Affiliate marketing has become one of the most successful strategies used by entrepreneurs today to drive traffic and increase sales in their businesses. The best thing about affiliate marketing is the risk is low and the benefits are high. You reward affiliates when the customer converts which means everybody is benefitting. Affiliate marketing is a performance based, highly cost-friendly lead generation tactic.
How appealing is that?
Entrepreneurs and business owners using affiliate marketing to grow their businesses will tell you that affiliate marketing drives sales and increases revenue streams. Before we take a look at the bet affiliate marketing strategies to improve your business growth, you need to understand what affiliate marketing entails.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of outsourced marketing, whereby you hire affiliates and pay them to bring customers to your business. Affiliates help to drive visitors to your website and make a purchase. Over the past few years, Google has recorded an increased number of affiliate marketing searches online. This shows that people have realised the importance of affiliate marketing programmes for their business to succeed. It is important to mention that affiliate marketing should not be confused with referral programs.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Once you have partnered with an affiliate, they are assigned a tracking URL. This ensures you can effectively track which members are consistent in driving traffic to your website.
Affiliates can promote your product in various ways like YouTube videos for your product with a link bearing the affiliate ID attached to it, blog post, email marketing, reviewing products, or via paid traffic like Google Ads. It is up to you to direct how they promote it.
During my time of practicing affiliate marketing in my business, I have experienced various benefits.
Some of the advantages associated with affiliate marketing include:
You can determine your cost per acquisition. This particular aspect will help you know if your affiliate marketing partnerships are making an effective impact on your profit margins. This is vital in understanding if you are employing the right affiliate marketing strategies.
You only pay for results. Business-friendly right? You can be confident you are not wasting money when you focus on affiliate marketing to promote your products. This cannot be said for all types of marketing.
If you are finding certain affiliates a bit unethical and shady; it is simple to remove them from your brand. This is a major benefit as there are none of the complications you would have with firing a direct employee.
Affiliates can be good at reaching specific niches you may have been struggling to reach as well as creating a loyal customer base. The bright side is, someone wouldn’t spend time and money signing up to be an affiliate knowing that they will not be able to drive your sales. An affiliate understands his/her work.
The Main Affiliate Marketing Strategies To See your Business Elevate To Another Level
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1. Have The Right Affiliates On Board
The main goal here is to have affiliates who will yield maximum conversions with minimum effort. Affiliate marketing will give you the ability to maximize the power of influence to generate more buyers or get people to purchase from you. By working with affiliates, you are able to influence purchasers buying decisions. You should choose wisely to ensure that you will be working with an individual who has the expertise to engage an audience that would be interested in your products.
When choosing affiliates to help you promote your product, you should consider some of the attributes they ought to possess. You have to check if they have a good affinity with their daily audience, if their audience is interested in the products you deal with, and also if they have; significant views, excellent site ranking, a good following, engagement, and command. This is all done to ensure that you are not wasting your time.
2. Improve Sales with Discount Codes, Deals and Promotions
Leveraging discounts and promotions is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies to boost your sales online. This is a major opportunity because people are always looking for ways to save money whenever they make purchases. Utilising discounts and promotions with affiliates on your websites can see traffic increase significantly and your business can experience a large increase in sales. A significant number of organisations employ these strategies to attract potential clients to their products and services. Research shows that promoting discounts with affiliate marketing in the travel, beauty and food industries have the biggest impact.
3. Take Advantage of Niche Influencers
Photo by Austin Distel via Unsplash
Influencer marketing has seen immense growth over the past years. For this reason, many social media influencers are focusing their efforts into becoming mainstream ambassadors. Many businesses and brands are quickly learning the art of utilizing source referral successfully. This success of using source referral strategies is attributed to influencers possessing more legitimate relationships with their broad base of followers than any brand possibly could. The relationship that influencers have built with consumers can means they can easily promote products successfully, turning their followers into your clients or potential clients.
The main difference between coupon sites and influencers is, most of the individuals involved in influencer marketing demand monetary compensation. This is nothing to worry about as the right influencer will easily increase sales. However, it is essential that you work with an influencer that suits your brand and products. You should ensure certain criteria is met before you decide to work with an influencer; check whether their followership is legit and whether your products will be of interest to them. You need to apply a logical approach when utilising influencer marketing.
4. Create Your Own Affiliate Network
You can build your own affiliate network rather than engaging various different networks. Recruiting your first affiliates could be challenging but expanding your affiliate network is not as hard as it might sound. It’s a relatively easy task. A tactical approach should be employed to attract affiliates. How? Make information available explaining what they are required to do, how it works, and how much commission you will pay to your potential affiliates.
Another method of encouraging affiliates to join your network is to let your affiliates recruit sub-affiliates and offer them a commission on every sale their sub-affiliates make. Take time to evaluate your affiliates’ performance, analyse the long term value of the clients they drive to your brand, and also reward your affiliates’ loyalty. One of the most effective ways to reward them is by offering a slightly higher commission in the future. These affiliate marketing strategies can help you build a robust affiliate network and encourage affiliates to give their all.
5. Promote Via Multiple Sources
It is almost impossible to rely on limited sources like influencer marketing or coupon sites to push forward your affiliate marketing plan. To maintain a competitive advantage, you have to dig deep and explore multiple sources. Nowadays, it is easy to find other platforms to promote your brand. Some of them include;
Email marketing – It is possible to generate large conversions if an affiliate has a broad base of email subscribers in your related specific niche.
Product review blogs- According to research, product review blogs are the most effective in gaining potential customers. This is a no brainer for a brand looking to expand it’s customer base.
YouTube videos– Featuring your products on popular YouTube channels can help your brand to grow it’s following substantially.
Webinars- This is also another effective way of marketing your product. This is because the webinar’s audience really trust the webinar’s host opinions and recommendations.
6. Utilize Your Product Pages for Conversions
A significant number of brands invest in affiliate marketing and sit back to watch their affiliates generate conversions and drive sales. This is a big mistake and will limit the success of your affiliate marketing efforts. Once an affiliate drives interested clients to your product pages, it’s your job to ensure that the pages are designed to a high standard. If necessary, employ a professional developer to design the pages to make it simple for consumers to buy your goods or services once they are at your site.
Generating more sales can only be made possible by delivering an excellent customer experience. This can be attained by optimizing your product pages with images and relevant information. Other important point to remember with landing pages are:
– Customer reviews should be featured to gain customer trust
– Provide sufficient product information to customers
– Have a site that loads fast.
– Display high-quality photos on your products to entice visitors among others
Conclusion
This article has outlined the strategies that businesses and brands can use to make affiliate marketing work for them and increase profits. When you are new to affiliate marketing , it is a good idea to get a grip on each strategy individually and once you are comfortable with each method, you can combine them to increase sales dramatically.
Author bio: This article was written by Conor O’Flynn of O’Flynn Medical. Conor has used affiliate marketing to increase sales of medical products like breast pumps in the past. One area that proved particularly successful was Influencer Marketing.
