Why your fintech or bank’s affiliate program might not land placements in top publications (& how to fix it)

Top publishers are selective and have many companies competing to work with them, making it difficult for firms to stand out.

And if you don’t know what they’re looking for, trying to pitch popular affiliates can feel like walking around in the dark.  

In our experience, there are certain criteria that top publications expect to see from quality partners. Here are five things we see preventing financial institutions from landing a top placement.

1. You don’t have a strong product

Top publishers select the best products to showcase for their customers, so your product has to stand out or measure up to the products they’re already promoting.

A competitive product might be a high-yield savings account with an APY that’s in line with competitors’ rates.

But a strong product may also have better features or value for customers than your competitors. For example, a high-yield savings account with a competitive APY that also offers no minimum balance or gives customers a deposit bonus can pique the attention of top publishers looking to provide the best value for their audiences. 

2. Your product doesn’t fall into common categories

If your firm’s product doesn’t easily fit into the existing content categories covered by the publications you’re targeting, it can be harder to land placements.

For example, pitching a travel rewards card or a certificate of deposit (CD) is generally straightforward, because everyone knows what they are and top publishers are already covering these offerings. 

Some publishers may be less willing to partner with non-traditional products, like invoice financing platforms, if they don’t see an obvious fit in their existing content. 

Even if you have great results with other affiliates, top publishers are unlikely to prioritize finding a placement for a unique product that doesn’t fit their standard categories. 

3. Your product or brand lacks credibility

Publishers are wary of promoting products that are unknown or haven’t yet built market credibility. Their reputation as a reliable resource is key to their business, so they carefully choose the brands they feature to maintain audience trust.

This is especially true for financial publications, which serve as trusted advisors for their readers’ important financial decisions. 

If you’re not actively marketing yourself digitally or building brand awareness, especially at the top of the funnel, publishers may question your credibility.

Without visible efforts to build your financial brand’s presence in the market, top publishers might hesitate to work with you, unsure if you’re a safe bet for their audience. This includes end customer reviews and ratings on both Google and sites like Trustpilot. Without a strong rating, it will raise flags with these publishers.

4. You can’t prove your marketing funnel is effective

Not being able to convert customers is a problem for top publishers because it affects their revenue and reputation.

First, publishers rely on commissions to make income. So they’re reluctant to feature products that may perform poorly on conversion metrics, especially when working on a CPA model. 

Second, publishers have invested heavily in building trust with their audience and are cautious about recommending products that offer a poor customer experience or aren’t relevant. 

If you don’t prove your application and product funnels are effective, top publishers may see your product as too risky to feature. 

5. You don’t have relationships with big publishers

When trying to approach a bigger publication, you may not have the necessary contacts or relationships with publishers to get your foot in the door. Or you may not know the best way to successfully connect with top publishers to start a partnership. 

Even if you have contacts in one product category, top publishers are big engines that often have different editorial and advertising departments. So you still may need to put in leg work to get to the right person for your next campaign with a different product.

Here is what we’ve seen work on landing placements with top publishers. 

Make your product more competitive and attractive to audiences with publisher insights

Your current affiliate partners and publishers can be great resources. They can help you understand how your product is positioned in the market and where it stacks up against competitors or industry benchmarks, because they have a wealth of data at their disposal. 

Their insights can provide you with the information you need to give your product team well-reasoned changes to improve your product and its competitiveness before you pitch top publishers. 

To get this information from your current publishers, prioritize establishing a rapport and building relationships with your partners. Exchanging data is a great way to do this. For example, you could share detailed data on your funnel so they can analyze the results of a campaign, while they could share how your product compares against competitors they work with. 

However, we know many marketing teams don’t have any control over product optimization and competitiveness. Does that mean you can’t work with a top publisher? If you have the budget, you can sometimes get secondary placements with popular affiliates through methods like fulfilled incentives. (We’ll cover this further on.) 

Help publishers understand how to promote your product when it’s unique

Publishers may be wary of a unique product if they can’t easily see how to position or talk about it, or where to integrate it with existing content.

So if you have a product which doesn’t neatly fit into a financial category, you have to make it easy for publishers to grasp. 

Here are some tips on how to guide publishers to promote a unique product: 

• Highlight good customer feedback and conversion rates from existing campaigns. Offer data that proves your product resonates with and attracts customers, even if it isn’t a traditional offering. Use metrics from current affiliates and other digital campaigns to demonstrate its popularity. 
• Give recommendations on how publishers can position and cover your product. List key features and provide angles that will appeal to readers. For example, include an article draft or identify specific pages on their sites to make it easy for them to envision an editorial feature for your product.
• Leverage existing content by suggesting ways to incorporate your product. If a publisher already has content on related topics, show them that adding another product will round out their coverage. Demonstrate that they can introduce your product to audiences within their current content. 

By spelling out what makes your product great and how much traction it’s already getting, you make it easy for top publishers to see why your product is a good fit for their content and audience. 

Build brand awareness in a crowded financial marketplace 

If you’re a lesser-known brand trying to expand to new geographic territory or launching a new product, build brand awareness so top tier publishers can see you have legitimacy. 

Working with smaller and longer-tail publishers can raise your profile and expose your brand to different audiences. This approach will build your credibility, especially alongside earned and paid PR and other digital campaigns. 

As you expand your marketing campaigns and increase your affiliate placements, you can use your conversion rates from smaller partners to prove to top publishers that your product resonates with audiences and your brand has gained recognition. 

