But while working with influencers may be top of mind for so many marketers, this type of collaboration typically comes at a cost that too many marketers make the mistake of approaching with blinders on. And while great pains have been taken in every other aspect of planning and budgeting, one hasty, wrong, or ill-informed decision can spell big trouble for a brand that may have been in the dark about what it really costs to dabble in influencer marketing. It’s decisions like these that could have lasting reverberations and potentially hinder what could have been an otherwise stellar collaboration.

In the 20+ years we’ve spent successfully working with partners – influencers included – we’ve concluded that an informed strategy is the best strategy. But that still begs the question: How do you know you’re truly informed when it comes to all things influencer marketing? Who or what is your trusted source of truth? After all, today, there are influencer platforms popping up at every corner and the expenses associated with running a programme can add up quickly: time, resources, software, payment to the influencers themselves–the list goes on. This level of involvement and expense can be enough to turn even the most seasoned marketer off to the idea of pursuing a full-blown influencer strategy. 

How can you get started?

However, there is a silver lining: Working with influencers doesn’t have to be as hard, or as expensive, as you may think. In fact, there are many savvy marketers who already have successful partnership or affiliate marketing programmes up and running and have figured out that you can easily work with influencers inside these channels. Further, you should be working with influencers inside these channels.

Think about it this way, for the categories that make up the broader partnership channel, one of the most attractive attributes is that they’re predicated entirely on a pay-for-performance model which allows for a certain degree of risk mitigation and insulation from what could be an otherwise expensive foray into influencer marketing. And this makes them the perfect proving ground for your influencer campaigns. 

But it’s not just brands who are in the know about the many benefits of working with influencers inside partnership. Influencers themselves are turning to the channel in droves for the opportunity to create an entirely new revenue stream here. In fact, Partnerize has noted a significant increase in platform applications from partners who categorise themselves as “social media”. What does all this mean? It means that influencers are not blind to the outcomes they see other traditional affiliate partners generating. (By the way, you can get more context on Partnerize’s overall partner sign ups here).

If you’re saying to yourself that the partnership channel’s low-risk model may make perfect sense if you’re working with smaller influencers, but what about the bigger influencers who know their value and command more for their effort, the lesson here is that size never equates to efficacy when you’re talking about influencers. Don’t be fooled: Smaller influencers may not have the huge follower bases you see with mega influencers, but you can bet that these smaller audiences are hyper engaged and that’s what it’s all about, after all, getting the right message in front of the right audience. 

The pay-for-performance model gives smaller influencers an opportunity to flex their talents for brands who may be trigger shy when it comes to working with them. So, instead of a flat-fee model that a bigger influencer may command, in the partnership channel, you can engage on a variable basis, and take the partnership for a spin so you can determine the true value this partner will render you now and in the future. Other benefits of this approach include avoiding upfront investments in both time and money in influencer platforms before you know if this marketing strategy will work for your brand. You have the opportunity to grow and mature into a sophisticated influencer marketing strategy. You can cultivate relationships with micro and nano influencers and have them ‘graduate’ to another platform or way of working once they have proven themselves to be of value to the brand, and subsequently, grow their own audience of followers.

Key takeaways

So what’s the overall takeaway here? When it comes to a turnkey influencer platform, they don’t necessarily exist without your effort, so throwing money at influencer software on its own merit without investing your time and due diligence, simply won’t bring overnight results. Instead, to achieve any satisfying level of success, marketers would be wise to tap into the already efficient relationships they have with those inside the partnership channel. Or, you can use the channel as an efficient means to easily discover the right influencers to work with or easily invite influencers you want to work with. 

At a time when edges meet and affiliate teams are managing more partnerships that may have been historically managed by PR teams, this could enable you with even more resources to test influencer campaigns out and learn first-hand what type of value they derive. And in the end, the partnership channel was tailor-made for this testing and learning as its inherent pay-for-performance model mitigates risk and makes the process virtually hiccup free which is exactly what busy marketers who are already pressed for time and results, need.        

Want to learn more about how the partnership channel is the perfect testing ground for influencer marketing? Download our Quick Guide to Influencer Marketing today.

The post Here’s Why You Should Test Working with Influencers Inside the Partnership Channel appeared first on PerformanceIN.

