Creating a Low-risk, High-value Strategy Using Affiliate Marketing
According to Adam Weiss (the General Manager & Sr. vice president of Rakuten Affiliate Network), affiliate marketing is a low-risk, high-value strategy that has been proven to generate sales and brand awareness for the advertisers while generating revenue for the publishers. Mr. Weiss stated that, when affiliate marketing is done right, it can create mutually authentic and beneficial relationships between both the publishers and brands as well as the publishers and their audience.
Below are a few reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing for your business
1. Cost effective marketing
In affiliate marketing, no payments are made to the publisher unless he/she refers a visitor to your site and the visitor ends up becoming your customer. Note that, the marketing costs are also fixed on the cost of the sale. You set the price of your product as well as the percentage (sales commission) that goes to the publisher and you only pay him/her when a visitor through his/her site makes a purchase. This is otherwise known as CPA ( cost per acquisition).
2. Brand exposure/awareness
When it comes to marketing, exposure is very important and what a better way to increase your brand visibility than through affiliate marketing. Through this channel, the publishers display your advert as a display advert or text link on their site and every time someone visits their site, they see the advert and may, in turn, click on it so as to make a purchase.
Through affiliate marketing, you can be sure that your service or product can be viewed by anyone from any part of the world (or you can specify which publishers you wish to work with by region). Your exposure will even increase when your advert stays present on appropriate sites that are targeting audiences that may be interested in your product or service.
3. Outsourced marketing team
Publishers have a lot of expertise in SEO marketing. With them advertising your product on their sites, the likelihood that your product will be seen among the top ranks on Google becomes high and this will definitely increase more traffic to your site and eventually generate more sales. Tracking is easier through affiliate marketing, you can easily track your sales (via cookies). You can even track the views on your site resulting from a customer having visited an affiliate webpage. This is very important because it allows you to know which affiliates are working and which ones are not. You will, therefore, get to know how to budget your marketing more effectively by spending your money on the adverts that are giving you the best results.
Affiliate marketing is at its most powerful if you have a clear communication/promotion strategy which works inline with your wider performance statistics available to you such as visitor behaviour, AdWords performance, search rankings, keywords and product performance. This enables both you as the retailer and the publisher to be more targeted, control promotional campaigns and track performance more accurately.
To learn more about how affiliate marketing can help build your brand, sell you more or give you more exposure get in touch with our team today and we can go for a coffee to help you understand how to set it up or make the most out of your program.