Quick Tips: Why You Should Consider Affiliate Marketing

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

Affiliate marketing can be an effective way for brand marketers to reach new customers and generate leads. As CPA, or cost-per-action, campaigns come of age and sophisticated publishers offer more targeted traffic sources, major brands are responding with more of their advertising dollars. Consumers are also responding, motivated by loyalty and offers that have real value.

The framework for CPA advertising is also firmly in place now. Ad networks have taken the time to build trust and a rapport with advertisers who might have been wary in the past. Affiliates have become more professional, skilled and effective. With sophisticated technologies, it’s also easier to aggregate, target and segment audiences across the Web.

With branded affiliate marketing campaigns, advertisers go directly to potential customers, whether they’re using laptops, mobile phones or tablets. This direct model, the online version of a point-of-purchase sale, will continue to adapt to new technologies and changing customer preferences and behaviors.

Here’s four reasons you might want to consider affiliate marketing.

1. A Clear ROI: With performance-based pricing, advertisers pay only when customers have performed the desired action. The model is simple, cost-effective and offers a relatively low risk.

Customers acquired from CPA marketing efforts usually have a high lifetime value to the brand, with the selected product or service added to that consumer’s profile which allows the advertiser to remarket to that individual. Coupled with demographics and other modeling techniques, the advertiser may even be able to predict what the next purchase will be from each new customer.

2. Seasonality: Virtually any occasion, season, trend or news story can be a potential trigger for a CPA campaign. Flowers for Valentine’s day; mortgage offers as interest rates are projected to rise; tax software in mid-winter; vacations during the holiday season; education offers in late summer; credit card offers for a down economy, and the list goes on.

It has become much more prevalent for large brands to use CPA to acquire new customers or high quality leads on a daily basis. In fact, several major banks are now adopting this approach to acquire new customers for their “rebuild your credit program” or “entry level” credit cards. During a depressed economy, these offers represent genuine value to many people and enable banks to increase their client base.

3. Real Time Adaptability: Advertisers and affiliates can analyze in real time and identify which offers are working and which traffic sources are the most responsive. Publishers understand their advertisers and markets. They can respond quickly if a campaign isn’t working well, tweak the offer, adjust the creative or redirect traffic. Each publisher’s results are accessible to advertisers, adding a critical element of transparency.

Direct response marketing is no easy proposition, and even the larger brands can fail in online marketing if there is no perceived real value in the campaign. To gain consumers attention, brands need to offer exclusivity—whether it’s an “online exclusive deal” or a “buy one, get one free” type of offer. With the wealth of media exposure available to today’s consumers, unless an offer is particularly eye-catching, it may well end up in their short-term memory bank before being completely discarded.

4. Ad Network-Publisher Partnerships. By partnering with reputable ad networks, publishers have access to the resources, knowledge and experience they need to be successful; this in turn brings a competitive advantage to advertisers. The networks should work closely with advertisers to oversee the campaigns and ensure a highly compliant environment.

An advertiser’s brand is priceless and has likely taken a multitude of resources to perfect. It’s critical to adhere to affiliate marketing compliance guidelines as well as continuously monitor the use of your creative and the quality of the traffic—and (especially because of increased FTC scrutiny) work to eliminate fraudulent claims on your advertising dollars.

Greg Bayer is general manager of the affiliate division at Adknowledge.

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