Affiliate Marketing Is All About Strategy, But How Do You Create One?

Affiliate marketing is all about strategy, but how do you create one?

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When you’re looking to launch an affiliate program, you need to be incredibly clear about what and why you’re doing it.?

So, what’s the first thing that you need to do before embarking on this journey??

Take a look at your other digital channels of course!?

Figure out how you’re reaching your customers across multiple ranges of areas both online and offline.

Once you’ve done this, you need to figure out how these partnerships will help to increase your brand reach and what types of affiliates you’ll need to engage with to find the right customers in each of these nurtures.?

Now this is out of the way, let’s get down to business on how to create an effective strategy, shall we??

Set Your Goals

What does that actually mean??

The goal is to understand what kinds of partners you need to be working with, but also how much revenue you’re going to have in place to work with those partners, how those partners are going to be remunerated for sending traffic to your website to convert and what the estimated sales are that you want to achieve for your affiliate program.?

Consider who your target audience is, and what kinds of affiliate partners are going to be bringing you that audience and then you can work to figure out a budget that will align and enable those partners to bring you those traffic sources – whether it’s through social media, paid per-click campaigns, paid ads or lead generation or even brand to brand partnerships.?

It all starts with who your customer is and where you want to target them (The Funnel).

There are multiple aspects to the types of affiliates that you can and will work with in your affiliate program to drive the incentivised traffic and make your program successful. So mapping out the partner types and segmentations at the start of your program launching is a great idea!

Following this, you’ll need to think about how you’re going to be running and managing all of these partners that you’re acquiring to promote your products and services.?

There are various platforms, networks and SaaS marketing solutions available to you that can help you to run effective affiliate programs.?

Some are considered entry-level, like First Promoter, and some are more complex and intelligent such as Tune or Impact.com.?

Deciding which platform or network is right for you is a key step to consider before starting.?

Your technology must be able to scale as you do.?

It must provide the right infrastructure to build your program and automate a lot of the administrative processes too.

The other alternative is to think about potentially using an affiliate network to launch your program. The benefits of this can also help scale your program faster early on.

If you don’t have a lot of industry expertise or resources in place within your marketing team to run the performance channel as an independent segment, this is sometimes the safest and easiest launch option.

So, depending on how big your business is and your budget, you really need to ensure that you’re selecting the correct solution for running your affiliate program and that that solution has the right amount of technical capabilities to scale as your program grows.?

Whilst you might want to have a very simplistic MVP solution to start with when you’re thinking about your strategy, you might want to instead consider something that’s a little more robust.

Why??

So that in 3-5 years when you’ve got thousands of affiliate partners joined to your program, you can effectively manage them.?

Think about what tools you’re going to use for your partner outreach and what you’re going to use to manage onboardings too.?

How are you going to be building your automation and promotion funnels once your database starts to grow??

These are all things you need to think about.?

What Are You Offering??

The next thing that you’ll need to do is to decide what products and promotions you’re going to be offering and what price points you’re going to be offering them at.?

Depending on what kind of program you work with, you might have multiple products on offer, you might have multiple brands within the same program to promote.

It really depends on your preference…

However, depending on whether you’re in travel or eCommerce or Gaming, you have to think about how those products and brands align with each other and how your commercial models need to be stacked up against them. For example, will you offer bundled commissions across the platform or run each brand individually?

Will you be paying a one-time fee?

Will you pay a lifetime revenue share or a combination of both?

You’ll also need to carry out a SWOT analysis too. Who are your competitors? What do they offer? What can you do to benchmark against them?

How Are You Benchmarking Your Program??

Deep diving into the marketplace and understanding who the partners you’re working with are is key.

There are tools available that can help you with this such as SEM Rush and UberSuggest – these will help you to look at what your competitors are doing and where their traffic sources are coming from.?

(At our ELEVATE Summit event, we held a Masterclass with Patrick McGill to teach affiliate managers how to go and do this research and how to find their ideal partners – if you’d like to see this MasterClass you can watch it HERE.)?

Once you’ve decided who you’re going to target, what those affiliates are going to be doing and how you’re going to be tracking and managing them, you can start to look at your competitive research and figure out what kinds of commissions you’re going to pay them.?

Policies And Structures

What are you doing to allow affiliates to do??

What are you not going to allow affiliates to do??

How do you want them to promote your brand??

This very much ties into the other digital channels that I mentioned earlier on in this newsletter where you need to understand exactly how your partners are going to fit into the gaps that your direct media doesn’t touch.?

You need to work out how to ensure that your affiliates are doing the promotions that you need and want effectively so that they’re sending you the relevant traffic sources.

Alongside this, you need to understand how you want to set up your KPIs, and objections and how you want your affiliates to be performing in this program.?

This means knowing what kind of reports you’re going to need to build within your affiliate platform and what kind of keywords they’re going to be allowed to promote and bid on if you’re going to enable those kinds of marketing methods.?

How Should They Promote??

How are you going to allow your affiliate partners to promote your offerings across different channels??

How will you manage them on social media??

There’s a big push on content curators at the moment and understanding how that strategy fits in with traditional traffic sources and lead generation affiliate partner types is incredibly important at the start of your journey.?

You also need to make sure that you have all of the right marketing collateral.?

It’s not enough to just launch an affiliate program, you need to make sure that you’re marketing it too.?

Think about your strategy in terms of why your affiliate program is going to be in existence and who you’re going to want to be working with as well as thinking about how you’re going to market it.?

What events are you going to attend??

How are you going to push the program brand and build brand affinity with that brand??

Once you’ve thought about all of these things, the next thing you’re going to need to do is to think about creating best practices for your affiliates and for your team to run the program efficiently and service your partners effectively.

How are you going to make sure that your team supports incoming partners??

How are you going to make sure that they have access to the information and knowledge that they need??

How are you going to ensure that they have the resources that can support them in terms of promoting and pushing your product and brand??

Finally…

The last thing you need to understand when creating your strategy is how you’re going to track and evaluate your performance.?

Ask yourself, what are the key metrics that you need affiliates to be hitting??

What are the key metrics that your business wants you to achieve with this partner program??

How are you going to measure that performance against the effort, money, time and investment that you’re putting into the affiliate program?

These are some of the key things that you need to be looking at when you’re building your affiliate strategy and when you want to make sure that your program is aligning with the rest of your business goals.?

Wait, There’s One More Thing!?

Before you leave me today, I have a question…

Are you a network, agency or brand looking for new business or affiliate leads??

This is your opportunity to be seen and heard at our annual AMPLIFY Summit 2023 as a sponsor at this popular virtual event!

>>NEW BUSINESS ALERT!<<

Join us as a virtual sponsor, build your database with engaged leads with one of our sponsorship packages and put your business in front of a targeted audience of Performance & Affiliate Marketers!?

This isn’t all, either!?

There’s also a chance to advertise in our weekly podcasts! We’ve officially broken into the TOP 100 Business News on Apple Podcasts, so there’s never been a better time than now to jump on board!

If you’d like to find out more, email us at [email protected] or download our Affiliate Marketing Podcast Media Pack HERE!

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