For some retailers, the need to conserve cash became the go-to plan to wait out the current climate. So, what was the first task on many marketers’ conservation agenda? Cutting ad spend. But 2020 wasn’t quite finished yet and Covid wasn’t the only catalyst for marketers pulling ad spend as a political and cultural upheaval was also taking hold prompting a bevy of marketers to pull ad spend from Facebook. We would soon come to know this spend pause Blackout Day or Blackout July, a virtual way to protest unrest with your wallet.

So, between both these catalysts for fear and uncertainty, what really happened with marketers’ ad spend over these past months? And perhaps more importantly, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, what does this signal for the future of ad spend? 

Keep eyes trained on the long view

For the affiliate solution partners’ part, the best guidance comes by way of educating marketers on the impacts of cutting ad spend now—particularly within affiliate—where trusting and mutually beneficial partnerships are the channel’s backbone. Keep eyes on mid and long-term opportunities rather than making knee-jerk decisions as we sit in the thick of uncertainty. Like all economic setbacks, the current crisis will surely pass, and marketers would be wise to secure relationships now for the better times to come—even if that means operating inside a new, albeit different, normal.   

When it comes to the matter of whether marketers should reposition budget, a recent Pepperjam survey across a diverse segment of clients conducted in April of this year, indicated that more than 40% of respondents cited their affiliate spend would increase greater than 5% as a percentage of their overall marketing budgets during Q2. It’s very likely that this increased spend can be attributed in large part to the channel’s pay-for-performance model which offers greater return on ad spend (ROAS) and risk insulation versus their pay-for-access channel counterparts. 

To further illustrate the mid and long-term reliability of the affiliate channel not only through the proverbial times of feast but perhaps more importantly, through times of famine, data from Pepperjam’s Affiliate Marketing Sales Index indicates that spend has been consistently strong in the channel dating back to March 25, when stay-at-home orders really took hold through July.

Performance as a beacon of reliability amid uncertainty 

Facebook ad boycotts, Amazon slashing commissions and the current climate, all have marketers scrambling for insulation against revenue loss. Performance channels like affiliate not only offer this insulation by way of their inherent pay-for-outcome model, but they are also highly prized for their ability to maintain brand exposure and increase awareness—all without the high price tag of audience access fees that accompany other paid channels. Savvy marketers are keen to this concept and understand more than they have ever before the need for risk insulation coupled with performance. Many marketers look at this period of uncertainty and unease as a window of opportunity to diversify their marketing even further through the affiliate channel. 

Ultimately, for marketers, the question of repositioning ad budget during times of uncertainty may boil down to two key factors: Payment models and results. On the other side of the equation, the pandemic and the political unrest also has a direct impact on the channels publishers are turning to. Take for example, Amazon’s commission cuts. It makes perfect sense that as a result, publisher partners would be looking for additional ways to supplement or subsidize their loss of revenue or maintain their monetisation streams. And they are doing just that as we’ve seen a greater number of publisher partners — content partners included—applying to the Ascend Affiliate Cloud platform — a pattern that shows promise that they too will continue to utilise affiliate links in their long-term strategic planning. 

At the end of the day, it’s all about the consumer

But where do consumers’ wants and needs fit into this equation? Marketers need to factor in the importance of providing consumers with a seamless experience when determining where to shift their ad budgets while still being certain they remain omnipresent throughout the buyer journey. The current climate will certainly have long-term effects when it comes to strategic ad budget and planning. Marketers will continue to search out low-risk, high return channels as they will still be cautious of their go-forward spend measures and performance channels—namely affiliate—satisfy this need. 

While long-term spend outlooks favor a bullish approach, this time of uncertainty has taught marketers valuable lessons when it comes to cash conservation, and they will still be cautious about spend even as we inevitably come out on the other side. Pay-for-performance models are resilient. They are adaptable and agile. They offer marketers a greater sense of stability and safety: they offer guarantees in outcomes—something that other primary sales and marketing channels can’t claim with any degree of certainty.

Is there any sound advice for marketers right now? Do your homework. Look for channels that afford you control over your ad spend and above all, let the data drive your spend decisions. 

