5 Business Reasons to Undertake Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Affiliate marketing has now become a difficult-to-ignore strategy to sell products/services online. It is not as complicated as it may sound. It is really quite a simple, low-cost and low risk way to sell more products/services online and with hugely beneficial returns. For sure, affiliate marketing has been around for quite a while and very popular with digital marketers but it must be done right to get the right results. It is not really a new strategy so to say, but it remains one of the most effective strategies to sell products/services and make money online. With affiliate marketing, marketers who have a product-based business can readily get more ROI, save time and open up more PR opportunities if they have an effective affiliate marketing strategy. The simplicity of affiliate marketing as a business model really lies in the ability of a brand/product merchant providing each affiliate with a unique URL or promotional code to use in their websites/blogs. When affiliates promote these links to their audience, all purchases made through the links entitle the affiliate to a commission. More affiliates campaigns usually translate to more sales and more commissions earned by affiliates. Simple!

Here are 5 reasons affiliate marketers cannot afford to ignore affiliate marketing campaigns in their overall marketing strategy.

1. Wider Reach: The more the number of affiliates you have in your network, the greater the potentials of your reach. The reason is simple. You leverage your own network and the individual networks of all your affiliates to put out your marketing messages to expand your reach. For this reason, if you are diligent and painstaking enough to choose your affiliates correctly, they can significantly expand your reach into new audiences and the results could be phenomenal. Through this scenario, affiliate marketing can easily give your business a global footprint within a relatively short while. This it does by putting your brand/product/service in front of thousands if not millions of your customers and potential customers for less effort.
 
2. Low Cost of Operation: Every reasonable business owner must always keep a keen eye on costs. Affiliate marketing campaigns are relatively cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing methods on TV and Radio where paid ads cost a fortune even without any guarantees that you’ll earn a dime in returns. With affiliate marketing, all you really need is an in-demand product/service, a carefully selected group of interested affiliates with an engaged audience and a decent commission to incentivize your affiliates. That’s it! You are obligated to pay your affiliates only when they make a sale. Quite simple really! You only pay commissions for sales made and nothing else. This arrangement has no chance of hurting your ads budget since your affiliates only take their commission right off the top of the sales you are making. No other marketing tactics come closer to this in terms of low operational costs.

3. Low Risk to Operate: Keeping risks low is also good for business just like keeping costs low. In affiliate marketing, it is easy for the brand/product merchant to push the hard work of marketing to affiliates. That helps to give the brand more time for product development. Since affiliates are expected to be paid only when they make a sale, it simply means the marketing campaigns are essentially self-funding. The harder affiliates work to promote products/services therefore, the more money they make. All affiliates know that if they don’t make sales, they don’t make money. They are therefore obligated to always up their game, take more risks, make more sales and make more money by way of commissions. Simple!

 
4. Easy to Track Metrics: Without the right metrics, it is always pretty difficult to adequately track marketing campaigns. Quite fortunately, affiliate marketing is one of the most easily trackable ways to market your business online. With every affiliate issued a unique code or URL, you can easily determine through these codes, exactly which affiliates are getting you which results. That makes it easy for the product merchant to compare results from his numerous affiliates. It is thus easy to know which of these affiliates are most profitable and how to reward them adequately. Through these efforts, some brands can even decide to give high-performing affiliates better terms or even more incentives like higher commissions in exchange for making a certain amount of predetermined level of sales.

5. Easily Scalable: In digital marketing, economics of scale can always be leveraged for better results. Since every affiliate gets paid depending on the sales they generate, you can at any time add more and unlimited number of affiliates to help generate sales. Therefore, any number of affiliates can always be added to your program as needed and at any time. Because brands are only required to pay affiliates a commission on every sale, affiliate marketing is easy to scale up without hurting the marketing budget of your business.

How to Create a Better Content Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

Every digital marketer needs a good content marketing strategy to run a blog or an e-commerce website. If the strategy is effective, it greatly helps to generate unpaid or organic traffic to the business website. How do you measure this effectiveness? It is by using online marketing content analytics tools such as Google Analytics. These tools help marketers to better analyze the performance of their content types to determine which performs best in terms of cost-effectiveness and marketing results.

