3 Affiliate Marketing Strategies To Realise Growth

Affiliate marketing is a cost-effective and valuable channel for advertisers. But in an increasingly competitive environment, a great affiliate program needs to challenge the norm and think outside of the box. In this blog, I share the top three strategies you can implement to drive incremental growth via the affiliate channel.

Know your competitors

We are all guilty of getting sucked into the day-to-day of the business, and it’s easy to forget to take a step back and look at program strategy. Running an audit of competitor activity is a great way to spot opportunities for growth with partners. Variables to look at on your competitor audit include:

• Who are the key traffic drivers to your competitors’ websites?
• How are affiliates promoting your competitors?
• How do you work with your competitors’ top traffic drivers?
• Are there partners that your competitors work with that you don’t?

The Acceleration Partners team regularly uses Similarweb’s platform to see which affiliates are driving traffic to a client’s competitors. A good place to start is to review your top competitor’s main traffic drivers that aren’t promoting your website. This gives you a pipeline of relevant partners to approach and recruit to your program.

You can also review partners that you are working with, but who drive significantly more traffic than your competitors. Once you have this list, you can evaluate how they are promoting your competitors and benchmark this against your campaigns. Consider the following:

• What content are they writing about your competitors?
• What offers are your competitors running with these partners?
• Where are you promoted on-site compared to similar brands?

Learn more about how to find your competitors’ affiliates.

Growth through partner development

New partnerships in your affiliate program are a sure way to increase revenue. Many clients we work with at Acceleration Partners are initially heavily reliant on a handful of affiliates and are often dependent on sales driven via voucher, cashback, and incentive partners.

Concentrating your activity with a small number of partners is a risky strategy. While you should still spend time optimizing your already successful affiliates, it’s important to look at ways to grow your affiliate program through new partnerships.

Working with a broad range of partners has numerous benefits, including, the ability to reach a wider audience, reduce risk and drive incremental programme growth.

Here are three best practice tips for finding and recruiting non-traditional partners to your affiliate program:

1. Clearly define your targets: The first step when searching for new partners is understanding who you want to target and your campaign goals. That way, you can find partners that can help you to achieve these goals. Think about brand fit and which partners share your values and target audience demographics.
2. Strategically approach your new partners: Before approaching any potential partner, spend some time understanding the company and have details on how the partnership will benefit them.
3. Know how and when to activate the partnership: When starting any new collaboration think about seasonality and events that could aid the partnership to give you and your partner the best possible chance of success. If Q1 is your strongest quarter, plan recruitment around this so that partners are launching campaigns in Q1.

You may be asking, does partner development release incremental growth? The answer is yes! One of Acceleration Partners’ retail clients wanted to accelerate growth via the affiliate channel. Our team ran a partner recruitment, and activation campaign which grew their sales by over 200% MoM, and the affiliate channel is now one the brand’s strongest-performing marketing channels. You can read the full case study here.

Using data to develop campaign strategies

Planning campaigns around seasonal events is a great way to increase market share. For example, Cyber 5 Week is an important eCommerce event for any online retailer, and most brands will utilize this online event to release their best offers and drive sales. It’s essential to plan exposure with partners well in advance of Q4 and have compelling offers. Take time to research what your competitors ran last year and what promotions performed well for you. For your strongest seasonal events, bake in the budget for CPA increases and incentives that will give you maximum brand exposure.

Analyzing trends in affiliate marketing is a great way to create new campaign ideas for growth. One way we utilize the Similarweb platform for our clients is to look at trending keywords for specific categories and verticals. For example, if you were a beauty retailer, you could check out the highest searched keywords for Q4 last year. You can use this information in a few ways:

• Build out new campaign ideas and content that complement top keywords.
• Share the data with your partners, so they know what product ranges are likely to convert best.
• Think about increasing exposure with partners that rank well for the top keywords associated with a specific campaign.

You can also use your data to plan campaigns. For example, if you’re a travel brand and your internal data tells you that the most popular holiday destination is Majorca, share this data with your affiliates and create specific offers and content that focus on this trend.

The affiliate channel remains a reliable source of traffic and sales for brands. Leveraging data and insights will be the key to creating winning campaigns.