Businesses are always looking for winning tactics that will help them to increase brand awareness and accomplish other business goals as well. And in this case, affiliate marketing may be the correct answer for them. But first, let’s start defining what it is.
Affiliate marketing is a collaboration between a business and affiliates, where an affiliate promotes a brand’s products and solutions and earns a commission.
Affiliate marketing is a win-win strategy, as two sides of each other grow and prosper.
The affiliate, who can be any blogger or influencer, recommends products or services to their audience and earns money for bringing leads and sales. Meanwhile, businesses increase brand awareness and increase sales thanks to affiliates.
Main Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Your Business
Effective affiliate marketing is a long cycle that starts when a company builds an affiliate marketing program and invites content creators to join it. And then affiliate links or promo codes when mentioning the products in their online audience. And when customers believe that those products and solutions can add value to their lives and make a purchase, affiliates earn money.
When done successfully, an affiliate program can offer businesses various advantages. Let’s dive into the benefits of affiliate programs for all kinds of businesses:
Boosts brand awareness
Typically, the right affiliate has an audience that matches your business’ target market. Therefore, thanks to effective partnerships and winning marketing strategies, businesses can increase lead generation and grow their market.
Drives traffic to your website
When affiliates share a link to of product page or landing page, as a result, they bring high-converting traffic to the business’ website.
Builds trust with potential customers
Customers are much more likely to trust affiliates’ recommendations more than branded advertising, and as a result, affiliate programs will influence their buying decision.
Almost risk-free and cost-effective tactic
If your company manages you to build an effective affiliate program, it will be profitable for your business. The reason is you pay affiliates to bring customers who are going to purchase your product and services.
Increases sales
The ultimate goal of any kind of marketing campaign is boosting sales, and by building successful affiliate marketing campaigns, companies can grow their sales. Alongside affiliate programs, businesses can increase their sales by working with an affordable Ecommerce PPC Agency and building effective ad campaigns.
8 Stages to Use Affiliate Marketing for Your Business
Effective affiliate marketing can be beneficial for different types and sizes of businesses. But companies should prepare a strategy and have a series of actions that they should follow to create winning affiliate marketing programs.
Define your program’s main goals
Like in the case of building all marketing programs, it’s a great idea to start by setting goals for your affiliate program. Without having clear and measurable goals, you won’t have an idea of what direction your affiliate program is going.
First, you’ll need to define what kind of audience you want to reach. Basically, you should write down all the targeted customers’ characteristics and decide what type of affiliates can successfully attract them. Also, define how an affiliate should promote your product through the SMS marketing campaign or social media strategies.
In the next step, decide how much revenue you expect during a specific time. Have a
complete understanding of goals about other metrics as well. It includes how much for conversion and the impression you expect from an affiliate. In that matter, without measurable objectives, it’ll be difficult to track the success of your affiliate program. Therefore as important to define, you should implement monolithic architectures or choose microservices-based architecture; it is also vital to set affiliate marketing goals for promoting your particular software.
Design your affiliate program structure
After setting goals, in the next step, you should build a perfect affiliate program structure. I that will help successfully accomplish your goals and will navigate you in the right direction. Basically, it is the structure of the main aspects of your affiliate program. In ways, you should define methods and tactics to find and attract affiliates.
The critical question is to set a budget and figure out how many affiliates your company can afford.
Your structure should also include a timeline for when your company should start an affiliate program and how much time you will consider for onboarding and managing affiliates.
In addition to that, the crucial step is designing an affiliate program policy and rules for your employees. But also, you need to figure out what kind of terms and conditions your company will suggest to the affiliates. Also, prepare the contract affiliates will sign.
Last but not least, you need to identify your program’s unique selling point. It will differentiate it from competitors’ programs and give it a competitive advantage.
Offer a competitive commission rate
In the next stage, you should make one of the most crucial decisions. It’s about finding a competitive affiliate commission rate you’ll offer. It’s core for building a profitable affiliate program for any kind of business.
Your job is to find a commission rate that will attract new affiliates but won’t be harmful to your company budget․ Finding this balance plays a huge factor in building a great affiliate program.
Decide whether your company will pay a set amount for each sale or a percentage of each sale affiliates bring. Decide how much your company can pay affiliates and also calculate customer lifetime value, which indicates how much profit a customer brings. In addition to this, you need to find out what commission rate your competitors suggest. After having all this data, you can make an informed decision and find the right commission rate.
In most cases, communication between affiliates and businesses about payment happens through emails. Therefore it is vital to implement the DMARC policy and take necessary measures to prioritize email security. This way, you can keep sensitive data safe from malicious attacks.
