What is Affiliate Marketing?

The Benefits of An Affiliate Marketing Program (Done Right)

In today’s digital world, having an affiliate program for your business can really help put you on the map. Whether you’re a small, medium, or large business, developing a dedicated affiliate program can define your business online and help develop your brands’ global reach into areas you never thought you could expand.

If you haven’t already got a dedicated affiliate marketing team promoting your business yet, it might be a good idea to look at how an affiliate program can benefit you.

Below, we’ve highlighted the importance of an affiliate program, how, when done right, it can help you drive more sales to your business and lastly, what makes a good affiliate program. These points each make up all sides of the equation to run a successful affiliate program for all parties involved:

Why Is An Affiliate Program Important?

Aside from brand awareness and a larger marketing reach, affiliate programs also enable brands to tap into a wealth of marketing experience within their niche without wasting unnecessary resources. A team of dedicated affiliate account managers can utilise their industry knowledge, networks, and connections to build trust and long-standing relationships with a variety of affiliate marketers.

Affiliates are often viewed as long term marketing partners because they earn a share of your revenue. Naturally, they have a vested interest in your success. Furthermore, each affiliate you’ll work with will also be a brand advocate, so this is another avenue to help build trust with your potential customers. 

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

There are many advantages and few disadvantages of affiliate marketing, which is why many businesses opt to run a dedicated affiliate program either in-house or externally.

Low Ongoing Costs: Affiliate programs are a cost-effective marketing strategy because, for the most part, it’s performance based. This means that you’ll only pay affiliates from the sales they bring in, so you’ll only pay for results rather than direct advertising. Furthermore, since most of your marketing activities are handled by affiliates, they’ll carry a chunk of the cost involved too.

Low Risk: Lost cost also means low risk. There’s a limited risk of loss because payments are only made when there’s an actual conversion, so an affiliate program is perfect for businesses that are on a tight budget.

Flexibility: You can easily make your affiliate program smaller or bigger at little or no cost. Furthermore, you can allow each Affiliate to run bespoke campaigns based on their business models. With an affiliate program, you can tailor-make everything on a case-by-case basis if you want to. Many affiliates prefer to have flexibility in remuneration models and marketing tools because of how and who they target. Whilst many will be happy to sign up and get started, there may be some affiliates where you need to adapt tools and costs applicable to them.

Targeted Traffic: Since affiliates can be vetted and chosen by you, you will be able to ensure your affiliate traffic is high quality and product targeted. Visitors will find your brand useful and what they’re looking for, which will help keep your conversion rates high.

Access Foreign Markets: Affiliate marketing is an effective way of tapping into the global marketplace. Using localised affiliates will help you enter new markets because their local knowledge can be used to sell your product to international audiences using strategies tailored to the specific area. This is something that might not be possible to do ‘in-house’.  If you want to explore new markets, working with affiliates in those territories is a cost-effective and often reliable way to do it.

What Makes A Good Affiliate Program?

Making a success of an affiliate program isn’t just down to affiliates alone – it’s a 2-way street. The success of an affiliate program relies on having all the tools to hand and making it easy for affiliates to promote you.

The best way to begin an affiliate program is to have a dedicated account manager (or team) who are passionate about the brand and who thrive on performance-based results. An affiliate partnership is unique because it is a partnership. The bottom line is, if we all work together, everybody can achieve more and meet their business goals sooner. Successful affiliate managers are always available to chat or assist when affiliates need help, offer insights, suggestions, and advice to help affiliate partners achieve more.

When affiliates choose to partner up with a program and market a brand, there can be no kinks in the chain. Everything needs to flow, from when they sign up to when they place your tracking links. Affiliate marketers are looking for profitable affiliate programs that they can trust for the long haul, but if you have everything ready and working, there are no limits to what you can achieve with an affiliate program.

Talk with us today to really get started on your PPC strategy and why not check out how we can help your own marketing mix with services such as SEO, CRM and affiliate marketing?