Today the competition for attention online is fiercer than ever. For new brands, breaking through can be especially difficult. How do you reach new customers who are bombarded with information, ignore ads, and endlessly scroll through an infinite inventory of entertaining video?
While you need multiple marketing strategies and tools, affiliate marketing should be in your toolkit as a cost-effective approach to amplify your marketing message across the digital landscape. Read on for a quick overview of why.
What is affiliate marketing
At its core, affiliate marketing is a scalable marketing program which incentivizes individuals to talk about, promote, and link to your products online.
Affiliates, or advocates as we call them at Audenticity, share content online that includes a link to your product. When someone buys your product through that affiliate link, the advocate earns a small commission on the sale. It's that simple.
Is affiliate marketing effective?
Affiliate marketing is powerful in multiple ways. First, targeted programs amplify word-of-mouth advocacy from your best customers - people who know and love your products. That means the message is genuine and likely to be heard by a receptive audience.
Second, it is a performance-based marketing approach, meaning that you pay out commissions only when a sale is made. This can make it an extremely cost-effective and highly leveraged marketing tool.
Last but not least, content with affiliate links can be evergreen. This means it can be indexed by search engines and surfaced long after an initial post, again amplifying your marketing efforts beyond, say, an ad placement.
Build it yourself or use an affiliate platform?
Building your own affiliate technology is generally only cost-effective for the very largest of brands and merchants. Using a platform like Audenticity for your affiliate marketing program enables you to get up and running immediately without having to worry about implementing and dealing with the details of tracking sales and payments to advocates in your network. In addition, with a platform like Audenticity you get the benefit of cross-pollination - your products are listed in a product catalog that our advocates are constantly viewing and promoting based on their experience.
If you are an online brand or retailer and don’t yet have an affiliate program, you are missing out. Audenticity provides a turn-key platform to power your affiliate program so that you can focus on what you do best - make great products - and leave the details of powering the program to us.
Learn more about the benefits of Audenticity’s platform and sign up today.
