Everyone is selling something nowadays. It would be an oversimplification to say after 18 months of this ginormous pandemic that almost every small and medium business has been affected in some way or another.
Scaling your business as a small or medium enterprise with traditional advertising methods such as having ads published on the telly, newspapers or magazines might not be the best way to go given the current circumstances, and the fact that cost can be higher than revenue when going head-to-head against giants in your industry already using an established brand image to ensure selling won’t stop.
Venturing into the digital space and airing ads on VOD and the various social media platforms may not be worth your while if you haven’t got the foggiest idea about how things work. It is most likely that you will end up spending a lot of money either way to learn lessons that you would otherwise have avoided by choosing what’s right in front of you – affiliates and influencers!
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?
By definition, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing channel where brands reward affiliate publishers or partners like influencers, for driving traffic or sales to their website. Affiliates place ads or market the products or services on their website, app, social media account or blog. Commissions are paid when specific “conversion events” take place. A conversion event could be any number of actions a user takes on-site, for example, a product sale, a newsletter sign-up, or an account registration.
It’s relatively simple to launch an affiliate marketing program from scratch, and you’ll breathe easy when you take the first step since you only pay affiliates and partners for successful conversions. Typically, brands create and manage programs that affiliates can join. The goal is to support the relationship between a brand and its affiliate partners. This includes onboarding (recruitment), contracts, payments, and sharing opportunities. Each affiliate program has its own set of terms and conditions and brands can use a SaaS solution to manage their partners at scale.
The growth potential of affiliate marketing and partnerships
It’s estimated that 80% of brands have affiliate programs at the moment with nearly 65% of affiliate marketers worldwide generating traffic by blogging alone. Affiliate marketing accounts for over 15% of all digital media revenue and statistics reveal that 94% of publishers use multiple affiliate marketing networks.
Affiliate marketing is popular because it’s reliable and affordable for all parties. And more and more brands are recognising the uncapped potential of affiliate partnerships. On average, high-maturity partnership programs contribute 28 percent of a brand’s overall revenue*. For all those wondering if affiliate marketing is still worth it in 2021, fear not. Prognoses are still in the making, but the affiliate marketing industry is already said to go way beyond $16 billion dollars worth and to skyrocket even further in 2021.
Question is – how do you get in touch with an affiliate or an influencer who is a perfect fit for you and can help you grow your business? And how do you find a trustworthy B2B partner who will go that extra mile with you in order to achieve success?
There are numerous affiliates and influencers that you can work with and many are quite specific about what category of products they will work with and promote. Without technology, it will certainly take up a lot of your time and resources to first find, and then, shortlist the perfect bunch with an excellent follower base and proven track record of successful conversions.
As for B2B partners, in the traditional way, you would probably be joining several business groups on the various professional platforms or chambers of commerce and meeting new people every now and then, and chances are you might find that synergy after losing a lot of valuable time.
As a brand, the best way for you to get everything in one place at present is to join hands with a technology provider who has their own marketplace of affiliates, influencers and B2B partners that you can work with through a secure platform with complete autonomy.
One of the biggest names in the sector at the moment is impact.com. impact.com’s partnership management platform lets you expand your program and scale every type of partnership, including affiliates, influencers, strategic business partners, mobile apps, publishers, and more.
As a brand looking for any, or all of these services from a platform, the two major factors you ought to be considering are the sophistication and superiority of the tech that you are getting access to, and the kind of flexibility offered to you along with a greater array of options for customisation.
impact.com’s platform is not only flexible and customisable in contracts, but it can help you track and measure the performance and value of each partner, handles every kind of partnership type, and last but not the least – their tech is far superior to others in the same sector.
We’ll be back next week to show you a comparison between working with a traditional affiliate network vs the impact.com SaaS (Software as a Service) way.
To learn more about how impact.com can help your brand create an impact in your market visit impact.com.
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