While affiliate marketing is second nature to us here at Conversion Digital, it’s certainly not the most common marketing tool used by businesses. Even if you’ve been in the e-commerce space for some time, you may have heard of it. But, you don’t necessarily understand it. If you’ve found yourself on our site wondering how exactly affiliate marketing can help you to build your brand and boost your sales, look no further.
In our latest post, we’re breaking down everything you need to know to understand affiliate marketing and its benefits.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
First and foremost, we need to introduce affiliate marketing in its purest form. In a nutshell, it can be defined as a type of performance-based marketing. It allows a brand can reward affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by their own marketing efforts. In plain English, it’s the process of offering a set commission on sales, clicks, actions or traffic generated by a publisher.
Who Are the Publishers?
There are many different publishers on the online space; that’s a whole separate blog post. But, to summarise, publishers can be voucher code sites, social influencers, bloggers, editorial platforms, and so much more. For example: if you’re a fashion brand, you might find that a fashion blogger that is affiliated with your site sends a lot of traffic to you, ultimately driving sales.
Why Would I Use Affiliate Marketing?
When it comes to building a brand, affiliate marketing can sometimes be overlooked. Granted, it takes a lot of time and effort to get right. However, it offers so much value to your business when executed correctly.
Affiliate marketing can help to build brand awareness, drive traffic, boost sales, and so much more. Some of the key benefits of this approach to marketing include:
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It’s performance-based:
Affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place. Therefore, they’re likely to work hard to drive the conversion that you’re looking to achieve. Because of this, you get what you pay for.
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It helps to expand your audience:
Affiliates exist in every market and every product category that shoppers and internet browsers will come across today. Whether you’re looking to break into an established industry or you’re offering something very niche, you can be sure that there are relevant websites that will align with your brand. By partnering with said websites, you’re allowing yourself to reach new audiences and ultimately extend your reach, growing your brand. Furthermore, you can also diversify to other sites to tap into a new audience too.
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It can boost your reputation:
When carefully selecting the publishers that you work with, you can significantly improve the status of your brand and the products you offer. By selecting affiliates that genuinely work for you, that will champion everything about your brand, ultimately becoming an extension. Affiliate marketing is at its best when consumers aren’t even aware that it’s a thing. Instead, they’re trusting the word and opinions of publications and platforms that they respect.
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It’s cost-effective:
When we get onto the subject of money: this form of marketing can be extremely friendly on the purse strings. Rather than throwing away hundreds on uncertain results, you’re simply paying when action is taken. It’s an easy way to branch out into a new method of marketing without huge overheads from the offset.
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It can rapidly grow your traffic and sales:
Working in conjunction with your internal marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates on your program will allow you to scale traffic even faster. The more trusted sites that link to your site, the more opportunities you have to convert that traffic into paying customers. While affiliate links won’t have a direct impact on your search engine rankings, it will have a ‘halo effect’ which will contribute to your rankings.
When it’s broken down, affiliate marketing is relatively simple and cost-effective, yet it can work wonders. If we’ve sold you on affiliate marketing, get in touch to see what we can do for you.