Affiliate marketing has grown exponentially in the past decade and has exploded in profitability as well as popularity.
It has expanded into every aspect of the Web and has the potential to be an extremely powerful, lucrative, and profitable way of generating both sales and revenue.
According to a Forrester Consulting study, 81% of brands use affiliate marketing to attract new audiences and engage with existing ones. This statistic is an indication of the fact that affiliate marketing has progressed in leaps and bounds over the last few years.
Enumerated below are a few affiliate marketing strategies the can be leveraged to grow your brand and generate more sales.
A marketing plan is critical for mapping out your future marketing goals. It should include your – market analysis, business objectives, marketing strategies, steps to achieving business objectives, realistic budget and realistic schedule.
A few critical questions need to be answered. These include questions like:
Choosing the right affiliate program is an important factor in becoming an affiliate marketer. If you choose the wrong program, you may end up not making any money from all your efforts.
Here are some general rules of thumb to follow when choosing which affiliate to join:
The best affiliate product to sell is the one you are most familiar with. If you have expertise in a certain field, and you pick a product related to that field, you will have a huge advantage over your competition because you will be able to understand your customers.
Make sure that your website is designed correctly and set up for optimal SEO. Use the right keywords, title tags and meta tags in your content to ensure that you’re able to rank high on SERP. This will ensure that you’re attracted to get some organic traffic. You also need to have relevant and updated content on your website.
Brands can ride on the popularity of an influencer’s brand to get a push for developing a preference for their own brand in the market.
According to Deloitte, customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate.
This is possible because influencers have a pre-established audience (which includes your target audience) who are already receptive to their ideas and endorsements. They have a built-in level of trust & credibility with their audience and are able to forge strong, personal connections with them.
Find online communities where most of your target audience hangs out on.
If your target audience includes adults between 25 and 40, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn may be the best options for you. For young adults between 20 and 25, Instagram and Snapchat are the more popular options.
If you can clearly define what demographics your target audience belongs to, you will be able to choose the right network.
Generate more revenue by promoting your affiliate products on the right social media platform.
Many of the people who come on your website, leave it without taking any action that helps your business. You can use email marketing campaigns to bring a percentage of these people back to your website. People treat emails with a higher level of a priority compared to other forms of communication because it is used for work.
Checking emails is one of the first things that most people do when they reach work.
You must have a few best-selling products on your website. To generate more sales, you need to analyze and interpret which are your best-selling products. You also need to learn how to cross-sell and upsell related products.
When you find success with your affiliate marketing campaigns, you should try to maximize profits by scaling up your ad campaigns.
To do this, you will need to reinvest the amount you earn from your affiliate marketing campaigns. Use it to fund more ad campaigns or to promote new products to the same audience.
Your success in affiliate marketing will depend on how you adjust your ad campaigns to make them more effective and efficient. To do this you’ll need to use two important tools – Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels.
Google Analytics will tell you whether your ad campaign brings enough website traffic or not. You can also use it to track the movement of the user within your website. And, most importantly, you can use analytics to check whether the users click on your affiliate link or not.
On the other hand, Facebook pixels let you keep a track of users who come on your website from Facebook. This will help you create a custom audience that’s made up of visitors who already visit your website.
You need to understand that you cannot become a successful affiliate marketer overnight.
Even when you choose and implement the right affiliate marketing strategies, you need to have some patience. It can take anywhere between 6 months to a year for your affiliate marketing strategies to bear some fruit.