When I ask myself ‘are we running out of talent in the industry?’ my honest and prompt answer is yes. I will explain the reasons why I think this is happening and how we can collaborate to increase the talent coming into our industry and keep it within our channel below.

Candidates’ experience

When it comes to finding the perfect candidate, the most obvious and key criteria that hiring managers look at is the candidates’ experience. The assumption is often that you need to hire people whose experience matches the role requirements, to ensure that they’ll be able to complete their work successfully. However, when looking to fill entry level roles or candidates with affiliate experience, companies sometimes have to expand their research to candidates with wider digital knowledge, as looking purely at affiliate experience can sometimes make the search too narrow. In addition, people with a wider digital experience can bring valuable experience from other channels, looking at how to adapt previous initiatives and strategies that could work well in the affiliate channel.

Global expansion and consequences

When finding good talent, other challenges are a consequence of the global expansion that businesses are experiencing nowadays. Companies want to be prepared to support clients in other countries but have their employees based in the same city. An example would be a client willing to launch their affiliate programme in the Spanish market, but having those employees based in the United Kingdom. This is increasingly a request of brands, so companies should take this into consideration when hiring candidates. They should ensure that candidates have the necessary languages, market knowledge and the right skillset to launch and support global programmes. If a candidate matches these criteria, the company will have greater success at scaling and managing global affiliate programmes. Companies also need to consider other factors such as Brexit which could make it harder to higher candidates suitable for global roles. 

Another external factor that cannot be ignored is the conception of affiliates within the digital landscape. The affiliate channel is very often scrutinised for its elasticity and “non-immediate” outstanding results, versus other channels like display, social or search. Consequently, this conception sometimes reaches employees’ opinion and the more junior employees decide to move from their roles in affiliates to other companies “to learn how other channels work”. 

Action points

Having summarised the current situation and the challenges that we are facing, I’d like to suggest a few actions our industry should take to ensure we are attracting and retaining talent in the affiliate industry.

Firstly, even if expertise is the most obvious criteria for hiring, I’d encourage companies to leave those criteria partially aside and look for the potential in people. If the person has the right profile, personality, is willing to join your company for the right reasons, shows excitement and commitment for the role and in addition, they speak other languages and have wider market knowledge, invest in them. Bring them on board and train them to make them successful at their roles, shaping and developing their experience. You’ll be able to shape their experience to make it fit perfectly within your company, which will reinforce the link between the employee and the company. This is not something that should only be done in the first few months, but something that all companies should commit to doing throughout an employee’s career. If the company cares about its employees and makes this clear to them by investing in training them, this person will be engaged and less likely to leave for another role.

Secondly, to overcome the challenge of the conception of affiliate marketing within digital, companies, leaders and each of us working in this industry must do a better job of explaining the values of our industry and embracing what we do. Our channel is a bedrock of innovation and is an exciting place to work. If this is represented daily by every employee and the leadership, these new “fresh” employees with limited experience in the channel will start to feel passionate about having chosen affiliates and will want to stay. Companies in the industry should also provide more education and valuable content to brands about the value and power of the affiliate channel and how it can be considered the safest channel due to its payment model.

Lastly, if employers invest in training and promoting employees when ready, they will be creating a fairer environment when it comes to real talent in our industry. 

Summary

In summary, we have some challenges to face when it comes to finding the right talent and we need to be aware of the external factors that can make this more difficult. However, there are a lot of initiatives that companies and each one of us can commit to overcome these challenges and to develop more talented employees that will not consider working outside of affiliates.

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We can all agree that the term ‘multi-channel’ is a hot topic in our industry. However, the online industry is growing at such a fast pace that it might be worth explaining and understanding what types of multi-channel experiences exist and what role affiliate marketing plays in this mix.

First of all, there is the offline to online multi-channel experience . Classic offline campaigns such as TV and newspaper ads, or billboards outside the train station, will awaken customers’ desire to purchase the brands or products that they will then come across online. 

