Affiliate marketing is not just a fad or an unsustainable trend, it’s a multibillion-dollar global industry. In fact, 80 percent of brands use affiliate marketing as a method of marketing their products and services.
If you are looking for a simple, low-cost way to market your products and services that effectively reaches your target consumer base, affiliate marketing is the path for you and your business. Let’s go over how affiliate marketing works and learn about the many benefits of affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
First, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of affiliate marketing. Essentially, affiliate marketing is when a company or advertiser pairs with an external partner, or an affiliate partner, who will then promote their product and deliver a specific result—a sale, a click to their website, an app download, and so on.
When implementing affiliate marketing, you will provide your affiliates with a unique link to put on their website, blog, or social media accounts that will link directly to your brand’s website. For every click or sale that is completed through the affiliate partner’s link, the partner is rewarded with a commission or percentage of each sale.
While affiliate partners are not directly linked to your company, they aren’t just any person. Ideal affiliate partners are people with a large following and online presence: content creators, Instagram or TikTok influencers, bloggers, podcast hosts, and YouTubers. These affiliates know their audience and what they will respond to, so they know the perfect content to create to market your brand and keep their audience engaged.
By implementing an affiliate program or directly seeking out affiliate partners, you can partner with people who will create and promote niche content for your brand. The best affiliates have a sizable platform and are able to continuously grow and nurture their audience. The best part about affiliate marketing is that your ideal affiliate’s audience is also your target audience. You partner with a creator who knows what that audience wants, which is why they are partnering with you and you are partnering with them.
What Are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
Low-Cost, Low-Risk Advertising
Bringing on affiliate partners is a relatively lost-cost venture with a high return on investment.
Affiliate marketing does not require any initial investments other than running a promotion to gain interest and acquire affiliate partners. Once you’ve secured affiliate partners and ensured that they are people you want to represent your brand, your part is pretty much done.
Since affiliate partners are paid on commission, they will only receive a portion of each sale they bring in, which also makes the risk of this type of marketing very low. Affiliates are only earning money when a sale is made, not for the content they are making. So, any time an affiliate helps make a sale or draws traffic to your website, money is coming in for you too.
Minimal Effort
One of the great aspects of affiliate marketing is that it requires very little work on your part. Setting up an affiliate program or finding creators who will be ideal affiliates and reaching out to them to secure a partnership is the extent of the work needed to implement affiliate marketing into your marketing strategy.
Very little design work is necessary since the affiliates will be the ones creating all the content and tailoring it to their (and your) audience. Basically, your affiliate partners will be pulling most of the weight to promote your product or service, and you just get to sit back and watch the sales roll in.
Direct Link to Target Consumer Base
Your affiliate partners have a direct link to your niche consumer base.
Anyone who wants to be an affiliate of your brand also wants to be conscious of what their followers want to see. They would not partner with you if they did not think that their audience would be interested in your product or service. If affiliates promote a brand or service that their audience has no interest in, they will lose engagement on their accounts or website.
So the audience that follows your affiliates and consumes their online content will also be your target audience. Your products and services will be directly marketed to your intended consumer base in a way that engages them and encourages them to try your product or service.
Increase in Brand Awareness
The basic intent behind affiliate marketing is to get consumers to click a link to your page that is provided to them by the affiliate partner. From there, the hope is that they’ll complete a sale.
With more and more people spending time online and on social media, chances are, consumers will discover your brand while they are checking their social media. The good news is, 50 percent of affiliate-referred traffic to sites comes from mobile devices, which means affiliates are doing a good job of using social media to promote the brands they represent.
Consumers like it when a “real person” can vouch for a product or service before they buy it. Sometimes consumers will check the reviews and promotions created by multiple affiliates before they make a purchase.
Even if a purchase does not happen immediately, a consumer has still heard about your brand and now knows it exists. Perhaps they’ll favorite the post on Instagram or revisit it later. Your brand name is still getting out there, and as a result, you will be increasing brand awareness through affiliate marketing.
A Growing Marketing Strategy
Affiliate marketing is not going anywhere any time soon. Spending through affiliate marketing increases each year, and with the return on investment being high, that’s likely to continue.
Not only are more people looking to be affiliates for brands, but more brands are also implementing affiliate programs. There are many benefits of affiliate marketing, and pairing it with additional marketing strategies like those we provide at InnoVision Marketing Group will help keep your brand name relevant and out there.
