The industry consensus is that a sale delivered or influenced by a content source is of a higher quality than perhaps other publisher types. Consumer data across industries suggest content publishers drive a higher lifetime value (LTV) or a higher new customer rate. 

The content strategy

The long-term value and purpose of a content-led approach is that the affiliate channel will support the digital marketing efforts of the brand. A sound content strategy should be aligned with search engine optimisation (SEO) and paid marketing (PPC) channels. This is because the aim for affiliate activity is to feature within search engine results page (SERP) results on Google. The content is then strategically positioned within keyword searches, which can deliver an increase in “share of voice” and ultimately market share to the business. 

From an affiliate point of view, the content created will peak in the short term as their loyal audience browses and clicks to purchase. However, it is an evergreen content piece, which acquires a new audience for both the affiliate and the client in the long term. 

Playing the long game

So, how do you ensure your brand is in a position to land as many of those high-quality sales as possible? The ideal scenario is to see brands forge long-term relationships with content publishers, both big and small, global, national and localised. This relationship includes assistance in optimising their content and site to best appeal to the audience they are looking to reach. It’s a ‘you help me and I’ll help you’ approach.

For bloggers or smaller, independent content sites, it might be the case that optimising their content for more specific search terms isn’t something they’ve considered when writing previously. Often, their creative voice takes the lead instead. It’s important for brands to provide guidance and assistance in the phrases, terms and buzzwords their content should include, in order for it to be successful.

This likely isn’t the name of the product itself, but those smaller more specific terms you want to be associated with your product. It could even be to optimise content to find its way into search results for things you can’t as a brand say. For example, say that the Duchess of Cambridge wears a dress from your brand, but this isn’t something you want your site to be publically basking in. Here is where your content partners can truly assist; littering search results with seeded content featuring the dress and the fact it was worn by the Duchess. Your dress finds a home in the search terms you yourself (the brand) wouldn’t want to be seen directly promoting.

How it works in practice

When The Ambassador Theatre group came to Silverbean over six years ago, their brief was to create a market leading affiliate programme which increased market share and with strong ROI. The group consists of ATG Tickets (the box office of over 40 venues across the UK) and LOVEtheatre (a ticketing agent for London West End). 

The ATG Tickets site was well placed to rank for key terms. However, Silverbean saw an opportunity to stand out against the competition and increase the brand’s share of voice in the theatre conversation by moving their program firmly towards content publishers. The strategy would look to dominate search results for secondary terms, specific show titles, top things to do in X city, or top shows in London and so on.  

An example of this is utilising The Times to review Wicked on the West End, The Mirror creating ‘the top 10 shows to see on the West End’, ‘Top 10 family shows’ etc. In addition to this, the agency worked closely with regional publishers for ‘what’s on in X city’ pieces and so on. All of these examples solve user problems through search (often tapping into high volume searches too), and direct the user back to the Ambassador Theatre Group. 

The results

Last year saw the release of one of the West End’s most hotly anticipated shows, 4000 Miles, starring Timothée Chalamet, one of Hollywood’s most in-demand stars. LOVEtheatre, part of The Ambassador Theatre Group, was allocated a number of tickets for the show’s general on-sale date. This meant coming up against some of the industry’s biggest players looking to sell their allotted tickets at exactly the same time. How could Silverbean ensure customers visited ATG for their purchase?

Most of the work had already been done through the six-year content-led strategy. This had seen the ticketing group partner with, and support, publishers in ensuring their content ranked well for key terms, such as the show title. These mutual partnerships bear fruit for both affiliate and brand each time the publisher’s site delivers a converting customer to the ATG Tickets or LOVEtheatre sites. 

For 4000 Miles this meant that the point of on sale, the terms ‘Timothée Chalamet West End’, ‘Timothée Chalamet Play’ and ‘Timothée Chalamet 4000 Miles’ returned top articles from The Times, Metro, List and Elle – all of which directed customers to the LOVEtheatre site.

Those key terms were dominated by content the team placed, in turn making LOVEtheatre the preferred option over competitors, translating simply into a high volume of revenue.

As networks continue to develop the means for brands to better understand the influence of content on an eventual sale, affiliate and digital managers are able to truly evaluate its value. Software as a service (SaaS) platforms have developed sophisticated models to display the touch points along that customer journey from inspiration to purchase, opening up the ability for brands to reward and invest in publishers who strike-up the inspiration for a sale. This type of model isn’t new as attribution has been something long-discussed. It is, however, the closest brands, affiliates and agencies have come to seeing the full picture of a purchase.

This insight helps Silverbean to define a fully bespoke commission structure for clients. Affiliate managers can reward the most influential affiliates (yet who often don’t earn commission on a last, or even second-from-last click basis) with a higher cost per acquisition (CPA) for those sales they do instantly convert. Its assistance helps managers understand where to place budget for paid exposures, to ensure the maximum revenue and return on investment, is invaluable. 

Strategically aligned content marketing

A solid content approach for a brand needs to be strategically aligned with other search channels. Working together, your brand can identify strategic search terms that affiliates, if advised well, can rank for and deliver value to the business. 

The relationship between the brand and the affiliate needs to be mutually beneficial and transparent. Education and support are key in order to execute the strategy in the long term. Each affiliate adds value in the puzzle for a content-led campaign; the key is to understand the potential for each affiliate in relation to each specific search term. 

Strategically, brands need a balance of publisher sizes in order to cater for various search results and search competition levels. But ultimately, this content-first approach enables both quick wins and long-term revenue success for both parties.

