Affiliate marketing involves brands partnering with third-party publishers and affiliates to promote their products and services on their websites or social media channels in order to drive leads and sales in exchange for a commission from every sale.
This offers brands a low-cost and low-risk way of driving brand awareness and boosting revenue without needing to hire an in-house marketing team. Because of its ease of getting started and low operating costs, affiliate marketing has exploded in popularity over the last 10 or so years, with an estimated 80% of brands having an affiliate marketing program of their own.
As the affiliate marketing industry continues to grow, it’s crucial now more than ever for brands to start an affiliate marketing program of their own and attract the top affiliates in their niche to grow their affiliate marketing program and maximize its results.
It may be easy to start an affiliate marketing program, but managing and optimizing it has become more sophisticated. Therefore, a well-thought-out strategy is crucial for brands looking to maximize their efforts.
An affiliate marketing strategy is only as good as the affiliate network, platform, and tools a brand uses to execute it. This article will cover the best practices brands should utilize to attract new publishers and affiliates to grow their affiliate program and its revenue.
1. Master Your Niche
To attract the right affiliates for your brand and enable them to promote your brand’s products or services effectively, you need to make sure you have the basics covered first. One of these essential basics is defining who you are as a brand, your values, and the message you want to convey to the public through your brand’s identity. Understanding your niche and industry is crucial to portraying your brand as an expert in your field. If your affiliates don’t know what you stand for as a brand, it’s hard for them to grow your brand’s awareness and become brand ambassadors loyal to your brand.
Brands should have well-crafted branding guidelines in place for affiliates to follow. A brand’s branding guideline should convey visually and in writing the brand’s personality through various elements. These elements should showcase what the brand stands for and the emotions they desire to evoke from consumers and affiliates interacting with their brand and its subsequent products or services.
After Simply Earth branded their affiliate signup page with captivating imagery and carefully thought-out wording that conveys what the brand stands for, they were able to effectively weed out affiliates that don’t align with their brand identity. After weeding out irrelevant affiliates, brands can attract only the top affiliates capable of becoming effective brand ambassadors.
It is crucial to understand your brand’s greatest strengths and weaknesses and effectively communicate them to potential affiliates. It allows affiliates to set their best foot forward when promoting your brand. Having an open line of communication is crucial for building rapport and long-lasting relationships with affiliates, so make sure to showcase this on your recruitment page.
2. Optimize Your Affiliate Recruitment Signup Page
Aside from conveying your brand’s identity, values, and the types of affiliates you seek, you should optimize your affiliate signup page to convert potential affiliates into affiliates for your brand. Therefore, your signup page’s design, imagery, copy, and submission forms should all be streamlined to improve the page’s usability. In addition, it should focus on your CTA (Call-to-Action), which is getting the right affiliates to fill out the submission form and press submit.
To rank high in Google search results, you should optimize your affiliate signup page for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By ranking high in search results, you will be able to drive significant traffic of affiliates searching for affiliate programs that meet their needs.
3. Promote Your Affiliate Recruitment Signup Page
Once you have your affiliate recruitment page fully built out and optimized, you should do your part to be vocal about it and promote it wherever and whenever possible. Your page should be published on your website and be easy to find for potential affiliates. In addition, you should send out emails to relevant contacts in your niche and industry announcing your affiliate recruitment needs and promoting your page. You can even have a footer attached to all your business emails that promotes your affiliate recruitment page.
Social media platforms are great places to promote your affiliate program and its recruitment page organically. All types of affiliates and publishers are usually very active on social media, so it’s a great place to talk about your affiliate program.
Affiliates and publishers that come across your affiliate program can forward your information to other affiliates that may be a better fit for your program than they are. Additionally, you can take it a step further and create paid advertising campaigns on social media that allows you to precisely target your affiliate program and recruitment page to the exact type of affiliates you are searching for.
4. Choosing the Right Publishers
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the type of publishers you want to join your affiliate program. Many different affiliate publisher types exist, from content publishers to loyalty and cashback publishers, and each publisher type serves a unique purpose.
Therefore, brands looking to run a successful affiliate program should keep a diversified mix of affiliate publisher types they partner with. However, this doesn’t mean that brands should partner with as many different publisher types as possible to keep their affiliate marketing program as diversified as possible.
Brands should not rush the onboarding process for new publishers and should carefully consider the publishers that best resonate with the brand and its products and services. They should evaluate the kind of traffic each publisher can send and decide if its traffic demographics are suitable for the brand and its products and services.
By mastering their respective niches, brands can clearly define their core target audiences and select only publishers that can provide them.
The Bottom Line
For ecommerce brands looking to grow a successful affiliate marketing program, a well-thought-out strategy and the right affiliate marketing platforms and tools will empower them to execute it effectively.
Brands should build out and optimize their affiliate recruitment signup pages to convey what the brand stands for and what it seeks in potential affiliate partners. By promoting their affiliate program and recruitment page through email campaigns and social media, brands can attract the right affiliates that resonate the best with the brand.
Refersion offers a robust, all-in-one affiliate marketing platform that gives brands all the data, resources, and tools they need to run their affiliate program with ease and to its fullest potential.
