Could Influencers Help You Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Business?

You’ve decided that you’re tired of the nine-to-five grind and you want to start your own business. You are not alone. In fact, in 2017, there were 582 million entrepreneurs worldwide. Clearly the entrepreneurial lifestyle is one people aim for.

And one route to take on the entrepreneurial journey, is affiliate marketing.

You might not earn as much as you would by selling your own product, but by working in affiliate marketing, you also won’t have the headache of production, and inventory. On the downside, however, it is an extremely popular business model. How do you compete with the other millions of affiliates out there?

We’ve got an idea.

What about using influencer marketing? In 2018, companies who enlisted influencers saw a return of up to 520% on their investment.

There’s no question that choosing the right influencer marketing campaign could be just the ticket you need to get your new business off the ground. But how do you choose the right influencer? How do you make this type of marketing work for you?

Brand Awareness

Since you won’t be selling your own products, you will want to build a brand awareness campaign more than anything else. After all, the influencer is not likely going to want to promote an affiliate product if they’re not getting a cut of the action. Let them help you build your brand instead, and you both win.

This all starts with finding the right influencer or influencers.

Finding the Right Influencer

Although it might seem simple, the truth is finding the right influencer can be a little complicated.

You should find the influencer with the most clout operating in your industry. So, all you need to do is look for the one with the most followers, right? Wrong.

An influencer typically charges a rate per thousand followers. Someone with 1 million followers, therefore, will charge more than someone with 10,000 followers. While you’re paying less in the lower end, you very might well be getting more value for your money.

Here’s the issue. How much does the influencer with 1 million followers really engage with their audience? Unless they’re willing to hire employees, there’s no way that they can keep up with the flood of messages they receive every single day. When engagement starts to go down, followers are likely to look for attention elsewhere. While they might not go as far as to unfollow the influencer, they also won’t be as active on their page or profile.

A smaller influencer, who is still able to maintain that relationship, would be a far better bet. You would pay less, and still get some measurable results. It might be beneficial, therefore, to consider hiring two or three smaller influencers instead of blowing your budget on one larger one.

Do Your Research

Your first step in choosing your influencer is to dig deeper into their results. Instead of just checking out the number of followers they have, look at how active the followers are. Do they like, share, and comment on posts? A large account with mostly inactive followers should be a red flag. This could indicate that either they have bought fake followers or that the followers aren’t all that interested in what they’re posting. Either way, working with them would be a waste of your advertising budget.

The next step is to learn as much as possible about the person. Follow them yourself, make insightful comments on posts, and see if you can establish their brand values. Not only should they have a similar target audience to you, but they should also have similar values.

You don’t want someone who might do something controversial associated with your brand. It will take a bit of work to find the right collaborator, but it will be worth it in the end.

Set Up Measurement & Track Performance

At last but not least, it’s essential to understand the importance of quantifying the success of your campaigns. Building brand awareness is crucial but without monitoring of influencers’ performance and their results you’re risking to throw your money out the window.

Since affiliate marketing and influencer marketing do intersect with each other, it is possible to use their distinctive features for the enhancement of the performance. Instead of paying for clicks and getting almost zero conversion rates, you can choose the payment model that implies to directly measure the revenue impact of your influencer campaign. For example, you can use referral links or promo codes to track sales tied to influencers and apply the CPA (сost per action) payment method.

Luckily, reliable performance marketing platform can help you manage advertising campaigns and track influencers’ results. Besides, its detailed statistics allows you to monitor the efficiency of each influencer. You can classify and create lists of influencers by different criteria such as CTR (Click-through rate) and ROI (Return on Investment).

Measuring all metrics and parameters, analyzing statistics, and optimizing campaigns depending on the results will help you to effectively use advertising budgets as well as improve performance and outcome. Consequently, it will lead you to figure out the right influencers for you and to get definable data so that you can tweak future campaigns for ultimate success.

Final Notes

Overall, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, an influencer could do your business a world of good. It’s a simple way to get more exposure for your brand, but It’s not something that you want to rush into.

Do your research up front, clarify your expectations, and put a system in place to monitor the success of your campaigns.

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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