The post Budget Cuts: Should You Be Repositioning Your Marketing Budgets Elsewhere? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Affiliate can take many shapes. Consider an influencer whose curated outfit-of-the-day that is monetised through affiliate links driving consumer discovery; or an article on a commerce-content destination monetising product recommendations in concert with affiliate; or price-savvy consumers who are midway through their shopping journey that may be incented to purchase and convert as a result of affiliate monetisation that lives in the form cashback. 

The point is that despite what some may think about affiliate being a last-click channel, affiliate marketing can live at any point of the consumer journey, from driving discovery to consideration, to decision—and beyond. In fact, a recent Performance Marketing Association (PMA) study (aptly named “The Affiliate Marketing” study), indicated that content and bloggers had the largest share of US spend in 2018. 

Affiliate marketing’s uniqueness, or versatility, lies in its ability to live in any content medium and to be distributed through a multitude of marketing channels. But it’s this same uniqueness that also prevented the channel from earning a position as a primary sales channel in the marketer’s mix. The versatility didn’t translate, and further clouded marketer understanding of the actual value affiliate marketing provided. Specifically, marketers struggled to understand how to measure affiliate value, how to use the channel to their advantage, and how to cultivate expertise. This problem still exists today. 

While many in this industry are familiar with the confusion and to a degree, the apprehension that surrounds the channel, this isn’t founded on opinion: It is rooted in fact. Very recently, we commissioned research with Forrester Consulting—who confirmed this notion for us. More than 170 executive-level (C-suite) marketers were surveyed, with most citing a lack of channel understanding as what inhibits full optimisation of affiliate. There is a real struggle to understand how to measure the channel’s value and well-established history of bias that has caused marketers to prioritise the channels they know—the traditional (paid) primary sales channels—and de-prioritise the affiliate channel.

So, while we definitively know the problem surrounding affiliate is one of misunderstanding, why then is there a concerted effort to veil that problem rather than address it head-on? Specifically, there is an open dialogue and debate about the employment of the name ‘affiliate’ vs. ‘partnership’ marketing. Partnership or partner marketing makes the case that there are two sects of publishers co-existing inside the channel: affiliates and partners. Affiliates fall into the coupon and loyalty categories while the rest of the publisher types are lumped into the “partner” category (think: influencers and content-focused publishers). But is it fair to classify “affiliates” and “partners” differently or place them into separate performance categories? I would argue that it is both unfair to the affiliate and inaccurate to the value of affiliate marketing. After all, with such a large segment of spending—the largest—belonging to content publishers and bloggers according to the PMA report, how can they not be considered affiliates?

The attempt to rebrand the channel—to re-christen affiliate marketing as partner or partnership marketing—is not a solution to the problem that exists. But to realistically answer the burning question of whether “partner” marketing is an evolving model or just a load of nonsense, in short, it’s really neither. 

The benefit of a long tenure in this industry has shown us that affiliate perceptions have little to do with naming conventions and everything to do with key stakeholders’ education and exposure to the affiliate channel. Calling affiliate marketing anything else now, only serves to create confusion by adding a “new” category with a “new” name and all the same problems.

Truth be told, in the midst of the back and forth over what to call the channel, we’re missing the real and obvious problem that exists. Instead, we’re ignoring it, hoping that renaming it will erase some of the stigmas attached. Yet the evidence that Forrester and the PMA uncovered supports just one productive ideology. Far from simply renaming the channel that won’t serve to solve any of these real problems, we have a common collective and vested interest to capture the attention of the C-suite and educate them on affiliate marketing. Until we do that, this issue will remain in the channel—whether newly minted or not. 

As leaders in the affiliate space, we all need to be mindful of words: What we say matters. Words have weighted meaning and when applied in a given context, aim to shape—or reshape—the way in which we translate concepts. By adding nuance to the affiliate channel through labelling it anything other than what it actually is, perhaps only serves to further convolute an already hard-to-perceptually-decipher channel.  

At the heart of the matter, the evolution of affiliate is not in the partner composition or in the labels. It’s in technology. Why are we seeing a rise of content and news publishers contributing to affiliate revenue? It’s because of the technological advancements happening that allow a brand to assign commission credit where they deem appropriate. For the longest time, last-click was the only model used. Not anymore. Now a brand can assign spend that aligns to their attribution model and where they see publishers having the biggest value and impact.

