Recently, Rachel Miller of Moolah Marketing hosted an affiliate marketing optimization tactics webinar for Awin Group partners.
In this hour-long session available to our advertisers, agencies and publishers, Rachel discussed the ways in which our clients could grow their performance marketing revenue and successfully supplement their business income with just Facebook.
“AppMyHome is a small publisher with both a blog and a YouTube channel, and with light traffic sometimes it is hard to see if we are making progress. [Rachel’s] talk provided insights on how to do better.” – Mark Pallone, AppMyHome
Following Rachel’s expert lesson, we rounded up our top five takeaways to better support your affiliate marketing efforts, now during the COVID-19 crisis and in the longer term.
1. Maximize connections
Meet your audience wherever they are in the Facebook ecosystem – on your personal profile, company page and in relevant Facebook groups – to best sell your business and products. Ensure you’re building connections between each part of the ecosystem and being active in each medium to allow your customers to engage with your business, products, content and other consumers passionate about what you do … producing the social proof and personal connections needed to grow your company into a thriving business.
2. Keep it personal
What sets affiliate marketing apart from other digital marketing channels is that it can get personal. Publishers allow advertisers to delve deep into who their customers are, and love and serve them where they are and how they need it. Furthermore, personalization helps businesses differentiate themselves from being characterized as spam – one consumer’s spam is another consumer’s treasure, the key is knowing who your customer is, working with the right partners to reach that customer and keeping all messaging personal.
3. Stay niche
It’s a proven fact – products and services fit to your audience’s interests and that complement content they’re already engaging with are much more likely to convert time and time again. How do you do this? Stay in a set niche across your personal profile, company page and Facebook groups. Effectively maximizing the Facebook ecosystem and meeting your customers where they are, offering valuable products and services that drive conversions only works when it’s personalized to them, not once, but every single time in every single place.
4. Nurture, nurture, nurture
Long-term revenue generation doesn’t come from capturing a consumer’s interest once, especially since there are always a plethora of mitigating factors at play including ensuring you’re capturing customer interest at the right moment in time when they are ready and able to make a purchase. Its critical to stay front of mind with your audience and allow them to ‘see’ you and interact with you on a regular basis to build a rapport and drive continued revenue for your brand.
5. Always disclose
As with all affiliate marketing activity, its critical to follow disclosure guidelines. That said, disclosing you’re an affiliate shouldn’t (and doesn’t) mean it will inhibit sales. In fact, Rachel sees quite the opposite results with her own affiliate marketing efforts. When she discloses and says she is an affiliate for a product she is promoting or recommending, her audience knows she loves that product and would never recommend something she didn’t believe in. Whether that’s actually true isn’t really relevant, as we know it’s not possible for all publishers to have a true personal connection to each and every product or service they’re an affiliate for. Because Rachel has followed the above blueprint – maximizing connections, keeping it personal, staying niche and nurturing her relationship with her audience – she has won her customer’s trust. By stating she is an affiliate and properly disclosing, it provides an extra stamp of recommendation and tells her consumer – I love this product or service so much and am so passionate about it (maybe I even paid for it myself) that I am officially partnering with this business. That’s how much I believe in what I am talking about.
BONUS TIP: Content needs to educate, entertain, and connect.
Content is most successful for generating sales when it follows these rules, hitting at least two of the three with each piece of content (whether it be a blog post, video, photo, etc.):
- Educate: Explain what the product or service is and why it’s needed.
- Entertain: Is it memorable? Does this stand out in a sea of similar content?
- Connect: In today’s coronavirus climate this is particularly critical as more and more Americans spend their days inside, longing for human interactions. Creating content around your products and services that engages your audience and asks them to relate to you in some way is extremely powerful and likely to produce the results you’re looking for.
Regardless of which of these content rules you follow, at the end of the day it’s important to remember that your content should not look or feel like an advertisement…. It should look like something your audience wants to engage with.
From everyone at Awin and ShareASale, a massive thank you to Rachel for the invaluable training and guidance she provided to our partners. To learn more about Rachel and ways in which she can further support your business’ marketing efforts, join her Facebook Group or subscribe to her page.
Interested in gaining exclusive access to Awin and ShareASale webinars, events and content such as this? Register your interest here. For more information on COVID-19, please visit our information hub where we bring you the latest news from the Awin Group, as well as links to network insights and useful pointers, alongside wider updates.