You can also point to Trustpilot reviews or even organic content online that shows a history of happy customers. 

For example, one of our banking clients had a lot of success locally and turned their eye towards expansion. They had a strong product and competitive rates, but were not a national brand and didn’t have enough exposure to land top publications right away. 

We aimed for them to increase their brand reach and to introduce their products to new audiences. By working with a mix of smaller and long-tail publishers, they successfully raised their national profile and built credibility through niche placements.

Improve your marketing funnel and prove conversion rates

Publishers will want to see high conversion rates when you pitch them. So, optimize your marketing funnel before approaching them. 

Start by analyzing your funnel to identify drop-off points where customers might encounter friction. Examine landing pages, the customer online account opening process, and other customer acquisition touchpoints.

Your existing affiliate partners can also help with funnel optimization. They see many campaigns and conversion rates, so they can point to where your funnel underperforms if you share your data with them.

As you examine your funnel, make sure your analytics are giving you a full picture of your affiliate data. Use tracking and reporting tools designed for financial firms to monitor and capture the right information and demonstrate strong performance for top publishers. 

Proper tracking and reporting also shows that publishers can expect good results from working with you, and proves you invested in long-term affiliate success. 

Build relationships with top affiliates

If you don’t have any contacts with top affiliates, one way to get a warm introduction is by working with an established agency. 

Agencies can help you pitch to the right people and craft effective messaging, as they have worked with the partners you’re targeting.

Once you’re working with top affiliates, you need to be responsive and invested in your publisher relationships.

If you’re not getting top billing with your current publishers, it may be because you aren’t taking a collaborative approach. Instead, ask questions and brainstorm opportunities together as you lead up to pitching bigger campaigns and ideas. 

And remember that large publications have many content verticals. So if you started out with a mortgage product placement and now want to work on a savings account campaign, you will need an introduction. This is easier when you have established a solid relationship with your points of contact.

In our experience as an affiliate management agency, financial brands can achieve the high level growth they are looking for even without a big name placement. We have seen financial institutions use a mix of smaller, long-tail publishers and experiment with their affiliate campaigns to reach ambitious customer-growth goals.

One example of how we’ve seen this work is with a bank that couldn’t yet pay out the costs of bigger affiliate campaigns, but still wanted to drive growth. 

We helped them partner with a mix of smaller publishers that showcased their leading high-yield savings account product alongside competitors to build credibility within their budget. 

As a result, they met their initial goals, and even received organic inclusion from top publishers because their product and brand gained so much traction. 

Learn how to promote your savings and checking accounts through affiliate marketing.

Here are three success stories which show how our clients overcame their hurdles to secure the right placements.

1. How a credit card company finally got top billing from a large publisher

One of our credit card clients with a generous affiliate program budget had been effective in securing some placements with popular affiliates. 

But they struggled to get a premium spot with their top publishers because their product, while strong, was not clearly a market leader.  

So we leveraged their rapport with existing publishers and used their affiliate budget to pitch an incentive campaign, where the publishers would market exclusive promotions to their end audiences funded by the card company. 

This helped differentiate the product and make it more competitive, and therefore successfully placed their card product in a premium slot, putting their brand in direct conversation with their competitors. 

2. How a bank improved their product pitch with editorial suggestions

Our banking client with a leading high-yield savings account has one of the best APYs in its category. 

While this product might seem easy to pitch, the bank had never had coverage from top publishers before and had lower product recognition overall. So they needed help to showcase their competitive product to potential partners.

We pitched one of our top publishers by highlighting that they had no coverage of our bank’s product, despite it being better than some offerings the publisher was promoting. We framed this as a missed opportunity for them to bring the best products to their audience, and provided data, like conversion rates, to back that up. 

While we trusted our publisher partner would respond favorably, we also didn’t hesitate to follow up and make ourselves available to get the job done. The result was a placement for our bank client, more robust editorial coverage for our publisher, and a competitive product to offer customers––a win-win-win. 

3. How PolicyMe built a case for a new vertical through experimentation

Our insurance client PolicyMe was debuting new verticals for insurance and wanted affiliate marketing to be a part of their launch strategy. 

But when they rolled out their new term life insurance product, there weren’t a lot of publishers in the Canadian financial space talking about this particular insurance category. So opportunities for easy affiliate placements were slim. 

We knew that to get them placed with a top publisher, we would have to expand the life insurance vertical. So we advocated for more term life insurance coverage by affiliates we already had relationships with, building a new conversation around it. We also worked with smaller and long-tail affiliates to open new doors to build credibility and land PolicyMe placements on sites like Finder.com. 

PolicyMe was also open to experimentation and negotiating their target acquisition costs. This allowed them to run unique campaigns, like hosted widgets, to drive results. 

Thanks to PolicyMe’s flexibility and willingness to experiment, they achieved a 65% year-over-year growth in submitted applications, increased their visibility, and scaled their affiliate program, making the channel one of their top four growth drivers. 

Read the PolicyMe case study to learn more.

Landing a placement with a top publisher is difficult, but doable with a strategic approach. Make it easy for publishers to understand what your product is, why it will resonate with their audience, and why collaborating with you will be mutually beneficial. 

While it may take more time and effort to land a placement with a popular publisher than it does to engage smaller partners, your efforts can pay off by significantly improving your customer acquisition growth goals. 

Ready to approach top publishers and want an expert partner to do it with? Contact Fintel Connect today.