Perhaps in lieu of a new channel moniker, we instead find common ground and unite in trying to overcome the problems that actually exist. Let’s roll our sleeves and look pragmatically at this situation. Let’s address the root problems and challenges in our industry, including a more comprehensive channel understanding, and address them collectively, head-on.

Bottomline: Address the problem at hand (marketer education), rather than taking the easy way out by renaming a channel that fought tirelessly to earn its rightful seat at the marketing table. 

The post Partner Marketing: An Evolving Model or Just a Load of Nonsense? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Validating affiliate as a cross-team lever

There has been a concerted effort to challenge marketers to rethink affiliate marketing as more of a “partner” marketing channel. And while this notion has aided in the expansion of partnership types that can be managed within it, when you cut past the smoke-and-mirror style naming conventions, it begins to feel more like a lesson in the power of semantics than anything else. And all these semantics simply do is define relationship marketing bound by a common payment model — pay for performance. The short of it? ‘Partnership’ is just a broader catch-all way of saying what you really mean: affiliate marketing.

Meanwhile, at its core, affiliate marketing has always been about relationship building. Traditional affiliate networks were facilitating working relationships between advertisers and brands for more than two decades. Today, we sit in position to watch the maturation of the channel: affiliate, all grown up. As this performance-driven channel comes of age, so must our approach to how we seek and foster the critical relationships that make it all possible.

This approach brings into focus how internal marketing teams are positioned to create a collaborative approach to relationship-generating efforts. In short, to maximize the performance potential of these relationships, the affiliate channel needs to work in harmony as a lever that can be effectively pulled across teams rather than acting as a standalone channel. First order of business in this internal partnership? Breaking down the organisational barriers that create silos, rather than efficiencies.

Expanding affiliate marketing to social and PR teams to maximize compounding returns of content

Thinking of digital tactics more fluidly may mean affiliate marketing, as a practice, can — and should — expand to social and PR teams to maximize relationships. This approach makes practical sense. PR teams are tasked with building trust not only with the media at large but also with brands and publishers. PR is the virtual anchor that stabilises your brand’s story by making sure you are amplifying one unifying message while avoiding potential brand messaging icebergs. Social and PR channels also do the job of ticking audience-reach boxes, organically or otherwise, and when your audience sees your messaging across these multiple channels, it builds recognition and trust.

Furthermore, the difference in a social or PR team managing a relationship versus an affiliate channel managing the relationship simply boils down to the payment model. PR teams pay flat fees while social teams may pay on engagement and reach and affiliate teams pay on conversion. Similar efforts packaged and priced differently.

Teams that work in tandem to help ensure overall brand growth. For example, where and when appropriate, PR teams can extend the life and continuity of their efforts (think earned media) because evergreen content is now tracked and monetised through affiliate links. Over time, traffic increases and ticks in engagement only serve to compound the value of the content — making trackability the key to measurement.  

This compounding effect assists in increasing brand awareness and bolstering ongoing sales. The sheer amount of “free” content readily available today has forced content creators to become more creative when it comes to revenue generation. Inserting affiliate links into content, such as an editorial newsletter or contributed article, helps ensure that creators are rewarded for their content-creation efforts. Since long-term traffic (and revenue) is preferable, the investment in affiliate marketing to support measurement of these content pieces indefinitely becomes very practical.

Building not burning budget bridges

As internal business teams grow and become increasingly adept in their skill set, an unfortunate side effect begins to emerge: highly-skilled experts tucked away in siloes. While this can make sense for other aspects of the organisation in regards to maintaining focus and efficiency, it’s not such a bankable game plan when it comes to maximising performance. Why is this? Well, put simply, the experts become tethered by budgets, stymieing their ability to do what’s best on behalf of the brand.

Start thinking about the organisation’s digital marketing budget in relation to how it will best serve the customer and budget accordingly, factoring in the channel that will drive the best return.

In a time when the market seems saturated with brands vying for customers’ attention, PR and social teams can work with affiliate teams to cross-collaborate on partnerships that not only drive revenue long-term but also help generate brand awareness and interest.  

The post Why You Need to Expand Your Affiliate Team to Pursue Performance-Based Relationships appeared first on PerformanceIN.