IconPeak on Converting Offers, Competitive Payouts and Skills to Survive in Affiliate Marketing

IconPeak is a fully managed mobile marketing agency that combines technology, expertise and data. They successfully operate in Sports Betting, Finance, Travel, Gaming, Photo & Video verticals.

Each day new players are starting to conquer the affiliate marketing industry. They all aspire to achieve great success and hope that someday their names will appear along with the affiliate marketing leaders. Now we could hardly imagine that days and years ago all of these giants were newcomers as well. What were they dreaming of? Which problems did they have? What were the key factors to their success? How did they become globally known? What was the affiliate marketing industry like back then?

We continue sharing the answers to these and many more questions in our series of articles, Affiliate Network Insider*, that touch upon the working life of the biggest and most prominent affiliate networks and agencies in the industry. Please, welcome our new guests from IconPeak mobile marketing agency team.

— How and when it all started for you in affiliate marketing business?

I started doing media buying when I was in high school. From my early success with Google Adwords, I decided to dedicate 100% of my time and efforts to online marketing and hired a developer and a designer. That is how the company began to grow.

After I saw the massive growth from the mobile campaigns we were running, I decided to focus the company entirely in mobile marketing and it came naturally to open some of the best campaigns we had access to other affiliates.

— What challenges did you face in the very beginning?

Antoine: The main challenge was managing the team and hiring too fast on the early signs of success. The online marketing industry is a very fast paced industry, where the most agile and fastest team to catch the next wave is the one to reap the benefits of. Companies that have too many employees end up with too many processes and rules, and as a consequence are not able to achieve that.

I’m now a true believer in running small teams of industry experts that are able to deliver the most value to our clients and partners and adapt to any new trends in the industry. Of course they must be well compensated and rewarded when the company is successful, that’s why we share a percentage of the quarterly results with every member of the team.

— What is IconPeak’s competitive advantage over other agencies? 

Antoine: What sets us apart is the expertise and responsiveness of our team. They work by your side to make sure that you achieve YOUR goals. We also invest heavily in tech to ensure that the traffic we deliver to our advertisers matches their expectations. In terms of tracking, we fully trust Affise, then we build tools around it.

— What’s your major takeaway from being in the industry for more than 15 years? 

Antoine: During these years I have seen many companies and marketers rising and then disappearing after a while. I would say that in order to last nowadays, it takes a much broader range of skills than in the past: from tech, to marketing and sales, the bar is always higher, that’s why the industry is so fascinating.

— What’s the most interesting thing working in affiliate marketing?

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you end up working with so many cultures and so many different people. And it inevitably leads to different types of English. Definitely the most funny moments are when everyone is trying to say the same and no one understands anything! Of course, finding a way out is quite simple if you want. There are some keywords to help so it really depends on how much you want to understand the other part.

“I’m a true believer in running small teams of industry experts that are able to deliver the most value to our clients and partners and adapt to any new trends in the industry,” — Antoine Moreau, CEO.

— How do you work with affiliates in your agency?

I believe the best way to attract affiliates is to give them well-converting offers with competitive payouts. That’s exactly what we do!

We have quite an easy process to register on our platform. Besides, we assign a dedicated Account Manager to each affiliate, who is always there to help them grow revenue faster. We love our affiliates and are always up to meet them in person, while attending industry events or in case we’re around.

— Who is “TOP Affiliate” for you?

Tatiana:  We are looking for affiliates with high quality of traffic and good volumes to our premium offers. I would say that communication is key here, so TOP affiliates are very responsive, reliable, eager to grow together with us and keep up with the industry.

— How do you work with advertisers?

We mostly focus on onboarding Direct Advertisers — App Developers. We strongly believe that the only way to succeed here is to know exactly what the partners need and how to find the right match of our traffic sources.

As for IconPeak, every Advertiser here gets a dedicated Account Manager, who is monitoring and proactively optimizing the campaigns in order to reach, and even exceed our clients’ expectations and goals.

— Your forecast for the next year: what we should be prepared to?

The industry is always changing, and in the past few years we’ve seen a growing attention to new performance metrics. Advertisers are becoming more demanding and concerned about the type of traffic and users agencies generate for them. And here comes a huge challenge — to adapt to the new demands of advertisers, not only in terms of performance, but also in limiting fraud to a minimum. So, here in IconPeak we pay attention to the things that are key in the short term, and will have impact in the long run.

— You top tips for agencies to increase their ROI?

Tatiana: Be flexible, transparent and responsive!

Carlos: Understand your clients and their needs, be honest in terms of what you can bring to them and do not promise what you cannot.

— What do you think is the main secret of your success? 

Ruben: The key is in balancing between dealing with numbers, statistics and people. Never forget the human factor and impact it has on developing your business relations.

Carlos: One and only thing: our people. You can have the best traffic sources, if the team is not working like a well oiled machine, nothing will work out.

* AFFILIATE NETWORK INSIDER is a project, covering success stories and inside life of the biggest and most prominent affiliate networks and agencies in the industry.

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Written by

Anastasia Zaichko

Head of PR and Marketing Communications

Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.

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