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To answer your question – it depends… the single answer to all marketing questions.
Marketing strategy is always determined by the goals – which vary for each brand. Any agency will tell you affiliate is a great way to increase awareness and reach new audiences. However, we’ve found that it can also be extremely helpful in penetrating specific online communities and establishing lasting connections with users in those channels. Figuring out what your brand wants out of affiliate is the first step in deciding which publishers, and how many, to work with.
There’s a thousand factors to consider when coming up with your affiliate program (which is why it’s typically better left to the professionals 😉 ), but with over a decade of top-performance in the industry, Advertise Purple has a few tricks up our sleeve to help you identify the best course of action for your brand. Here are the three biggest things to consider when drafting your affiliate plan:
SCOPE
If your goal is to skyrocket brand awareness, then you will want to work with many publishers to maximize impressions. Olivia D., Advertise Purple’s Director of Account Management Development, recommends “top-of-funnel placements (for increasing brand awareness) – these can be anything from working with small, vertical-specific bloggers to participating in large scale newsletter campaigns.” Using a combination of publishers across verticals and via different media channels will dramatically increase the scope of the audiences you are reaching, bolstering your brand’s recognition, however it won’t necessarily generate the highest ROI if the publishers’ audience’s interests don’t align with your brand.
LOYALTY
If you are looking to develop brand loyalty, you might choose fewer publishers but work to do exclusive optimizations with them creating a unique experience for your customers through these publishers. To keep customers coming back, Olivia says she, “will often lean on affiliates who split their commission with the user in some form, and look to make strategic recommendations surrounding offers and other value-adds that will keep a user engaged with a brand past their initial purchase.” Choosing an affiliate who has a loyal audience directly correlates to how likely the audience is to trust you as a brand, and providing special offers for their audience will enhance their receptivity to the brand.
COST
Budget is inevitable to come up in discussions of building an affiliate portfolio, but it can really go either way. Since affiliate marketing is largely performance-based you typically pay out on partnerships when you get a sale directly from the partner’s link. So the question, how many affiliates can I afford becomes a question of what quality of affiliates can I afford? If you’re picking all publishers with extremely high conversion rates, you will be using a lot of your budget, if you want to disperse across more publishers with moderate conversion rates however, you will be able to have a much larger affiliate portfolio.
There are countless nuances that come into play when figuring out how to scale your affiliate program, but these are the top to consider. Getting started in affiliate can seem overwhelming at first, but when done right the benefits drastically outweigh the costs. Ultimately, your campaign will be a combination of the expertise that went into developing it which for many companies means it’s better left to a team of industry professionals. Get in touch with one of our agents to find out how we can leverage our affiliate data to develop custom strategies for your company starting today.
