6 Benefits of Setting Up an Affiliate Program for Your Company
You’ve probably seen more and more brands (both big and small) using affiliate marketing. So you might be wondering if it’s right for your brand too. In this article, we are going to go over the basics of affiliate marketing and the benefits of it that your brand might see.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is essentially companies partnering up with content creators to market their products or services. Think of it like word of mouth, but it’s a little more involved than simply encouraging customers to share what they love about your brand with family and friends.
Affiliate marketing is similar to working with influencers. The main difference is that you don’t have to have a contract and set payment amount with these content creators like you would an influencer.
With affiliate marketing, your brand signs up for an affiliate program. This can be done through platforms such as CJ, Rakuten Marketing, Awin, Affiliately, and other platforms. Then content creators can submit a request to join your company’s affiliate program. Generally, these are already people who love your brand! Your brand can then approve the content creators you believe fit into your niche, industry, or target demographic.
Once approved, these affiliates will then be able to create trackable links to products or services on your site that they can share to their audience. When someone clicks on one of those links and makes a purchase, the affiliate makes a commission from the sale. Your brand will be able to set the commission amount and have final approval of whether a sale counts toward commission. A simpler option is to offer a single specific URL that the affiliate can use for shoppers to click on, or a specific code that shoppers can use at checkout that gives shoppers a discount on their purchase while also referring to the affiliate they came from.
You can take it a step further by partnering or collaborating with an affiliate to promote a specific product or service. This involves offering them the product or service free and in return, they make a post about the product or service or do a guest blog for your brand. A contract is not necessary; it depends on the amount the product or service costs and what you expect in return.
You can also communicate with affiliates about upcoming sales or product releases that they may want to promote for you. Many affiliate programs offer the ability for you to provide images or banners that affiliates can share with their affiliate link already attached to it to make it easy for you and them to promote!
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing might seem complicated, but the platforms that allow businesses to run these programs make it pretty simple. So let’s look at the benefits of using affiliate marketing so you can decide whether it’s right for your brand or not.
1 | It Broadens Your Reach
If you are a smaller or niche company, having affiliate content creators share about your products or services to their audience can broaden your reach and in turn, boost your sales and overall revenue.
2 | It Can Inspire Audiences
This is especially true for companies that offer products that allow customers to be creative, like makeup or craft supplies. Content creators often share how to use your products, sometimes in ways that other shoppers might not have thought of, helping inspire them to want to try their hand at the same technique or product. This has the effect of boosting sales, but can also generate a lot of positive online sentiment about your brand that can spread!
3 | It Helps You Track Sales Progress
Affiliate marketing platforms offer tracking, from click to sale. This can provide you with metrics that help you understand what people are loving from your brand even more, as these insights even share when a customer made a click on an affiliate link and when they finally made a purchase. We know that sitting on a cart for a while can be a hard thing for businesses and this gives more insight into it.
4 | It Supplements Your Promotions
You can enhance your promotions and sales by sharing information with affiliates ahead of time. This allows affiliates to get their links ready, or if you want, to create buzz around a product. This helps to amplify your in-house marketing strategies.
5 | It Provides Social Proof
Affiliate marketing is one of the most potent ways to integrate social proof into your business. Social proof are things such as reviews, suggestions, and testimonials. What affiliate marketing shows customers is that another influential person believes so much in your brand that they are willing to endorse it. This helps build trust in your brand to a broader audience.
6 | It Provides a Strong ROI
Believe it or not, affiliate marketing has an unusually high digital marketing return on investment (ROI). It has the ability to increase average order value, per-customer order average, and average customer revenue.
The Bottom Line
Affiliate marketing has helped brands big and small boost their revenue, generate social proof, and amplify in-house marketing efforts to great effect. Want to learn more about affiliate marketing strategies or ready to create an affiliate marketing strategy for your brand? Tintero Creative is ready to help you amplify your brand online! Schedule a free consultation call today.