2.4 : Affiliate marketing and how it can be used
Dr. Tahir Rashid, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK
You may have seen adverts on websites where you are surfing, encouraging you to click on them, either at the top or at the sides of that particular site.
Banner adverts or ads are usually an image or video animation based on short messages that are used to advertise a product or a service on another website
Affiliate marketing is an example where referring sites receive a commission which could be a fixed amount for a lead or a percentage of the purchase price.
This can be a very lucrative way of generating income from placing ads on affiliate sites, but success of affiliate marketing depends on building relationships with the right types of affiliates.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based advertising model where affiliates are rewarded for bringing customers to a business
Usually affiliates are paid a fee based on a % of the value that the customer ends up spending, or another specific action such as completing an enquiry form on the advertiser’s website
Affiliate marketing is growing rapidly, and affiliate marketing is popular with most blue chip companies, and small and medium enterprises. It is about making sure that we generate enough traffic to our site through these different affiliations or as publishers so that we can gain maximum publicity for our site.
Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK
As an organization, we don’t use affiliate marketing. We are very aware of the benefits and how that could actually drive sales and drive traffic and drive employees into the business, but the model doesn’t suit recruitment in term of how we do it, therefore we don’t go about investing in that particular online channel.
Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece
We are using affiliate marketing for specific clients, usually for e-shops. We can see that it’s a cluttered channel right now because everyone is looking for sales and it’s not an easy task because affiliation marketing is working with actions. So let’s say you are an airline industry and when you are, let’s say, using a banner or an advertisement, when someone is clicking to your banner and going for sales, we will get a percentage of this sale.
Affiliate marketing is usually suitable for online ecommerce businesses
This is because it is easier to identify direct value that was brought by a particular affiliate to the advertising ecommerce business
My recommendation for affiliation marketing is one step at a time. Start with emails, try to get emails. After that go for leads, give them something like an incentive. And the final step of your strategy has to be the conversion, but one step at a time.
Consider rewarding your affiliates for different types of actions:
- Subscriptions to your mailing list
- Completion of lead enquiry form
- Purchase converion
One objective on affiliation marketing is not only sales and conversions, you can separate your objective like increase your database with emails or even drive traffic to Facebook page, or increase your searching competition on Facebook application.
Consider different marketing objectives when designing your affiliate rewards:
- Database subscribers
- Competition participants
Because you can use a lot awareness, and a lot of impressions and traffic to your website, try to connect them not only with conversions but with some leads as well.
Exercise
How can you as an individual benefit from the Amazon platform?
- Write an idea of where you could use a blog as a platform for affiliate marketing.
- Read two or three ideas from other course members and comment on whether you think their affiliate marketing idea will work.
Additional materials
There are a number of ways that you can engage with affiliate marketing. Have a look at this platform by Commission Junction http://www.uk.cj.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing
See at the alternative model offered by Social Chain: http://www.socialchain.co/add-your-audience
What are the main affiliate payment models that are offered here?
Compare these options for those offered by Amazon – https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/
References
Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Can you get profit by writing blog? An empirical study in Google AdSense
http://research.nchu.edu.tw/upfile…
Please see following pages for chapter 2:
2.0 Understanding the different nature of digital channels based on geographic, demographic and digital fit for a campaign
2.1 Search Engines – differences in countries – based on the case study examples
2.2 Social Media platforms differences in countries and how to they can be used
2.3 Email marketing and how it can be used
2.5 Mobile marketing and how it could be used
2.6 Paid channels overview – search and social
2.7 Communities focused engagement