Marketing an ecommerce business needs careful thought. There are many channels on which to place your ads, for example, and various methods of digital marketing techniques from your website to blogs, SEO articles and social media. Each of these resources needs to be optimized for marketing, and with particular attention paid to smartphone optimization.
One marketing channel that is often under-utilized is affiliate marketing. What are affiliates, and how does affiliate marketing work? In the article that follows we will be looking at affiliate marketing and how it can benefit even the smallest of businesses, so we’ll begin with a brief explanation of what affiliate marketing involves.
What Does Affiliate Marketing Mean?
Rest assured that affiliate marketing is not as complex as you may believe. It is simply a method of increasing your brand awareness, but having other people do it for you. Does that sound too good to be true? There is a catch in that you have to pay them, but you only do so when they enable a sale. Let’s have a look at an example.
A small business selling fishing gear wants to expand its market reach. To find affiliates, they look for bloggers in the fishing field, or Facebook fishing groups. They invite these sources to become an affiliate for their brand. This involves either placing ads on their sites, mentioning the brand in blogs, talking about it on social media, and so on. In each case, there is a link to the product being promoted.
A consumer comes along to his or her usual fishing blog, sees the product mentioned, and clicks through to find out more. They like it and make a purchase. The affiliate then gets a commission payment of an agreed percentage. A business can have a few affiliates or hundreds, the choice is up to the. So, not we know what affiliates are, how do you go about finding the right ones for your brand or product?
Who Might Be an Ideal Affiliate?
In the example we described above we used fishing as the niche. It could be any product or service in the e-commerce world, and the example would fit. Put simply, you’re looking for social media pages that are in the same field as you. Perhaps if you sell baby clothes, you might want to find affiliates in the shape of a ‘mummy blog’ or social media groups aimed at mothers and babies. As long as the connection is there, you will expand your brand awareness.
However, there are different levels of affiliate you can utilise. There are those who simply have a relevant blog, and are happy to mention your product and hope that they make some money on the side. At the other end of the scale there are people who have a popular YouTube channel, for example, or a blog or social media page with many followers, and that hold some authority in your market sector.
The latter type of affiliate will engender trust in your product or service, and when that is transferred to social media, social trust is a metric that you need to keep up with. When consumers see an authority figure commenting on and recommending your brand, they are more likely to take note than if it were someone with no clear link to the brand. There is a lot of necessary research in choosing and managing your affiliates, so be prepared to put aside time to keep on top of things or allocate a team member to manage your affiliate program.
We should add that there are businesses that offer professional outsourced affiliate management services, and this may be a route you wish to consider. Before we close, let’s talk about the benefits of affiliate management.
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
We have seen above that affiliate marketing is a successful addition to any marketing campaign. It is not only simple, but it is also relatively cheap. The main benefit is that if you can find the best affiliates for your niche, you are targeting customers who are most likely to buy your product or use your service. This is why research into affiliates is essential.
The other factor to think about is that affiliate marketing is not something you set up and leave to do its job. It needs managing, monitoring and constant attention, so that means either dedicating some of your time or an employees time, or engaging the services of an affiliate marketing company that can do the job for you and add their expertise.
