Are you wondering whether you should include an affiliate marketing strategy in your overall marketing plan and budget?
The short answer is: “Definitely!” As explained in our previous posts, affiliate marketing comes with numerous benefits. In this article, building on decades of our affiliate program management experience, we’d like to highlight the advantages of weaving an affiliate marketing strategy into your overall one, as well as walk you through the areas that require special attention as you devise one.
Top 10 Advantages of an Affiliate Marketing Strategy
1. Low Upfront Cost
Traditional advertising requires significant investments with uncertain outcomes. Affiliate marketing, however, changes this model. Your initial costs typically cover affiliate program setup and tracking tools, often much less than standard marketing campaign budgets.
2. Performance-based Payment Structure
You pay your partners (aka “affiliates” or “publishers”) only when they generate desirable actions (such as completed sales, leads, or app downloads) that you determine while setting your affiliate program up. Commission rates are flexible and can be adjusted based on product margins or campaign goals.
3. Access to Targeted Traffic
Affiliates are not random promoters. They are niche experts with engaged audiences that match your ideal customer profile. For example, a tech reviewer attracts gadget enthusiasts, while a parenting blogger connects with families. This precise targeting brings qualified visitors who are actively interested in your solutions and are more likely to buy from you.
4. Scalable and Flexible
You can start slow and with low commissions, or scale fast with aggressive payouts. Test new markets through region-specific affiliates and new marketing messages by partnering with different content creators. This flexibility allows you to adapt quickly, supporting growth on your terms.
5. Brand Awareness and Trust
Third-party reviews, best-product awards, and expert recommendations not only spread the word about your product but also build and consolidate your reputation. Consumers see real people endorsing your solutions rather than corporate ads. Third-party validation builds trust more quickly than in-house campaigns.
6. Guaranteed Return on Investment (ROI)
Combining low startup costs with performance-based payments delivers exceptional returns. Businesses often earn $10 for every $1 spent on affiliate programs. This return on investment (ROI) surpasses most marketing channels. Detailed tracking provides transparent ROI calculations, allowing you to see which partners drive sales and optimize your partnerships for better results. It is profit-focused marketing at its best, and you control the profit.
7. Competitive Advantages
You gain market insights from partner feedback about customer preferences. Successful affiliates share what resonates with their audiences, helping you refine your overall marketing strategy. The model also fosters valuable partnerships beyond transactions, as regular communication with top performers builds collaborative relationships with affiliates who become genuine brand advocates.
8. Traffic Diversity
Affiliates promote your products through blogs, social media, email lists, and mobile apps, providing multichannel exposure that protects against changes in any single platform’s algorithm. If one traffic source declines, others can compensate. This decentralized approach builds a sales force without the overhead of a traditional payroll. The best part is that you choose the types of affiliates you work with.
9. Specialized Services
Whether you need help with SEO, media buying, social media management, content creation, or conversion optimization, there are surely experts in these fields among your affiliates. And you don’t have to trust their words; you can see them at work and assess their performance day-by-day.
10. Long-term Results
Affiliate content is usually evergreen and continues to produce results long after it’s been published. It can be updated and repurposed as needed, unlike ad campaigns that depend on the budget supporting them.
Now that we’ve established what the benefits of having an affiliate marketing strategy are, it’s important to understand what a coherent and effective strategy should cover.
Affiliate Marketing Strategy Basics
Expanding on Geno Prussakov’s already-textbook instructions of running an affiliate program with five pillars in mind [see this video of his conference presentation of the pillars], in what follows, we’d like to focus on the key fundamentals not to miss as you’re devising your own affiliate marketing strategy.
- Competition analysis: Analyze what your top competitors do and find ways to do it better.
- Infrastructure and tracking: Choose between in-house affiliate marketing software and affiliate networks, and set up the program.
- Program terms: Decide on payouts, tracking period, locking period, accepted promotional methods, and brand guidelines.
- Creatives: Prepare deep links, banners, product images, videos, product presentations, product samples – what can you provide?
- Recruitment and activation: Find, contact, onboard, and activate partners, building longstanding, mutually beneficial relationships.
