How to Leverage Social Media to Grow Affiliate Programs

Have you heard? Social media is where nearly everybody is at these days doing their own thing. It has mass appeal and mass following, the reason it has become an essential channel for online marketers to grow their affiliate programs. Today, mass adoption of social media by marketers has no doubt impacted every facet of marketing in many and immeasurable ways. The most beneficial way appears to be affiliate and partner marketing since this is carefully designed to leverage on the popularity of social media. Essentially, in the online marketing world of today, any type of partner, including influencers, can leverage the principles of affiliate marketing to reach a very wide range of consumers exactly where they tend to spend a very significant part of their time while online. Such channels include but not limited to where a majority of them may be found just scrolling around. Such places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest where they are either following influencers, or they are influencers themselves. This established relationship hugely supports the idea that influencers and social media together can help bring an incredible monetization opportunity for affiliates involved in affiliate marketing programs.

 

Many online marketers now know that they can find a wealth of new opportunities for engaging with potential customers via social media channels. The good news is that it works! Just as consumers grow more and more comfortable using social media channels for brand and product discovery, and shopping, social media options continue to expand. Thus, if you are a marketer looking to deepen your relationships with customers, it is smart to consider leveraging social media in your affiliate marketing efforts. With the ease of use, popularity, mass appeal and easy tracking technology associated with social media, good marketers can easily take advantage of these offers to grow their revenues and affiliate businesses.
Here are some simple ways affiliates can leverage social media to grow their revenues and affiliate businesses.

Always Take Advantage of Social Media Innovations
 
Social media platforms are always trying to evolve new and practical ways to satisfy their numerous users. That is why many like to innovate based mostly on user preferences. These innovations bring with them, new social tactics more user-friendly platforms which are better at engaging the target audiences. As a marketer, it is smart to always seize the opportunities of these new innovations with a view to leveraging the newest ways to acquire new customers and build brand loyalists as a viable way to grow your affiliate marketing business.

Leverage Advanced Tracking Capabilities of Mobile Commerce

The world is increasingly in a hurry and mobile devices are becoming indispensable in world commerce. Most people are finding it increasingly easier to complete business transactions right from their mobile devices. These devices now come with advanced tracking capabilities which affiliate marketers can rely on to determine the direction and progress of their marketing efforts. Facebook alone as a very popular social media platform has over 1.3 billion active users and over 90% of these persons are accessing the platform by way of mobile devices. In combination with other social media platforms out there, we are looking at over 3.5 billion active users. That is a huge mobile market out there with advanced tracking capabilities affiliate marketers can leverage for their businesses. Marketers can now track nearly everything from what partner influenced an app download to what mobile tracking link led to a conversion. That makes it easy for them to incentivize their affiliate partners to ensure prompt and accurate payment of commissions. These advanced tracking capabilities of mobile devices now make it easier than ever before to optimize affiliate campaigns which marketers are running through social media platforms.

Target Your Audience from Their Favorite Platforms
 
Well, it is a marketing truism that every business person must try to take his business to where the right customers can be found. Daily, many social media users spend considerable time on the platforms and many are on multiple platforms. That is where they can be accurately targeted depending on which platforms they use more. Even if you are partnering with publishers, media brands, influencers, or other brands, distributing co-marketing content on the social networks exactly where your audience is active tends to make a very good marketing sense. That ensures a more even and much cheaper distribution among content marketers, bloggers/influencers, and social media channels. It engenders better results as well.


 
Align Your Content to All Stages of the Consumer’s Journey 

In today’s social media-obsessed world, many bloggers and other content marketing affiliates rely hugely on social media to creatively and effectively promote their brands. On social media, they rely heavily on good content to drive awareness, consideration, and eventual purchase. Therefore, social media tends to play a very huge role in the early stages of the consumer journey up to the final click to buy. Advanced tracking capabilities enables marketers to deploy better attribution and improved partner commissioning strategies. Thus, by including social media channels in your affiliate programs, you can easily enhance your ability to reach consumers in all stages of the purchase journey starting from product research to comparing prices to the actual buying of the product/service. With the ease of tracking transactions from anywhere associated with them, social media partnerships now help immensely to broaden affiliate marketing techniques and with better results in tow.

Work with Affiliates who have Commanding Influence on Social Media
 
This influence is determined by the number of followers the affiliate already has who trust him and rely in his judgement to make buying decisions. Working with such influencers as partners helps to get marketing traction faster online. If you choose to distribute promotions and offers through social media influencers, the purposes may be different. Maybe you are looking to elevate average order value, repeat purchases, or new product/service experimentation. The type of influencer you settle for on social media will largely determine how successful your quest can be. By setting very clear expectations up front with your social partners, it will therefore not cause future disputes to determine exactly what constitutes a desired action, and what doesn’t. That settled, it becomes easy for you to optimize high-performing programs and to drive incremental revenue through the social media channels that are working well and giving the desired results.