When creating a content strategy, one of the most important considerations is to know your audience. If you don’t know your audience well enough, it is pretty difficult to know what type of content you can create to attract their attention better. If for instance you know what your website visitors love to read on your web pages, you can then take deliberate steps to improve those pages or create similar articles to attract more of such people to your website. You can also approach performance based on segmentation. However, what matters most is to try to use analytics results from all these efforts to maximize ROI. Just keep a keen eye on the metrics and you can take better marketing decisions. That’s all it takes.

Here are 7 important marketing metrics your business needs to create a better content marketing strategy to maximize ROI.

1. Total Visits: This metric helps to measure the number of people who visited your web page or website.

2. Brand Awareness Metric: This metric helps to track how people get to know about your business/brand on search engines, your website content or social media posts.

3. Returning Visitor Metric: This metric helps to measure the effectiveness of your website in building an audience your web content directly influences.

4. Web Traffic Sources: This marketing metric helps a marketer to understand exactly where his traffic is coming from. The information is vital to help the marketer to focus content creation on those sources. 

5. Time on Site: This marketing metric measure the time visitors spend on a business website per each visit.  This is hugely important because the longer visitors spend reading your content, the better for your website SEO and your conversion rate.

6. Bounce Rate: This metric helps marketers to assess visitors who left their websites too quickly, maybe just immediately after hitting just a single page. A high bounce rate deeply hurts your website SEO, reduces overall conversion rate and even sales. Smart marketers always aim to reduce bounce rates on their websites to the barest minimum.

7. First Visit Metric: This metric helps marketers to understand how online users find business websites and how they engage during their first visits to the websites.

Proven Marketing Strategies for Conversion Rate Optimization

If you run your small business online, conversion rate optimization ensures you get the highest conversion rate possible by marketing effectively and managing your sales process efficiently. This warrants that you focus on all types of conversions to help the steady growth of your sales revenues. This also means a better focus on all marketing actions and activities that lead to conversion rate optimization. Many of these activities revolve around content marketing which greatly underpins conversion rate optimization. Your website content must be of high quality, educational and informative enough to be of any help to the conversion rate optimization of the site.

Here are some tested and proven content marketing strategies helpful for conversion rate optimization.

Leverage Social Media

Presently, social media because of its huge popularity appears to be one of the greatest tools for boosting business conversions available to business owners. You can leverage your marketing activities on this popularity to get good results. First thing is to get your business on social media and build a steady following for it. Next is to share your marketing messages and even promos widely on the platforms. That will help your business to better elicit engagement and interactions with its social media audience. With an engaged social media following, leads, conversions, customers and sales follow in logical sequence from your efforts.

Improve Your Website Content

The most effective marketing window for your business online is your website. By steadily populating your website with high quality content, you increase its ability to attract traffic. You must therefore endeavor to fill your website with the right content that is well aligned with your business niche. This you can do with effective and creative blogging on the site to address your website visitors’ needs for useful information. Blog posts that provide real value to readers are the most helpful as against those that overtly promote products/services which may be boring in the main.

Market with Captivating Videos

Having a captivating explainer or how-to video on the homepage of your website can be very effective to engage and convert customers. You can explore a range of different tactics to ensure that your video content greatly helps your conversions. If for instance, as with explainer videos you are able to provide value to show customers how your products help them to solve problems, it can be great for your conversions. Videos showing customers how to use your products can help to ensure buyer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps to increase recommendations and improves reviews in no small measure.

Personalize Your Content

As most online marketers very well know, personalized content is always a very effective content to market with. Therefore, you need to explore all ways to make things personal for your business customers. In this quest, you need reliable data and metrics which you can obtain through Google Analytics and Email marketing automation tools. You can effectively use this data to optimize your content to meet the needs of individual consumers. Doing so can result in higher sales figures for your business.

Improve Your Website Loading Speed

Online surfers are always in notorious haste. The reason smart marketers like to capture their attention as quickly as possible. To do this effectively, aside from improving on the content of your website, you also need to improve the loading speed of the website. Ideally, you should ensure every page on your website loads in just 2-3 seconds since many visitors have little patience with slow loading websites. A fast loading website helps to decrease the bounce rate on the site, while slow loading increases it. A decrease in bounce rate keeps visitors longer on the site and helps conversions better.

