Already with the translation of the term affiliate the rough framework of this marketing strategy becomes clear. It means to affiliate, and that’s what it’s all about: an outside person is “affiliated” with the company in the form of a partnership.
This person – also called affiliate – receives a commission from the company for the sales achieved by him. In the online area, the affiliate is usually assigned a special link, which makes it possible to track the purchases made through him. Affiliate marketing offers many advantages, here are the 6 most important ones:
1. low cost factor
The main advantage of an affiliate program is that it is completely performance based. Affiliates only receive a commission if the agreed effect, such as a sale, is achieved. This ensures that affiliates are usually more motivated than employees who get their wages either way. It ensures that your company is not spending money unnecessarily on marketing efforts that have no proven value.
In addition, recruiting partners from other sectors is an easy way to enter new markets without making large financial investments. Another plus factor is that affiliates plan and execute their marketing activities themselves, so you also bear most of the associated costs.
2. minimum self-effort
It’s basically self-explanatory: since, as mentioned above, it’s a partnership with an affiliate who does the marketing for your business, there’s no need for an extensive team to create and oversee sophisticated marketing efforts.
Your marketing team are affiliates. You only need one of your employees to take care of the affiliate marketing, evaluate it and find new affiliates – depending on the size of your affiliate program you may need several. All other employees can concentrate on the core business. This also gives you time to focus on other projects, such as the further development of your business.
3. improve your ranking (SEO)
SEO is still a topic that should not be ignored, especially in the online sector. Affiliate marketing can contribute greatly to your SEO through numerous backlinks to your website via the blogs, social pages, etc. of your affiliates can make a great contribution to improving your SEO. The more websites that link to your pages, the more opportunities you have to convert those users into paying customers.
Affiliate links may not have a direct impact on your search engine rankings, but through you more people will search for your products and be navigated to your pages – which is great for your rankings.
4. increase your brand awareness
Affiliate marketing offers your company the opportunity to increase your brand awareness by using the diversity of each affiliate to reach a much wider and also new audience that may have never heard of them before.
The often colorful and positive way affiliates present their brand creates a whole new awareness of the brand and helps to further build and expand your brand awareness. In addition, as a company, you get customer feedback on new products more quickly through this type of marketing and the associated word-of-mouth.
5. simplified data analysis
Thanks to detailed dashboards and sales reports, you can monitor all the data and also optimize it based on the statistics. By being able to track affiliate performance, you have the ability to effectively plan your marketing decisions and increase the use of successful affiliates.
This will also give you a better overview of what kind of products or services are of most interest to your audience, so you can focus only on those that will bring you the most benefit. This saves time and money.
6. high return on investment
Affiliate marketing has been proven to have a much higher return on investment than most marketing strategies. This is partly because this marketing activity not only minimizes company spending on online advertising, but also lets you positively impact overall sales.
You calculate the ROI by dividing the gross profit by the marketing costs incurred and taking this value times 100.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, it makes sense to make affiliate marketing a significant part of your marketing strategies as it offers better value for money than other strategies. And as the market continues to grow, the benefits that affiliate marketing offers to businesses are becoming more and more apparent. So what are you waiting for: create your affiliate program and make it known. For example, with an explainer video.
