Affiliate Marketing: Is It For You?

You’ve probably heard the term “affiliate marketing” before but many people in today’s ecommerce space aren’t sure what it is or how the whole process works. To keep it simple, affiliate marketing is a performance-based model that rewards affiliate partners for driving a desired action. Such actions include increased site visitation from potential customers, product exposure and lead generation that could lead to the completion of a lead form and / or converted sales. This low risk form of marketing can be extremely beneficial and a great way to promote your products to your targeted audience.

To help you better understand the true benefits of affiliate marketing, we’ve compiled a list below of what we consider to be the top 5 benefits of affiliate marketing.

1. Performance Based

The main advantage of utilizing an affiliate marketing program is that it’s entirely performance-based. Affiliates are only paid commission once the desired action has taken place, so they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for. This helps mitigate any efforts that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while ensuring you get exactly what you paid for.

2. More Expansive Marketing Efforts

An affiliate can be found in every market and product category that exists today. The great news is that many of these affiliates will already have an established following. Whether you’re looking to break into the retail industry or something more niche such as hand crafted instruments or sculptures, there will always be relevant websites you can align your business with. These partnerships provide the opportunity to expand your reach into new markets you may or may not have had the bandwidth to explore. It also helps to further saturate your existing targeted markets and giving your brand a much stronger online presence. Just think of these partners as an extended arm of your current marketing or sales team.

3. Validity of 3rd Party Partners

You can further the reputation of your brand and its products by teaming up with trusted bloggers and reputable websites that already have an extensive following and internet presence. These partners will glorify your products and further solidify your targeted consumers confidence in your brand’s product or service. Consumers are more likely to trust the opinion of a 3rd party over any content that’s produced directly from the site of origin. Consumers have a certain level of trust in websites they frequent for product recommendations.

4. Cost Effective

Affiliate marketing can be extremely cost effective for many of the reasons listed above. Remember, you’re only paying commissions when the desired conversion has occurred so you’re not throwing away ad dollars on placements that have no proven value. Recruiting affiliates in new markets is an easy way to branch out into that targeted market without the overhead cost of creating an entire marketing campaign. This helps mitigate the need to pour money into an unproven market for testing.

5. Increased Scalability of Traffic

In alignment with your current marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates to your program will allow you to scale traffic must faster. The more sites that direct their following to your website, the better your chances are to convert them into paid customers. The other benefit of having these affiliates promote your services is the added value search engines bring to your website. The more outside resources linking back to your site positively effects your search engine ranking and compliment your existing SEO efforts.

Affiliate marketing can be a very effective, low-risk investment to help expand your current marketing efforts beyond a small business’ traditional bandwidth. For the above reasons listed, we believe affiliate marketing is worth the investment and can take your program to new heights.