Internet marketing technologies have changed the concept of advertising and how to use it. Fundamentally new mechanisms have emerged for promoting products to the masses, as well as ways of direct communication with a potential client. Many entrepreneurs quite logically start from website optimization tools, blogs and other means of SEO promotion, in vain refusing intermediary advertising.
In particular, affiliate marketing can bring a tangible effect in real sales figures. The main thing is to use it correctly.
Affiliate marketing concept
We are talking about advertising, which is served not by the manufacturer itself, but by a third-party agent, who will also take a certain percentage for the promotion. A typical scheme works this way: a partner takes a link to an advertisement from a customer, distributes it, provides statistics on clicks on this link and, in accordance with the terms of the contract for calculating sales, receives payment in the form of a percentage of each click. Calculation schemes and estimates of advertising returns can be different.
Affiliate Distribution Channels
One of the main questions is which sites a potential partner will use.
The main placements for such advertising include the following:
- Author's blog. A partner’s own channel, which can show ads to readers as a link in the text or a banner.
- YouTube channel. A popular media platform can also be used for high-impact promotion. On his YouTube channel, an author with a large number of subscribers can integrate links into video descriptions or talk about the advertised product in the videos themselves.
- Cultural and entertainment and informational events. Various exhibitions, conferences, festivals and seminars with a certain theme can become an opportunity to promote through business cards with a link to the product both among customers and among potential sponsors.
- Email. A morally obsolete but still effective way of mass promotion. If your partner has a large database of email addresses and experience in writing sales letters with creative design ideas, you can count on high returns in the form of clicks on links and subsequent sales.
Attracting partners
If the business itself does not have sufficient potential for growth and competition, successful owners of media channels who are ready to offer their sites for advertising will hardly be interested in promoting it. Therefore, the very access to partners involves the use of marketing elements.
It is necessary to turn to potential partners with a ready-made cooperation project. For simplicity, it’s worthwhile to create a business card site in advance, which will describe basic information about the company and its product, as well as the terms of cooperation.
Affiliate program advertising
Finding partners is a fairly simple task, since the marketing market in the digital space is active and dynamic in itself. But it is important to correctly build an advertising strategy for your proposal, which will help the following ways:
- Corporate website. The main channel for communication with agents and customers who are interested in obtaining information about the company. It also integrates a service for registering partners who agree to cooperate.
- Advertising in niche communities.To simplify the search for advertisers and distributors of advertising, special communities are created that represent one or another segment in the market.
- Advertising on social networks and blogs. Also corporate information branches of the company, which must be used to communicate with partners.
- Directly a store or other site where sales take place. Here, the potential partner is clearly acquainted with the advertised offer.
Work organization
Interaction with agents should occur according to a pre-established model. It is important to comply with established promotion rules without the use of "black" methods, for which a company with its media resources may receive fines from search engines like Google. Otherwise, for the most part, partners get complete freedom. It should be noted that they themselves are interested in successful promotion, since the effectiveness of their work will directly determine the earnings.
At the same time, studies show that only a fifth of advertising partners ultimately form about 80% of sales attracted in this way. Accordingly, it will be necessary to regularly monitor agents who do not bring any profit at all. The selection of productive agents is an important condition for streamlining marketing.
Sales Automation
The advantage of affiliate marketing is that it saves the manager from performing routine work on organizing product promotion tools. In this case, the automation of sales with third-party customer acquisition allows us to rely on the autonomy of this part of the enterprise.
Achieve effective automation will help modern software tools to control and manage traffic with clear calculations of statistics on clicks, time spent on the site, purchases, etc.