From the other perspective, the increasing use of online becomes an inevitably strong factor when it comes to shopping offline. Customers will find products that they are willing to purchase while browsing on the internet and will complete the purchase offline.  Customers will not only come across brands and products when browsing with their computers, but also on smartphones, tablets or TV. It is important that retailers have a marketing campaign that is aligned on every single device which leads nicely into my focal point about multi-channel. 

Multi-channel attribution

In most purchases, more than one digital channel (PPC, display, email, social or affiliate) will be involved. Retailers need to have strategies that will ensure the synergy of all the channels throughout a purchase to provide an optimum customer journey, but let’s looks more specifically at affiliate and the role it plays in the multi-channel experience.

In the first instance, from offline to online, affiliates do not have an effect on customers’ purchases, as this has been provoked by something external. However, affiliates can potentially benefit from conversions that have been influenced by an offline campaign. On the other hand, affiliates can support retailers to drive sales from online to offline, as they engage with potential customers online and drive them to the stores using geo-targeting. 

Affiliates are able to recognise the potential customer’s location through their device and inform them about discounts relevant to their location. However, this raises some questions: is it fair to attribute sales that were influenced by offline efforts to the online channel? Is it really an incremental sale for the retailer or would this customer have purchased the product regardless of the discount being offered? The reality is that customers purchase based on their habits and tendencies nine times out of 10. A great example is one of the biggest retailers in the world, Inditex. Their online and offline marketing activity  has until recently been non-existent, yet it hasn’t stopped them becoming one of the preferred global clothing retailers. 

Multi-device

In regard to the other half of the multi-channel experience – multi-device – affiliates also have a strong role to play in optimising customer journeys through every device, and have the capability of targeting potential customers differently depending on the device they are using. 

In this instance, affiliate networks play a key role, as they must provide the technology that ensures the transactions that were initiated on an affiliate’s site on a desktop are tracked when the customer completes the purchase on a different device such as their phone without passing through the publisher’s site again. Retailers should ensure that they work with a network that provides this technology in order to properly recognise the affiliate’s efforts. 

However, this takes us back to the previous thought: what if between the customer’s search on the affiliate’s website on their desktop and the actual purchase, they come across a TV ad that reminded them about the brand? Would this offline influence be the final factor for the customer to complete the purchase through their smart phone? Would it be fair that this transaction is attributed to the affiliate?

Assisted purchases

Lastly, but probably the experience where affiliates have the strongest influence, is in purchases that have been assisted by different digital channels. Retailers normally have a digital strategy that covers the entire digital landscape. In this instance, retailers could focus most of their activity on affiliates in order to have a win-win situation: advertisers have the capability of working with affiliates that are experts in all digital areas such as search, SEO, display, voucher or social and will pay on a last click attribution model. 

The affiliate contribution in this multi-channel instance is endless: they will be represented in all the digital channels, with a more positive ROI and their CPAs will be under control. However, this circles again back to attribution. How can a client make sure that affiliates are satisfied with their attribution within other channels and between affiliates themselves.

Reward models

Retailers can take three different paths when it comes to pay based on attribution:

• Pay every influencer.
• Divide the commission based on the customers’ touchpoints.
• Pay on last click, which is the current affiliate solution.

Since affiliates will be rewarded if they are at the end of the funnel, clients should try to improve  attribution throughout the customer’s journey by using technology that tracks all customer touchpoints. This will help retailers to understand the weight of their affiliate activity and the different business models within their affiliate channel. Retailers can then work more closely with affiliates at the beginning of the funnel to try to improve their performance, based on their understanding of attribution. However, as well as advertisers playing their part, each affiliate business model should be aware of their potential revenue and assume the role they play within this multi-channel experience.

In conclusion, retailers that take the time to understand their customers’ journeys and improve their presence at the beginning of the funnel can potentially drive additional sales. This will be beneficial for parties, retailers and affiliates, since they will have additional sales instead of having to distribute the commission assigned to one single purchase. This will also demonstrates the recognition publishers deserve and will improve their contribution in the multi-channel world. 

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