In this article

Learn more about how affiliate marketing can work alongside a digital marketing strategy and provide simple tactics to help incorporate the channel into your overall digital mix.

When building a marketing strategy, it is important to think of all the moving parts as a whole. Consider how they will interact with each other and look to understand each individually. For example, how does your Facebook strategy relate to your email marketing campaigns? And how can Instagram support your website sales?

Nothing in digital marketing stands alone. As a strategist, it is important to look at the big picture to understand how each platform and tactic will integrate. This can help you achieve your overall goal.

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

To understand how affiliate marketing can support your overall digital strategy, you must first understand the benefits of this unique channel.
Here are a few to consider:

• It is cost-effective as you only pay for meaningful results; if you’d like to learn more about the cost-effectiveness of this channel read our blog here.
• It broadens your audience reach.
• The right affiliates can boost your reputation; as influencers, they are giving you the stamp of approval by featuring you on their site.
• Publishers drive high quality, bottom of the funnel traffic; the affiliate channel is usually the highest converting channel in your digital marketing toolkit.
• The hard work and content creation is done by the publishers, so you have you more time to focus on your own content.

The biggest draw to brands is that affiliate marketing is cost-effective. Also, the quality of the audience reached is higher, more targeted, and engaged. Therefore, it is important to work with affiliates who already have a target audience similar to yours.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Support Your Broader Digital Efforts?

Affiliate marketing supports all areas of your business by expanding your audience reach. More people = greater opportunity. But how does it support your digital marketing efforts?

Amplify Your SEO Strategy

Optimizing your brand to appear in search results can be a huge undertaking. When handled internally, it can take a long time to gain authority or rank high on search engine results pages. By adding affiliate marketing into the mix, you’re boosting the likelihood of your brand name appearing in the first pages of search results. This is an enormous benefit and one that can really set you above competitors because it makes your brand easier for consumers to find. You’ll also appear more trustworthy if a third party is endorsing you.

Extend Your Brand Reach

Having a database of affiliates at your fingertips is a great asset when you have news you want to amplify. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you can update your partners to have them help get the message out via updated craeted or newly developed, organic content. This creates great buy-in from your affiliate parnters as it allows them to provide added-value content to their audience and show their readers they’re on top of the latest news.

Boost Your Conversions

Another great aspect of having a wider audience reach is that consumers will see your company message from their favourite bloggers and influencers. This exposure to your brand not only increases awareness but is more likely to result in conversions.

Support Your Brand Reputation

With consumer behaviour adapting regularly, people now want more reviews and product comparisons from genuine users and people they trust. This alone is a good reason to partner with affiliates as they produce content that is unbiased and honest. Because of this, they can help boost your brand reputation among consumers.
To help increase conversion and reputation, brands can produce their own content targeted at different points in the sales funnel. This way, once consumers have gained interest from affiliates, they can find all the information that they need to convert into a sale.

Choosing Affiliate Partners that Support Brand Identity

The affiliates and influencers you partner with can say a lot about the kind of brand you are. It is therefore important to choose the right affiliates, just as choosing the right products is the number one concern for affiliates.
Affiliates become the spokesperson for your brand, so it is important that you look for ones that will represent you in a way that you want to be seen.
Things to consider when choosing affiliates:

• Who are their audience? You want to choose affiliates who target a similar audience to you so that products are relatable.
• Do they keep up with marketing trends? If you see that they haven’t adapted their site in years or they are not utilising new tools, they may be lagging behind the curve and miss growth opportunities, meaning they won’t be bringing you high-quality traffic.
• Do they have a good reputation? If your affiliate is rude on Twitter or fuels negative comments, you may want to reconsider associating your brand with them.
• How many other affiliate partnerships do they have? Look for publishers with a handful and seem fully invested. This way, they’re more likely to want to spend time with your brand and help make the partnership more valuable over time. Alternatively, if they have hundreds of affiliate links and no substance, they’re not truly invested in long-term commitments.

Before starting, find out how invested and engaged an affiliate’s audience is. This is more important than the size of their audience. We often see affiliates with smaller audiences – around 5,000 followers – have a higher engagement rate, which in turn leads to higher conversions. You can do this by viewing their social presence, finding reviews or comments on their page, or where they’ve been featured in the news.
Having good quality affiliates also means that as consumer trends change, they will naturally adapt and go with it as opposed to being left behind. As a business, this alleviates some of the pressure to keep up.

Affiliate Marketing Can Boost Performance Without Breaking the Bank

Affiliate marketing is a low cost, high converting channel, and complements all your awareness activities by providing a reliable, lower-funnel converting channel.

All things considered, working with high-quality affiliates can significantly boost your digital marketing performance, resulting in more conversions. Because you pay only on successful conversions, there will be less discretionary spend too, which helps you make the most of your marketing budget.

To go back to our first point, a successful digital marketing strategy interlinks many pieces together. No one tactic or channel is a stand-alone success without the understanding of how other digital assets can be used together to drive your business towards its end goal.