How Affiliate Marketing Benefits Your Business

One question new comers to affiliate marketing always like to ask! How exactly does affiliate marketing benefit my business? Very simple and easy question to answer! Affiliate marketing is all about leveraging in your business. That however depends hugely on the strategy you are using. Depending on your own strategy, you can leverage affiliate marketing on almost any broad business goal of your choice. It is one very quick and efficient way to put your product/service in front of a very wide and diverse audience at the lowest cost possible particularly online. The end result is a huge build up on the reputation of your product/service and even your brand.

Among many others, these here benefits easily accrue to your business if you decide to adopt affiliate marketing as one of your marketing strategies.

Boosting Brand Awareness

Trust and authenticity count a great deal in brand promotion. Theoretically, in affiliate marketing, the affiliates who promote your brand are assumed to have tried it or sampled it and liked it. That puts them in a trusted position to provide a genuine recommendation since they’ve chosen to promote the product/service. Believability comes in very quickly in that kind of arrangement and that helps to quickly boost brand awareness. 


 
Growing Sales

The primary reason why most businesses opt to adopt affiliate marketing as part of their marketing strategy is that it has the proven and demonstrated power to increase sales fairly quickly and jack up revenue figures. Because affiliate marketing strategy has many variants and is easily adaptable, it can be easily used to grow sales fairly quickly irrespective of any specific challenges the business may be facing. For instance, any businesses that had hitherto relied hugely on offline advertising with limited results can easily and seamlessly grow sales through online affiliate marketing techniques.

Testing and Experimenting with Campaigns
 
As technologies change, so are marketing techniques. That alone challenges smart marketers to constantly and routinely test the techniques they are using for better results. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in really handy. Marketers have since discovered that one of the most beneficial ways to leverage affiliate marketing is by using it to test and experiment on new products/services as they are being rolled out. This is hugely important because such marketers don’t have to worry too much about the cost implications of these experimentations since affiliate marketing relies more on a pay for performance model. Using it to test new campaigns and marketing strategies can be a really smart move for marketers particularly on promotional costs implications. Therefore, adopting affiliate marketing strategy is one very smart way to test the markets at limited cost implications before trying other promotional methods with huge cost implications.

Boosting Brand Reputation

Many marketers routinely spend several millions of dollars annually on reputation building for their businesses. Affiliate marketing characteristically helps most others to keep these costs as the lowest levels while still hugely effective at boosting brand reputation. Once a merchant gets a link out there for affiliates to use as backlink to its product/service, the promotional effort could easily go viral by taking on a life of its own depending on how good the affiliate is in its promotional efforts. With Artificial Intelligence and quick feedbacks coming into the mix in the use of affiliate marketing, businesses can quickly handle consumer enquiries and concerns thereby helping to boost brand reputation.

Boosting Leads Generation

Any marketing or promotional effort online must rely on leads generation to boost business even though leads generation remains one huge challenge most online businesses routinely face. Affiliate marketing in most cases helps out to meet such challenges. Affiliate marketing helps to provide powerful tools of discovery for your target consumer. When merchants partner effectively with websites, blogs, and other platforms particularly social media, it becomes easy for them to advertise to a very specific group of people without having to sink valuable resources into building up their own audience. It is smart for merchants to settle for affiliates with good online reputation and very high numbers of followers. That is because it is a given that such affiliates already have detailed audience demographics and data available to them. That is what most merchants easily leverage on by placing their products/services in front of those who are most likely to become customers. That helps leads generation fairly quickly.

Cost Effectiveness

Characteristically, affiliate marketing works well with pay for performance model of marketing. Meaning, you earn as you work! Affiliate marketing programs can do what other marketing strategies can do and even more at less costs. That is what makes affiliate marketing a very viable option for any business irrespective of its size, experience or marketing budget. Since businesses only pay commissions in affiliate marketing depending on provable work done, there is little or no room for promotional wastages. That is cost effectiveness at play. If through the promotional efforts of an affiliate it is established that a purchase was made or an action was taken in line with a pre-established agreement, it is only then a payment is due. Meaning? Merchants are not expected to pay out any money unless they’ve made money themselves. That’s cost effectiveness which affiliate marketing techniques guarantee.


 

How to Understand Affiliate Marketing Programs

For most marketers, affiliate marketing simply involves referrals and commissions payments. It significantly involves referrals where bloggers, influencers and publishers get paid when a buyer takes action based on their recommendation. What that signifies to all participants in affiliate marketing programs is essentially that when a blogger, influencer or an affiliate promotes a certain product/service, he receives a commission when someone signs up or makes a purchase as a direct result of such promotion. That relationship works smoothly when merchants provide gateway links to access their products which publishers promote in their own websites or blogs. A click on that link takes online visitors to the product/service being promoted. This model of affiliate marketing works well when a popular and well-trafficked website/blog embeds an affiliate link into a post on its website/blog. This is with a view to guiding website visitors to take a certain action. If per chance such action leads to purchase of the product or to a sign up for a certain subscription or on-going service, the publisher earns a commission based on prior agreed percentage of the sale. In some variants of affiliate marketing, even a click is enough to earn a commission irrespective of whether a purchase was made or not.

Businesses seeking to advertise through affiliate marketing channels must first find influencers or affiliates operating in the same or similar niches to their own. With the advantage of similar audiences to their own, it becomes fairly easy to quickly and effectively promote a merchant’s products/services to enhance its desired growth of sales and leads. This is quite a very simple and mutually beneficial relationship for all the parties involved in the business if you ask me.


 
For an affiliate marketing program to work well, it requires the participation of the following three parties:

The Merchant

A merchant is the entity that takes ownership of the product/service to be promoted. For that reason, it is the merchant’s responsibility to pay the affiliate a commission for promoting its product/service on their own website, social media service or blog. A merchant may be a company that directly owns the product/service or has the mandate to sell product/service.

The Affiliate

An affiliate is the entity that has responsibility to promote the product/service on behalf of the merchant and earns a commission from its promotional efforts by way of affiliate agreements and understanding with the merchant. Most affiliates use their own websites/blogs as well as their social media sites where the referral link to the product/service is posted. With large following and good website traffic, they are able to expose the referral link to a wide and diverse audience comprising of potential buyers/customers.

The Buyer

A buyer is the entity that responds to the referral link posted by affiliates and takes action to buy the product. The affiliate is effective when many more buyers are able to see and respond to the affiliate link embedded into its website/blog posts. It is this link a buyer follows to become a customer by making a purchase or taking some kind of desired action.

For all three parties, it is a win-win partnership. The merchant site benefits from targeted exposure. The affiliate site makes passive income for promoting the referral link. The consumer gets the value of a personalized and trusted recommendation and in some cases even a discount, a coupon or some other valuable incentive. This is essentially how affiliate marketing programs work for all parties involved in the business.