How affiliate marketing works?

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Digital marketing channels are known for being based on traffic payment models such as CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per thousands of impressions), CPV (cost per view) etc.

Affiliate marketing is the only digital performance channel charging advertisers for the end result : the sale/lead.

If you’ve been in the e-commerce space for some time, you’re most likely familiar with the term “affiliate marketing.” However while paid search, display or paid social are fairly straight-forward as all traffic acquisition is powered by an auction (it’s the algorithm that decides who gets the impression or the click in real-time) many advertisers often mismatch it with its niche variation – influencer marketing or else aren’t still making full use of affiliate marketing benefits.

Those who are fully aware of how it works are swiftly moving the bulk of their paid media spend into it to invest in growing their affiliate program, aka publisher relationships. Therefore , this form of marketing can be an incredibly beneficial, low-risk way to promote your products/services.

Let’s learn 3 of this fairly unique channel benefits to see why it’s often surpassing paid search in advertisers’ spend being considered most efficient digital channel:

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First benefit: Affiliate marketing is based on the end result: performance action the advertiser is paying for: be it the sale, a ticket booking, a subscription lead etc. It’s the lowest down the purchase funnel.

How it works: Since affiliate partners (publishers) are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for.

This mitigates any efforts that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while also ensuring that you get what you pay for.

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Second benefit: It helps enrich your audience. The recipe is simple: you’re reaching out to publisher’s own audience network, meaning: when you have a tiny audience of your own (when you’re a start-up) or you’re an established brand yet have a stagnant, non-evolving audience of your own, you’re finding customers elsewhere: on sites where they consume content, entertain & interact.

These partnerships grant the opportunity to expand out into new markets where you might not otherwise have had the bandwidth to explore or to further saturate your existing target markets, giving your brand a much stronger online presence. Think of these partners as an extension of your current marketing or sales team.

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Third benefit: It helps enrich your brand reputation. By choosing a publisher on your network you’re in fact choosing a messenger, a brand ambassador. They need to possess the right qualities to represent your brand – have similar values, similar audience. All they require in return to help share your brand message (be it an offer, a product launch or an awareness message) is the message accuracy: the ad copy text, offer duration, dedicated landing page and creative images, banners to help place your message on their site pages, in their newsletters.

To learn more about how it works in action, its key players see below the presentation for more details:

I have no doubt you’ll start seeing the benefits of the channel soon enough after launching it for you. All you have to do is dedicate some time at the beginning to source the right publishers to work with and set up a calendar of events/updates to ‘seed on their content plantation’!

Make it work in less than 2 months or else – do reach out for an advise or support, we’re totally sold into the channel benefits and with our experience working on some of UK’s most ambitious affiliate accounts such as Argos, TalkTalk or New Look – we’re a fountain of knowledge, ready to share some know-how!

Meanwhile be ready to entertain yourself by taking a Quiz on Affiliate Marketing to see how well you’re now getting familiar with the channel:

https://kahoot.it/challenge/04197639?challenge-id=a8755edb-dcd1-4dbb-9501-ad4942d723ed_1593007048353

GAME PIN: 04197639

All the best,

STEPP Digital Affiliate Team