- Management and communication: Review affiliate applications, monitor performance, update creatives, and send promo details.
- Policing: Monitor where and how affiliates promote and ensure they comply with program terms, and all referrals are valid.
- Optimization and growth: Keep your best affiliates close, motivate them to scale, and try to find more like them.
Beware of the Set-it-and-forget-it Approach!
Many “marketers” try to sell affiliate programs as marketing solutions on autopilot: you start the program, set it on auto-approve, automate payments, and let anyone interested join and promote you. Don’t fall for that!
You’ll just pay commissions to low-level coupon and cashback websites or browser extensions that touch traffic acquired by your other marketing channels and increase your costs per sale. The internet will be stuffed with unauthorized discounts and paid ads targeting your brand keywords that will discourage good affiliates from promoting you.
You may also end up with fraudulent sales, placed with stolen credit card data, and pay not just commissions but also unnecessary shipping costs, on orders whose value will need to be refunded.
Understand the Buyer Journey and the Affiliates’ Role in It!
The buyer journey is not streamlined and is often influenced by multiple marketing channels. Customers learn about your products from social media, TV commercials, newsletters, or paid ads. They then check reviews, compare prices, look for discounts, and try to get cashback. Sometimes they leave without buying, and you need to bring them back with display ads and shopping cart recovery emails. Who should get credit and commission for the sale?
Lower funnel affiliates are usually more affordable and show immediate results. But only as long as you have top funnel affiliates building awareness and interest for your products. If they don’t get credit for the sales they influence, top funnel affiliates will stop promoting Without them, many, if not all, of your lower funnel affiliates will become useless.
You cannot and should not try to eliminate affiliates from the buyer journey. Just understand and reward the value they bring, choose your partners carefully, support them, and work with them to improve the buyer experience and build loyalty.
How to Recognize a Good Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re looking to hire someone or outsource to an affiliate marketing agency, it’s important to see beyond the hype. Sometimes, a few rows by email or in an Excel sheet are more valuable than a 20-page presentation with graphics and terms you don’t understand. Especially now, with AI being able to build good-looking strategies for almost anything, you want to make sure that the person behind your affiliate marketing strategy is the one who built it or, at least, they fully understand what it entails and can implement it.
Here are a few tips:
- Get to know the person behind the affiliate marketing strategy: Total experience in business and with brands in your niche, how many other programs they manage, and how much time they can dedicate to your account.
- Make sure the strategy takes competitors into account and captures the essence of your products and services: Your affiliate marketing manager will be selling your products and partnership offer to experienced marketers, so it won’t be easy.
- Don’t fall for inflated numbers and empty guarantees: 100% growth only means double sales, and going from 2 to 4 or from 10 to 20 could mean nothing, especially when those 20 sales are low-quality affiliates preying on your other marketing efforts. Similarly, 50 affiliates onboarded in one month on auto-approve will often prove less valuable than 1 affiliate with a relevant and considerable audience who creates and publishes content around your products and services.
- Pay attention to needs and availability: All affiliates and programs need support (creatives, product and promo updates, etc.). How responsive and willing to meet is your affiliate marketing manager? Do your affiliates receive the needed updates and materials? If they’re not there for you, they surely won’t bother with affiliates either.
- Keep an open mind: Sometimes, even the best strategies fail, because market conditions and customer priorities change, competitors adjust their strategies, etc. Everyone wants product awards, big media, and expert reviews. But these can’t be obtained overnight and will often come at a price. Try to stay flexible and open to solutions and alternatives. When big media doesn’t want you or is too expensive, you use smaller media to grow to the point where big media can no longer ignore you.
- Prepare for a long-term game: Affiliate recruitment and activation take time. Affiliates often take weeks to produce and publish content. Some join your program to monitor to see if you manage, communicate, and pay commissions on time. Others don’t respond because they already earn 2-3 times more from your competitors.
Let’s Build Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy!
You already know the advantages of an affiliate marketing strategy. I’ve also covered the benefits of working with our affiliate marketing agency here. If you think your business can benefit from affiliate marketing, let’s talk! We will provide the affiliate marketing strategy for free, and it will be entirely up to you whether we implement it together or you try your luck with someone else.