Businesses are more frequently seeing the benefits of affiliate marketing in their strategies today.
Affiliate marketing allows companies to effectively market a product with a low budget, low effort and time, and at a well-contained risk level while guaranteeing a high return on your investment, increase in brand awareness, and business growth.
Of course, some things sounds too good to be true, but in this case the benefits are a consequence of marketing that is highly targeted and effective. Businesses are able to identify a target market and select the perfect set of representatives that’ll suit the brand—this is exactly what affiliate marketing does.
Before you launch out, you should first learn about best practices and tips that you’ll need to perfectly execute your affiliate marketing campaign. Let’s go over what affiliate marketing is and some of the key benefits that come from adopting it as a strategy.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
This type of marketing involves hiring people to promote your product and rewarding them for their efforts on a commission basis—this is an effective strategy that brands employ to improve sales. Quite often, it’s better used in tandem other marketing outreach strategies.
Affiliate marketing usually involves a partnership between a business and an affiliate to help promote the sale of their product, with the retailer agreeing to pay a commission to the affiliate marketer for every sale they drive.
For online-based businesses, the affiliate uses a unique link that’s created to track traffic that’s directed to the site.
Since 2015, revenue from affiliate marketing programs grows by 10% annually. The projections are this impressive trend to continue at least until 2021.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing on Your Business
According to Statistica, affiliate marketing spending in the U.S alone is expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022.
Why are companies spending so much on affiliate marketing campaigns? Below are some of the benefits of using affiliate marketers in your business:
1. Low cost of start-up
An affiliate program does not require that you have an advertising team for ad visuals or purchase ad space.
Rather than that, you’ll have to depend on your affiliates to come up with their marketing content. Other than the initial effort of selecting and vetting affiliates, there’s little effort required from you to market your products, which is one of the reasons it’s become such a popular method of marketing.
Once a company is comfortable working with an affiliate and has built a good relationship, they can for the most part let them get on with marketing your service or product.
2. Low ongoing costs
Since most of your marketing activities are done by affiliates, they’ll also bear the chunk of the cost attached. And since it’s a commission-based program, it means that you’ll only pay affiliates from sales they bring in.
This marketing model makes cost easy to manage and does not interrupt your cash flow, unlike other marketing models such as PPC advertising that requires you to pay for every click leading to your website. But affiliate marketing ensures that you only part ways with your money when sales are made.
3. Low risk
Lost cost means low risk. There’s little risk of loss since payments are only made when there’s an actual conversion; perfect for businesses on a tight budget.