Brands Need to Use Their Pool of Affiliates for Collaboration

In the affiliate marketing landscape where organisations continue to wrestle with their digital brand identity, they shouldn’t panic! Brands should make more use of the affiliate pool working in synergy to help the brand provide something that’s truly remarkable and authentic.

It’s time for brands to consider their affiliate pool as an extended workforce who can provide a rich insight into the views of your brand, the strengths and weaknesses – it’s time to consider your affiliates as part of your team. Brands need to focus on what their unique selling points are to not only attract customers to purchase but what also attracts affiliates to join and sign up to their affiliate program, and it’s not all about offering the highest commission rates!

Brands should focus on building a platform of trust and loyalty by sharing branded messaging and content with their affiliates who in turn should use this to drive a relationship with the customer in order to help fuel sales and build an ongoing stream of content to support the affiliate program.

Reasons to work with your affiliates to accelerate your digital brand voice

1. Search Engines & the Impact of Brand Domination 

It is the brands that drive the trust and authority that search engines rely on to drive the right answers for searches. Brands should focus on creating content that users want to find to drive acquisition or lead generation for example. To do this brands need to consider getting out behind their desks and reaching out to their affiliate base and get their views on the reputation of the brand, what could be done better. By crafting branded content that brands are happy for affiliates to use to drive the program.

2. Brand Authority

Many brands fail to realise that the branding opportunity is to tell a great brand narrative to engage with existing users and new prospects and to fine tune and optimise branded content through the various different digital channels. Rather than brands implementing this themselves, consider engaging with your affiliates who specialise in specific digital channels e.g. PPC affiliates, SEO affiliates or email marketing specialists. Reach out to your affiliates and ask what sort of authoritative content could be utilised to assist with the objectives of their affiliate campaign?

3. Identifying Branded Online Value Proposition (OVP)

What is it that helps to differentiate your proposition? What is the reason why your organisation exists and what is it you offer that no one else can?  These are the types of questions that need to be answered to help safeguard the future of your brand as well as ensuring you are offering something unique to your affiliate base that is different to your competitor programs

Consider spending time researching your market sector and the affiliate programs and begin to understand points of difference as well as opportunities for your brand offering to create a new, uncontested market place.

4. Brand Storytelling

Brands should not assume “bringing to life your brand through the art of storytelling” should be done in house, consideration should be given to your pool of affiliates – the eyes and ears of your brand who work on the front line in generating lead or sales for you and have plenty of quantitative and qualitative evidence to share with you to aid the brand proposition – use your affiliates as an extended workforce, they are there to help you!

I am campaigning that brands need to consider forming long terms relationships with their pool of affiliates to not only assist them to drive a healthy affiliate channel but also to consider using their pool of affiliates to help drive exactly how and what they should position their digital brand.

The opportunity therefore to build a credible online voice of authority lies with brands who are prepared to join in on the conversation and build authority in the content deployed across the multitude of different digital channels, in this case the affiliate vertical by sharing their digital voice with their affiliates to help drive sales.