An Affiliate Marketing Action Plan: The 5 Cs Approach

Note from Geno Prussakov: I am excited to welcome our newest guest blogger, UK-based Simon Swan. Enjoy his first AM Navigator post below.

As affiliate marketing continues to mature as a key digital channel to support an organisations acquisition strategy, it is important to have an actionable plan in place to support your program and having set objectives in place to help drive the campaign in order to meet key business goals.

For any campaign there are three key features you should look to set the foundations for a successful affiliate strategy: Research the Market, Knowing your Audience & Identify your USP – i.e. how will your affiliate campaign stand out from your competitors?

With this in mind, I have put together an affiliate marketing 5 Cs campaign to follow to ensure you’re campaign can deliver the results

Key actions:

Listen to your market – Set up and monitor your competitors and associated keywords through free tools such as Google Keyword planner and Google Alerts.  Monitor review websites, affiliate forums and use Social Media tools to listen to the market, views and opinions of customers and affiliates of your competitor programs.Have a performance benchmark? – Key indicators to consider when completing your competitor analysis include: commission tiers, size of their affiliate base, are there any corporate publications that provide a breakdown in how much revenue their affiliate channels generate?Exploit Gaps/Opportunities – From the SWOT analysis, a number of gaps & opportunities should now be identified and should provide you with a strategy. Defining a Gaps and Opportunity analysis  can be very effective if you’re operating in a crowded market place and are looking for a way to stand out to recruit affiliates to your program.Points of Differentiation – Look for the opportunities, what are your competitors not offering the market that you could exploit and take advantage of to boost the appeal of your affiliate program?Surveys – Set up online surveys to send to potential affiliates who sign up to your program and also ask the 3rd party affiliate program to see if they could communicate this to their wider pool of affiliates. Be prepared to offer an incentive or competition prize as a means to drive users to complete the survey – this acts as an effective tool understand the potential, opportunities and to create new incentives

Key actions:

Override fee –The majority of affiliate networks charge a 30% override which is based on the commission you are prepared to pay your affiliate base.Tiered Commission Levels – As your program matures, you should be looking to segment your affiliates by revenue (or what the objective of your program is) so to clearly incentivise the affiliates or to easily identify clusters of affiliates that may need more time and support on understanding how to best optimise their performance. As much as it is with the lead affiliates, it is also important to incentivise the “long tail” of your affiliates.Bonus - Introduce “Bonus level” commission tiers to help sell through end of line products or If you’re a retailer that produces “own brand” products, you may well have more margin to play with by offering a higher commission level.

Key actions:

Know your affiliate community – According to Econsultancy 55% of affiliates consider text to be the most effective linking method with banners (36%) and datafeeds (25%) also voted the most popular form of promotionBanner sizes – Ensure you’re providing a rich mix of banner inventory for affiliates to use on their sites – these can be generic based or targeted around key products/services as well as promotions being run through your seasonal campaigns.Keep it fresh – Make sure you’re keeping your creatives fresh and updated – there is nothing worse in seeing banners promoting out of stock products or Christmas promotional creatives being run in July!

Key actions:

Open to questions – Get into the habit of communicating with your affiliates as well as the  affiliate network  and better still, face to face so you can build up a good working rapport.Extended Workforce – Your affiliate base should be regarded as an extended work-force of your organisation, they should be supporting you to deliver on the objectives you’ve set and thus should be treated as an internal member of staff.Introduce an Open Day – Launch an annual open day at your offices – Invite your affiliates to come and visit you and the team, introduce them to your product lines, future plans and product promotions you have planned for the year. The key here is to really get their buy-in and that they feel part of your business.Keep the buzz alive – Never let your program become boring and out-dated! – keep up interest levels by running competitions and interesting, topical information on your organisation and the sector you operate. Easy to do plans such as an events or editorial calendar should help to stimulate your team to continue to keep communication going through-out the year with your pool of affiliates.

