3 Affiliate Marketing Strategy Tips for Scalable Success
Affiliate marketing has become a mainstay of digital marketing, offering a cost-effective, scalable, and performance-based model for brands to reach new customers. However, affiliate marketing didn’t begin with the Internet, although that is where it really took off. Old-school affiliate marketing began with businesses giving current customers a discount for referring them to a new customer. We’re all familiar with this type of affiliate marketing – it’s still in use, but much harder to trace results than clicking online links.
The Internet changed the game by making affiliate marketing easier to track, more profitable, and easier to reach more people. Now valued at 27.8 billion and expected to reach $48 billion by 2027, affiliate marketing continues to grow at an astounding pace. So, how does affiliate marketing work? Below, we’re going to get into the basics and offer three affiliate marketing tips to put you on the path to success.
Basics of Performance-Based Affiliate Marketing
Performance-based affiliate marketing – sometimes referred to as partnership marketing – is fairly straightforward. Brands work with content creators – bloggers, podcasters, and social media influencers – to make referrals. In return, content creators get a commission when for the desired result, whether it be web traffic, sales leads, downloads, or sales. Affiliates encourage their audience to visit an online store or marketplace through links that track where the user came from. Most affiliates get paid if their referrals lead to a sale, but some get rewarded for free trial signups, web clicks, or app downloads.
Tip #1: Never Start with Affiliate Marketing
Our recommendation is to start affiliate marketing only when the client is ready. What does this mean? Before reaching out to affiliates, partners, and influencers to promote a product or service, it’s important to develop and optimize the landing pages and sales funnels to take a visitor from a click to a conversion.
It can take a bit of time to get up and running, as it’s not like the more immediate results you see when running media campaigns on Google or Meta. The learnings of our expert search and social teams are leveraged to bring incremental traffic, but cannot be dialed up or down based on budget alone. Discovery, recruitment, and then waiting on the affiliate to add content and links for a promotion typically take a few weeks before the first sales are on the board.
Scaling an effective affiliate marketing strategy is a factor of available landing pages and sales funnels. Affiliates will have the attention and eyeballs of the advertiser’s next customer but at different points in the sales funnel. Some will still be at the initial awareness and then discovery stage, while others will arrive with credit card in hand and ready to buy. Advertisers who can convert a high-intent, ready-to-buy visitor at the bottom of the funnel and take an interested lead through a nurturing sequence will benefit from the widest variety of opportunities with affiliate partners.
Understanding Performance-Based Affiliate Marketing
There are many types of affiliate marketers, and not all are a perfect fit for every client or product. It all depends on what the business is promoting and the results you’re looking for. For example, an excellent source of new traffic, customers, or leads for one brand may not work for a different brand and could even lead to a violation of an industry’s terms and conditions. It’s essential to know and understand the type of traffic each type of affiliate can deliver. This performance-based model has become popular due to its cost-effectiveness and flexibility.
Key Features of Performance-Based Affiliate Marketing
- Commission-Based Structure: Affiliates earn a commission when consumers take the required action.
- Performance Monitoring: Brands can track and measure the performance of affiliates.
- Flexibility: Affiliates can market products to their audience through blogs, email, social media, and more, depending on what resonates with their audience.
- Independent Creation: Affiliates have the freedom to create content authentic to them and, therefore, resonate more with their audience.
Understanding the Partnership Model
2025 could very well be the year of partnership affiliate marketing. Increasingly, the best opportunities in affiliate are really about the closer ‘partner’ models. Affiliates that can offer a personal recommendation to their audience or have already earned the reputation and trust of their subscribers with a history of authority, will perform the best. Instead of offering each of them the same links and landing pages, advertisers should lean into this audience and welcome them with customized, even co-branded, content.
Key Features of the Partnership Model
- Collaborative Effort: Collaboration can look like co-hosting events, running joint campaigns, or featuring each other’s products.
- Synergy: The brands and affiliates complement each other, making them stronger together. This synergy can attract new customers and expand reach.
- Shared Resources: Partners may leverage each other’s audience or customer base by including one another in newsletters, linking to one another websites through back links or pointing to them as thought leaders.
- Stronger Brand Trust: Collaboration with trusted affiliates enhances the credibility of brands and effectively builds consumer trust.
Tip #2: Know Your Target Audience and Offer Multiple Sales Funnels
We start by evaluating whether a client or product is a good fit for affiliate marketing. It begins with an analysis of what traffic is working best and identifying the custom target audience. We also take a close look at the competitive landscape to see what partners are sending traffic to similar offers. Once we’ve identified and evaluated websites and publishers, we begin outreach.
Measurement of Success
When you set up the goals for your affiliate marketing, you can determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, we look for Incremental growth without impeding current traffic sources. It goes back to the very beginning step of first identifying what our client needs (customers/sales) and at what targets (cost/volume). When campaigns are launched and affiliates begin promotion, it is important to monitor and evaluate to ensure the traffic and customers are incremental growth, not merely a diversion from current customer journeys.
This is where the “partner” aspect of the program really begins. As the advertiser, by properly identifying your audience and the opportunity your product or service presents and sharing this information with potential affiliates during prospecting and discovery, you allow them to best self-identify the opportunity and properly position the offer for their audience.
Tip #3: Be a True Partner to Your Affiliate. Be Genuine, Accessible, and Transparent
As the landscape changes, maintaining your affiliate’s trust is paramount. Discerning genuine, reliable content will continue to become more difficult against the tide of fakes, disinformation, and simply mistaken AI-generated content. This goes two ways, and we advise and help position our clients to follow simple guidelines to be genuine, accessible, and transparent. By first developing that relationship with the affiliate partner, the brand will be able to attract, recruit, and retain preferred affiliate partners.
An effective affiliate marketing strategy includes numerous marketing channels. Done right, it can lead to sustained growth, increased revenue for your business as well as improved brand awareness, recognition, trust, and credibility.
Are you looking to start an affiliate program? Contact Lamark Media today to get started.