The post How to Enhance Your Performance Programme With Content Marketing appeared first on PerformanceIN.

For much of its existence Influencer Marketing has escaped the metrics and measurement we see Performance Marketing traditionally held to. Exactly what success looked like for an Influencer campaign was open to interpretation, varying from brand to brand. Strategies here typically strove to achieve maximum exposure, with minimal data falling behind the results to back up its apparent success. It makes sense; influencer marketing was born in a PR world, but in 2020 that world has well and truly collided with performance marketing. 

Even now the industry as a whole has yet to connect the dots that will allow us to truly understand the effect of an influencer’s endorsement or branded content. It certainly isn’t for a lack of trying, but whilst what happens in Instagram, stays in Instagram, are we ever truly able to know how a campaign performed?

Simply put, yes. We can if we’re smart and layout the breadcrumbs that will define performance for us. 

Evolve your strategies

If we start to evolve the way we create strategies to include some of the key points of a performance marketing strategy then we can start to follow a customer’s journey with a brand, from their first interaction with the influencer content we placed to inspire that very journey. What we see with Performance Marketing strategies is an emphasis on accounting for events along the way, in order to provide us with a more detailed picture at the end.

Looking at direct the sales and traffic from an influencer’s inclusion of your product will only ever give you a one-dimensional view of its performance. Obtaining a piece of content’s KPIs from the influencer (should they oblige) will at best help you flesh this by a second dimension. So how do we get the third? 

Look at your data

Attribution and incrementality are buzz words those in the affiliate marketing space will be incredibly familiar with. Networks have each worked towards building a model that allows us – the strategy makers – insight into the journey a customer follows through the affiliate world before eventually pressing confirm on the checkout page. What we likely know from being customers ourselves is that the journey can sometimes be long and convoluted. The seed planted in the back of your mind long before a decision is ultimately made. Along the way several other factors might well arrive; cashback publishers, voucher code publishers, a piece of content your team also placed, or just simply several months.

Whilst our networks and SaaS platforms are definitely working to flesh out their attribution models to help give us the full picture of purchase, in this mix the true influence of influencers is largely lost. Should they have included your products in a blog post or perhaps a YouTube video then you’re lucky. We can start to factor in their purchase power. However, whilst one of the industry’s biggest-selling tools, Instagram, isn’t able to pass on its cookies to a browser, the whole picture is unfortunately out of grasp.

Items that inspire an instant, spur of the moment purchase truly succeed. For many transacting in the platform’s browser isn’t a problem for a relatively unconsidered purchase. But what about an influencer promoting a holiday to their audience? Or a handbag attached to a price tag that can only be described as ‘an investment’? The number of consumers who’ll instantly transact within the browser and therefore assign the sale to its source is greatly diminished.

Tracking your organic mentions

Paid content with influencers is one thing, we can implement ways in which to track and monitor the results, but what about the organic inclusions? Arguably a far more accurate way of monitoring an influencer’s influence. It’s an industry acknowledged fact that content labelled as an #Ad tends to receive less traction and engagement than an organic endorsement. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be done however, but it is the legacy and long-term benefit you need to bring in to your measure. 

Does the product go on to be mentioned outside of this paid content? Does the influencer endorse you repeatedly? Do they direct their followers to you when they ask questions or require a recommendation?

To bring in that third dimension to our reporting on performance we need to blend our influencer marketing strategies with key learnings from performance marketing. Let’s follow that customer from that initial spark of inspiration provided by an influencer, right through to their purchase, whenever it may occur. The way we do that? Give the consumer a reason to join those dots on our behalf. 

Beauty Pie are a brand who’ve seen the importance of a customer’s need for time to think and review. The influencers they invited to collaborate with the brand were each given a code to provide their audience with, increasing their initial monthly allowance on their first order. These codes are indefinite. ‘CAROLINESENTME’ will forevermore tell Beauty Pie the true power Caroline Hirons has to inform, inspire and instigate a customer to purchase with them. They played the long game and more importantly, saw the value in it above instant performance. Affiliate links were present to capture those instant Swipe Ups – and even those who came directly from a blog and YouTube post – but the third dimension to the performance comes from this return for a consumer to always return to the original source. They get something for it. That incentive reappears with organic content the influencer’s posted, time and time again. 

In the case of Beauty Pie, it wasn’t so much a discount as an encouragement to spend more with them, simply because they increased the amount you could spend with them. There are a whole host of ways in which we can ensure a consumer provides us with their original source outside of a discount, however. Referral codes acting as an inclusion in a monthly giveaway, free shipping, additional samples, exclusive elements and access; utilise what we have learnt from performance marketing and apply it to influencer marketing.

If your affiliate strategy is well managed you’ll be able to negate these codes or referral links finding themselves posted elsewhere, allowing you to close the gap and understand the real value of an influencer’s opinion. At the same, should there be any overlap (an influencer code being applied to a purchase a cashback provider ultimately takes the last click for, for example) you’re provided with even more information to measure performance with? That influencer didn’t claim that sale, but they were a deciding factor in its event. 

To conclude

When it comes to determining the performance of Influencer Marketing the key lies right there in the title itself. Influence. That’s what we need to devise our strategies to understand and record. What sales and new customers can your influencer marketing campaign ultimately inspire? In working to put the strategy in place that will allow us to see the full picture we can drastically alter the ROI and measured performance of a campaign.

The post What Can Influencer Marketing and Performance Marketing Learn from Each Other? appeared first on PerformanceIN.