Use Strong Calls-To-Action, CTAs

It is not good marketing to leave it to chance that your website visitors know how to convert. Visitors must be “lured” to do something for them to do what is expected when they hit your business website. That is where the right call-to-action, CTA becomes imperative in effective marketing. With the right CTA, marketers can effectively lead buyers where they want them to go and to take the right actions they want them to take. Some of such actions include helping to commit your website visitors to a purchase by showing them exactly what they need to do. When your CTAs are strong and effective, they engender more conversions and sales.

Why Having an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy is Important for Your Small Business

How effective your digital marketing strategy is, is directly related to how well your small business can succeed online. Every small business needs a marketing strategy, an effective digital marketing strategy to make any impact online. Without it, you may end up struggling in vain to do business online. Good digital marketing strategies require that every business sets up business goals and initiates the right campaigns to meet these goals. Some of such goals can be anything from gaining more customers, raising brand awareness, lead generation, or boosting sales. If your business strategies are effective, they will ensure that the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals of your business are being reached as planned. If not, the business has ample opportunities to make adjustments to ensure the goals are reached as planned. This is made possible by having in place a digital marketing strategy that encompasses the following.

Budgeting

For your business to succeed online, it needs a digital strategy plan that can specifically analyze your set budget and deploy it judiciously. Budgeting and implementing a good budget makes planning for the future of your business easier and more practicable. That helps the businesses to grow and to produce more sales revenue.

Addressing the Basics

An effective digital marketing strategy is not just about crafting blog content and making a few posts here and there particularly on social media. It is much more than that and understanding the basics is a basic necessity. These basics help you to put all the necessary activities together to form part of a much wider plan that evolves into a working strategy. By doing this, your business stands a very good chance to start reaping the benefits right away.

The Right Tools

You cannot have an effective strategy without deploying the right online tools. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must encompass the use of the internet, mobile devices, social media and search engines to effectively reach consumers. As a remarkable contrast from common traditional marketing methods, such as print, billboards and TV, digital marketing is essentially data-driven. It relies on online technology/tools to measure and track what consumers are searching for or generally doing online. This data can be collected, collated, analyzed and used to understand how each strategy contributes to sales and conversions.

The Right Techniques

A digital marketing strategy requires the right techniques to be effective. Some of such techniques encompass anything from Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media marketing, Email marketing, Pay-Per-Click, PPC, Google Analytics and video marketing. The aim is to always get the message across to the right consumers and in the right form. When these techniques are deployed in a goal-driven approach, they help to reach more consumers. That helps the business to get more leads and customers with a corresponding increase in sales revenues.

Reaching Customers

Customers keep every business in business. Strategies that help businesses to reach customers easily are good for business. When a digital marketing strategy is well crafted, it helps to pinpoint the behavioral patterns of customers/potential customers. Through it, you can get to find out how they prefer to interact online, whether it is by way of smart mobile devices or through desktop computers. You can gather demographics data such as their ages and their consuming preferences. With a concise analysis of this data, businesses can plan effective methods to market to their audiences by taking advantage of the ways they prefer and ways that fit their demographics. That way, businesses can effectively deploy marketing messages that can better hold customers’ attention to get the desired results.

Performance Metrics

With online metrics, you can measure how well your marketing campaigns are doing. Online, you can take advantage of performance measuring platforms that provide tools that can be used to study the success of your marketing campaigns. The data provided by metrics helps businesses to optimize their marketing messages, track the target audience and make any improvements/adjustments in ongoing campaigns. Such metrics allow for more opportunities to reach targets/goals and are of huge benefits to future campaign plans/designs.

Business Transformation

If your priority is to completely transform your business, a well-designed digital marketing strategy will give you the means, platforms and ways in which to grow your desired business model. Overall, whatever you aspire to do in your online business, with the right digital marketing strategy deployed effectively, you can accomplish it.

