There are a lot of practices when it comes to digital marketing and of course, the primary goal of each is to basically increase the reach and engagement of the business’ products and/or service. Some of the most common forms of digital marketing include PPC or pay-per-click ads, social media marketing, email marketing, and SEO just to name a few.
You also might’ve heard of affiliate marketing but have yet to completely understand how it works and what it’s about.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Let’s first talk about what it is first. To put it simply, affiliate marketing is when you help promote another company or brand through your platform. The brand strikes a deal with you in which you get a cut of every sale they make while under your promotion. The company benefits from the exposure, while you benefit from the extra commission on your end.
What makes affiliate marketing effective and worth the investment is that all parties involved have some form of return somehow. The more successful the affiliate marketing campaign is, the better it is on your end as you’ll get a larger commission as well. Now, let’s move on to other important aspects of this form of digital marketing.
Who’s Who
In an affiliate marketing campaign, the merchant that will sell or promote its products on your platform will be called a merchant. You, on the other hand, are going to be called the affiliate. Keep in mind that you can be the affiliate of more than one merchant.
It’s Mostly Free
What makes a great investment worthy of being called great? For starters, there should be some form of gain on your end. Another factor is that the risks you take – AKA the investments you make, should be minimal. For affiliate marketing, you don’t even have to spend a dime.
If you are an affiliate of a company, you don’t have to pay for anything anymore. In fact, your only expense is those that are related to incorporating your partner’s brand on your websites. As such, affiliate marketing is a good choice for up and coming businesses who don’t have a huge budget for marketing yet.
Performance-Based Kind of Marketing
Another reason why more marketers dive into affiliate marketing is that it’s relatively easy to measure how well the partnership is going. Like PPC ad campaigns, affiliate marketing campaigns are all performance-based, says Skyline Media, you can base the performance of the campaign on the number of sales that your partner makes. Which is great if you want to follow the situation closely.
Less Work on Your End
Affiliate marketing is basically the opposite of every other marketing campaign you’ve tried so far. Whereas in other marketing campaigns, most work is done on your part, it’s the merchant that does the heavy lifting when you become an affiliate. As such, it’s a perfect digital marketing campaign technique you can do without having to sacrifice too much on investments and money.
The Makings of a Successful Affiliate Marketing Campaign
As per Forbes, the elements of a successful affiliate marketing campaign are the size of the project, return on investment, incrementality, and the versatility of the program. Basically, you need to focus on reach more than anything else. As such, marketers tend to be more aggressive towards targeting their audience when it comes to such campaigns.
An affiliate marketing campaign might just be what you need to make a little more profit for your business. Before you do it, make sure that the merchant you are being affiliated with has the same vision and scope as you do. This will help increase the success rate of your campaign.