Highly Economic Ways to Boost Conversions

Most online businesses are always looking for ways to increase their conversion rates. For such businesses, affiliate marketing always comes in very handy because of its unique qualities of helping to boost conversion rates. It is economical too and advert budget friendly because it delivers effectively on a pay-per-performance model. What that means is that merchants pay commissions to affiliates only on the basis of the conversions they help to garner. That appears fair enough on the surface but merchants still have to experiment with different affiliate partnerships and sales strategies until they find the one that works best for them. That requires some unique strategies to get right.  When merchants manage to get that right, they can then expect a remarkable boost in conversions and ultimately business revenue figures.


 
Here are some strategic effects which help to enhance the process.

Effects of Someone Your Consumer Trusts

This comes into effect by simply targeting people your consumers can trust and bringing them on board your referral marketing chain. In this regard, bloggers and social media influencers are particularly effective because they already have a large following of persons who trust and rely on their recommendations to make a purchase decision.  These people are very effective at helping to grab conversions from their loyal and dedicated fans/followers on the basis of the relationship they’ve established which subsists on trust. To get the desired results, you must as a matter of deliberate policy try to build very strong relationships with your affiliates, be on the lookout always for affiliates who really like your product/service, are trustworthy and have a full engagement of a large following. Such affiliates help a great deal to boost conversion rates at very cheap costs.

Effects of Hyper-Targeting

In modern day online marketing, you get better results when your ads are specially designed to appeal to a very specific group of people. That is hyper-targeting. As a remarkable improvement over traditional marketing methods, marketers are now able to focus on a very specific demographic, down to age, gender, location, education, and even brand preference. The results of such hyper-targeting could be very impressive. When you introduce affiliate marketing in the mix, it not only allows you to control what message is sent about your brand, but also who sends it and to whom. That makes it imperative for you to work with affiliate partners who are closely aligned with your target audience. Doing so enables you to deliver at all times, a clear and powerful message to your consumers from someone they trust.  That is what helps to get the best results which reveal this method as a very effective strategy for boosting conversions. However, for it work satisfactorily, it is advisable that you know very well your target consumer at the outset. Research deep to find out your consumer’s core values as well as where and how they spend their time online using the right online tools which enable you to make changes in your marketing strategy as necessary.

Effects of Bolstering Valuable Content
 
Online marketers have since found out that one great benefit of affiliate marketing is that it contributes immensely to your presence on the internet and, ultimately, your search engine rankings. Influencers, bloggers and publishers who routinely write highly informational and educative posts about your products/services work in anticipation of Google’s need for user-friendly content that serves a useful purpose to the reader. When Google likes your content, it ranks it high on its SERPs. That gets it better noticed for greater readership and ultimate conversions. To be so favoured by search engines, affiliates must habitually write good content that people like to read. Such content must be SEO compliant for better rankings and merchants must regularly frontload their affiliates with vital and current information about their products/services.

Effects of Leveraging Special Promotions
 
Affiliate marketing can help grow your conversion rate by helping to attract new and repeat customers through special promotions. Most online shoppers depend on someone they trust to take most of their buy decisions. In that category are influencers, bloggers and publishers whom the buyers trust and are already following. Even if buyers are hesitant to commit on account of price or some other impediment, a recommendation from influencers or bloggers helps that process along for them to commit to buying. Special promotions which come highly recommended by these online influencers help boost conversions for the business.

Promo codes, discounts, deals and sales on their own may help grow conversion rates but without a good reach, their effects are severely limited. It is influencers and bloggers who help to provide this much needed reach and eventual boost in conversions. So, when merchants combine affiliate marketing with special promotions, they manage to get their promo deals in front of many more people as a result. That helps them to pick up more conversions from both brand-new and repeat customers. For this to work effectively, merchants must always look out for the best ways to regularly offer exclusive deals and discounts using affiliates special promo codes and partnering with such affiliates for freebies and giveaways.

Effects of Building Your Backlinks

Google maintains that, “having other sites link back to your site is like a vote for the quality of your site.” That appears to be why Google uses the number and quality of backlinks to a website as part of its ranking considerations. If your site has high-quality influencers/publishers linking back to it, Google is more likely to rank it higher on its SERPs. That alone can help in a great way to boost conversion rates for your site. Even though backlinks can help merchants rank higher on Google’s SERP, it is possible only if they’re done in precisely the right way. Expert Marketers advise adequate care when building backlinks to avoid “spamming” which Search Engines routinely and mercilessly penalize. For this reason, merchants must not ignore suitable keyword search and usage. All their affiliates must be provided with specific anchor texts for use on their sites and cross-posting actively encouraged among the affiliates. All these help the value of backlinks, search engine rankings and a boost in conversion rates.