5 Ways to Effectively Measure Your Ads Campaign Success

In digital marketing campaigns, it is very difficult to judge your marketing campaign success without accurate measurements. Most marketers already know how important and critical measurement is to the success of their marketing campaigns. Because of marketing cost implications and ROI for marketers, it is hugely important for marketers to understand at all times, how effective their campaigns and promotions are. They can only leverage the right metrics to, accurately gauge how successful their digital marketing efforts are. These, here five ways are highly recommended by experienced marketers.

1. Automate Sentiment Analysis

You can manually conduct sentiment analysis or you automate it through a third-party tool. The insights you get from sentiment analysis allow you to know what your customers perceive to be good or bad reasons for these perceptions, as well as causes from a business or customer-service perspective. You can automate AI from third-party tools to help gather sentiments information over a long period of time. Apart from helping to gain valuable insights quickly from large volumes of data, automated sentiment analysis will also minimize error or bias that could easily result from manual analysis. By doing this, brands are able to understand what consumers are saying about the brand over this given period, what perceptions have changed over the same period, and reasons why. Without automation, marketers are saddled with manual analysis of a very huge amount of data from across multiple platforms. This can lead to avoidable errors, misinterpretation and even outright bias because perceptions could be highly subjective to human sentiments.

 
2. Using Emerging Smart Technologies

Emerging technologies are increasingly becoming popular in digital marketing. New smart technologies like Nativex’s XMP are very useful to track creative campaign performance across many different popular social-media platforms including Google. They help to save costs on operations and easily provide an aggregated understanding of which ads work best across social platforms, throughout campaigns and across all various markets. These technologies allow for unprecedented tracking, measurement and customer understanding by providing huge amounts of data to marketers for planning and directing ads campaigns.

3. Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Metrics

You can effectively measure the success of your campaigns if you have a good balance of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Qualitative metrics help to measure customer sentiments online through third-party social-listening tools while quantitative metrics help to measure tangible commercial outcomes like volume of sales and purchases. A combination of both gives information about how customers perceive your business and how much business they are doing with you. From this information, it is easy to see whether a particular brand is actually driving consumer awareness and engagement as desired and how many customers are being led to your brand’s e-commerce website via a particular piece of ad content. These insights can be subsequently leveraged at the point of engagement and connection between your brand and its consumers to rejig your present campaigns or to design your future campaigns. The significant consequence is that the consumer audiences of your brand will feel heard and seen by the brand. That can help to build some loyalty with them even if they had initial negative misgivings and or perceptions.

4. Studying Brand Nuances

Just as brands differ, so are circumstances surrounding their marketing backgrounds. Every brand must therefore, be understood in tandem with its peculiar circumstances. A brand’s current market context must be peculiar to the brand. For instance, metrics for measuring brand awareness cannot be the same for newly launched brands and a brand that already has mass appeal or a stronger market presence. An adjusted approach has to be taken into consideration when deciding on which measurement metrics to be adopted to measure the success of both brands. Similarly, you cannot use the same parameters for previous campaign measurements for an older brand as against a newer brand in the market. The nuances of both brands if taken into account tend to give more equitable and balanced results to help the marketer measure the success of both brands from the campaigns. That allows brands to have a better understanding of what worked and what did not and to inform the design of future campaigns. All told, it is not only important to look at campaign success in isolation, but also to benchmark it against historical failures as well. Expert marketers know that because of the nuances of both brands, a suitable balance always lies somewhere between these two extremes.

5. Classifying Which Metrics to Measure

In digital marketing, the brand you are marketing largely determines the type of metrics you have to measure. For this reason, different perspectives tend to surround the classification of metrics. Most of these perspectives relate to importance, urgency, and time-frame, that is, short-, mid- or long-term perspectives. In bigger business concerns, different departments and functions tend to prioritize different metrics. That is what they specifically measure for their own departmental use. When metrics are taken over an extended time frame and classified, they add real value to ongoing campaigns and the design of future campaigns. Information from these metrics empowers marketers to be more creative in their content marketing activities and to engage meaningfully with their audiences over an extended time-frame, say for about 6 months or more. From this info, marketers can adequately develop strategic plans that fit perfectly into their immediate, short- mid- and long-term marketing objectives.