
If you have existing customers, you can set up a branded referral program as a quick and straightforward affiliate model.
A branded referral program incentivizes existing customers to share links to your website with friends or family. You can reward them with a discount on future purchases or a gift.
Grow Via Partnership Outreach
There will be other businesses in a similar niche to you who are marketing to a similar customer. While you aren’t competitors, you can form a partnership and promote each other’s brand in exchange for a commission.
For this type of affiliate marketing, you’ll need to run an outreach campaign to contact business owners who fit that category of a potential affiliate partner.
Grow Via Influencer Outreach
If you want to try using influencers for affiliate marketing, there are two ways you can do that. Your first option is to use an influencer network that will help you connect with the right influencer.
However, since influencers have sizeable social media accounts, you can approach an influencer directly and ask if they want to work with your brand.
Grow Using Pre-Written Affiliate Content
One helpful way to entice more affiliates to work with your brand is to make their marketing job easy. You can do that by providing marketing assets for your campaigns.
That could include pre-written blog posts, ad graphics, and banner designs. Some more prominent brands even offer affiliate marketing training to help their affiliates promote their company effectively.
Grow With a Competition Campaign
If you haven’t used affiliate marketing before and aren’t sure where to start, here’s a simple idea. Create a contest and offer your flagship product or service as the star prize.
Ask people to enter by submitting their email addresses and use this to grow your subscriber list.
Send this competition to your affiliates and get them to market on your behalf. For extra momentum, create an affiliate competition and award a cash prize to the affiliate that brings in the highest number of email leads.
Growing Your Business With Affiliate Marketing
As you can see, there is more than one side to affiliate marketing. There are plenty of strategies and ideas, so it’s perfect for any brand, whatever your digital marketing goals.