Analyze your competitors’ affiliate programs
The great idea is to analyze not only the commission strategy of your competitors but their whole affiliate program. When you start to build your business strategies, you certainly do a competitor analysis. In case, researching their affiliate programs as well should be your priority. Dive into the great affiliate programs in your niche. Also, find affiliate programs from businesses that aren’t selling similar products that have the same targeted audience.
There are several factors that you should find out about the competitor’s programs. Your job is to discover how each brand finds its affiliates and how they pay them. Determine to they have an affiliate marketing team that recruits affiliates and whether you need to use an affiliate network.
Also, you have to know that channels affiliates use to promote business products and solutions. In addition to that, discover promotional and branding resources each brand provides to affiliates. And what kind of communication they maintain with their affiliates.
Find perfect affiliates
The next step after setting goals and structure, and analyzing competitors’ programs, is starting to find the right affiliates. Make a list of high-qualified affiliates and start to decide on a set of actions you need to follow to find them. There are several steps you should take in this stage:
✔ Examine their social media profiles and websites
✔ Check engagement of their content
✔ Ensure that you have a positive reputation
✔ Check their strategy for promoting your products and solutions
✔ Analyze their history, including sales results they’ve brought for companies that partnered with.
After building a list of perfect affiliates, the next stage is to reach out to them. This message should include what benefits the affiliate can join the program and briefly summarize the affiliate’s responsibilities.
Promote your affiliate program
After having a list of the right affiliates for your business, the next step you should spread the word about your program and promote it. There are a few channels to do it, so let’s dive into it.
Share on social media channels
There is a great opportunity for affiliates to use different social media channels as professional platforms. So don’t miss a chance to promote your affiliate program on your social media pages. You need to create high-quality content that highlights the value of your program. Use visual elements to make your content more appealing and captivating. This way, you can attract potential affiliates.
Another way to grab their attention is to add affiliate programs’ links in your social media bio. Lastly, think about creating social media carousel ads highlighting your program’s benefits for a social media audience.
Use opportunities that email marketing gives
Share with your email recipients about the affiliate program and give them reasons to join. Create a promotional email that dedicates your affiliate program and tells about the best side of your program. Or, in your weakly newsletter, you can include a separate segment about it. Moreover, you can build a B2B email marketing campaign and promote both your B2B business and your affiliate program to your email leads.
Promote on your website
There is a great chance that people who are visiting your website are interested in your brand, so they are likely to join your affiliate program. You have to create a landing page that highlights the benefits of joining your affiliate program. Your website content should build credibility and authority for your brand so affiliates look forward to working with you.
The beneficial idea is to promote your affiliate program on website pages that drive your high traffic and the most popular blog posts.
Implement SEO tactics
One of your main goals is probably to increase the visibility of the affiliate landing page. Take the essential steps to optimize your page. Start the process by finding targeted keywords and using them organically. Don’t forget to make those page mobile friendly to increase website traffic. In addition to this, ensure that you take the necessary steps to improve page speed.
Affiliate networks
Affiliate networks also can be an excellent opportunity to advertise your program, as they are the unique bridge between brands and affiliates. You can check affiliate forums and groups where affiliates try to find programs relevant to their niches and join them.
Keep your affiliates motivated and support them
Building strong relationships with affiliates is the backbone of affiliate programs’ success. By supporting affiliates during this journey, you can help them bring more clicks and conversions.
There are several ways you keep them motivated:
✔ Suggest them free products and new product samples.
✔ Offet incentive bonuses for great performance
✔ Share tips and helpful content and always give them feedback
✔ Prioritize good communication and send surveys asking for their feedback
Always keep encouraging and supporting them. Your employees should be ready to provide ongoing support to your affiliates. They will send webinars, graphics, and social media content that can be helpful.
And if affiliates feel you value their job, essentially, they become a brand ambassador and will continue to recommend your products and solutions.
Measure the affiliate program’s efficiency
Even after you launch your affiliate program, your job doesn’t stop there. Businesses need to regularly track their success. Ensure them you achieve the goals you set while planning your program. Similar to the process of referral tracking, which helps to understand referral programs’ effectiveness, marketers should also analyze their affiliate marketing efforts.
Companies need to track the following KPIs:
✔ amount of revenue
✔ conversion rates
✔ unique sales
✔ revenue by affiliate:
You should track these KPIs to see the ROI of your program. Without tracking measurable objectives, it’ll be difficult to know how successful your affiliate program actually is and whether it was a good return on your investment. If your program isn’t meeting KPI that we discussed, you may be to change the structure of your program and make other necessary changes.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a great opportunity for businesses regardless of their type and size. Affiliate marketing is a great tactic to increase sales and is incredibly beneficial to both brands and affiliate marketers, it is done strategically. Here we have discussed the main advantages of an affiliate program. Also, define essential stages for building an excellent affiliate marketing program. Following those steps, you can skyrocket your business and accomplish different kinds of objectives as well.
