Affiliate marketing refers to hiring people to promote your brand and rewarding them with a fixed salary per post or on a commission basis. While often used in tandem with other marketing strategies, businesses can't turn a blind eye to its effectiveness. Affiliate marketing is a popular strategy because it delivers results, quantified through increased traffic and sales, as a few factors.
If you're a small and up-and-coming business, affiliate marketing through platforms like Super Affiliate and others sounds like a lot of good news. It's seen as an attractive marketing strategy for growth by increasing the customer base and subsequently stabilizing the business's profit levels.
Before you launch an affiliate marketing strategy, it's important to be backed up first with all the reasons why adopting it as a strategy is beneficial for your business. Let's go over what those are.
One prevailing challenge among startup businesses is the budget. You've already spent so much on the capital, and as a startup, sales aren't yet that strong. This means the profit coming on also has yet to be stable. If there's anything you must be mindful of, it's the finances. Now's not the time to overspend, even if it's for essential business activities like marketing.
The good news is digital marketing has given birth to strategies that are less costly to run than traditional marketing. One of these is affiliate marketing. The cost is significantly less than other marketing forms, as you only pay the affiliate for every post they make. The more followers they have, the higher the rate. So, as a startup, you can also begin with affiliates who’ve yet to demand high rates.
Moreover, some affiliates are also paid on a commission basis. This is even more ideal, as you only have to pay them for every sale made through the affiliate's specific code. With this agreement, you have a higher guarantee the affiliate will work even harder to make sales so they can be paid the agreed commission.
Still keeping with the cost-related benefits, it's not only the startup cost that's cost-efficient. Since the affiliate themselves is undertaking all marketing activities, the affiliate bears a bulk of the ongoing costs to keep the marketing campaigns running. Therefore, this marketing model makes the costs associated with advertising activities more manageable. Unlike other marketing activities, there isn't any interruption experienced in the cash flow.
Another earmark of business growth and stability is how well-known your brand is. Startups aren't just under pressure to keep their finances in check—they also have to work hard to make themselves known. The goal is that despite being a startup, you'll be so famous in their market that, eventually, your startup business becomes a household name in the industry.
Affiliate marketing boosts brand awareness because of the undeniable power affiliates have. Their word is often given so much trust and weight by their loyal followers, mainly if they've already been in the industry for so long. This removes the need for your business to double the time and effort in reaching a target audience when each affiliate already has its respective sets of followers.
Progress tracking is something businesses should always do after the release of every marketing campaign to check whether or not it's bringing in the intended results. With progress tracking, you could save time and effort on effective marketing strategies. The longer it takes to discover that, the bigger the chance of wasted resources. This isn't a situation that businesses, particularly startups, would want to have.
The good news is that affiliate marketing offers real-time tracking. This means you know when a visitor clicks a link and goes to your site. You can also monitor sales through the affiliate's links or with their code.
Because everything is trackable, you can check and see how well each affiliate is performing from time to time. Changes can be implemented before it becomes too damaging for your startup if it's negative.
Feedback and reviews on your products are excellent, marketing-wise. The feedback may not always be positive, but even bad publicity is still publicity. It's a lot better than not being talked about at all.
The more affiliates talk about your products and services, the bigger the hype. Those product reviews and comparisons will start flooding the Internet. When a would-be buyer sees information about it, they'd be more convinced to purchase your products as they can see it's talked about so much. This situation favors your startup as it translates to more customers and sales.
Digital and technological advancements nowadays paved the way for more marketing possibilities and options for business, one of which is affiliate marketing. Previously unheard of, there seems to be a lot of buzz surrounding affiliate marketing. It reduces risks inherent in startup businesses while also decreasing upfront marketing costs, to name a few. The list above is strong enough to prove and show that, indeed, the benefits of affiliate marketing are strong and quantifiable.