Key actions:

Below is a list of KPIs that should be considered to assess the effectiveness of your campaign with the objective to generate sales:

Active affiliates – those driving key objectives of the campaign e.g. sales, leads, visitsInactive affiliates – those no longer promoting the campaign, left the programPotential affiliates – those no longer driving positive performances based on their historical sales or leadsCTR (Click-through Rate) – the total number of ad clicks divided by the total number of ad impressionsImpressions – the total number of times your ad is shown. This is a good metric to understand the effectiveness of a banner creativeConversion – the total number of visits divided by total number of sales

 

generatedAverage Order value – of sales through the program

Simon Swan is a digital marketing & business development professional who has led and built commercial digital marketing strategies for start-ups and large organisations working in the entrepreneurial private & public sector. You can read more from Simon at his blog http://www.swan-e.co.uk

Tags: affiliate communication, competitive intelligence, creatives, KPI

Merry Christmas All...

Regards

MichaelT

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How to Leverage Affiliate Relationships to Create Content

Note from Geno Prussakov: I am excited to welcome our newest guest blogger, UK-based Pete Campbell. Enjoy his first AM Navigator post below.

Very few things in life are black and white (zebras and pianos are notable exceptions) and, more often than not, things fall into that difficult and morally ambiguous “grey area”. This is just as true for affiliate and SEO marketers as it is for everyone else.

If you’ve come across the terms black hat and white hat in an online marketing context before, you’ll know precisely what I’m talking about. In highly competitive niches such as gambling (bingo and poker), law (personal injury claims) and finance (payday loans), it can be difficult to choose between doing your online marketing the “right” way (according to Google), and doing things the “wrong” way in order to gain the upper hand.

The problem is, no matter how tough Google is getting with black hatted online marketers who engage in spammy techniques, doing the dirty is still paying off. You only need to type a highly competitive gambling search term such as “bingo sites” (which has 18,000 monthly searches in UK) into Google and although it might not be obvious, most of the websites on Page 1 engage in spammy black hat techniques. The use of paid link networks and link farms is still rife and still generating search result rewards – for now.

Yet, by all accounts, the days of paid link building are over. Google may not have managed to banish every trace of SEO spam from the SERPs, but the search engine certainly means business. While black hat techniques may inflate your rank over the short term, if you have long term ambitions online, they’re not likely to go the distance.

You only need to look at Google’s clamp down on payday loan search terms to see this in action. In tandem with Panda 2.0 (which was updated to get even tougher with low-quality sites with crummy duplicate content and spammy back links), Google released a Payday Loan Algorithm update in May 2014. Designed to target “very spammy queries”, particularly in those competitive niches I listed earlier, the update was launched to start getting rid of the spammiest offenders who target these competitive terms.

While the Payday Loan Algorithm update will affect a small 0.2% of English search queries, it’s a clear signal of intent from Google. The search engine have also claimed that they plan to start proactively penalising and even banning affiliate sites which fail to add value for visitors.

And if you think Google are calling spammy webmasters’ bluffs, think again. Back in January 2014, gambling giant William Hill was hammered with a serious penalty thanks to its spammy backlink practices. The penalties sent the gambling site hurtling down the SERPs costing them what must have been hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue.

If you’re keen to avoid a future without penalties and want to do things right, it might feel like you’re fighting a losing battle against your less scrupulous contemporaries right now. But the truth is, you don’t have to play dirty to win big. Google may be slowly starting to punish black hat behaviour, but they’re also in the habit of rewarding websites which play by the rules. Increasingly, websites who focus on producing awesome, hyper-relevant content, great user experience and high-quality editorially earned links are starting to win on page one.

I’ve been running content strategy over at Two Little Fleas (a UK based bingo portal) throughout this period and, thanks to some concerted effort and creativity, great content has helped Two Little Fleas make page one for highly competitive terms including the aforementioned “bingo sites”, 100% paid link free.

But cracking content only is not the be all and end all to page one rankings. One of our most successful strategies has been reaching out to affiliate partners to collaborate on and distribute content has been a big contributing factor. We’ve explored ways to work with affiliates, leveraging these relationships to build great, relevant links and some pretty cool stuff.

Everyone’s a little bit susceptible to flattery and, if asked, we’re all pretty keen to share our wisdom and opinions a lot of the time. It’s normal. But it’s also very helpful if you want to generate content that’s interesting to your readers and highly sharable within your niche. Take some time to build relationships, reach out and ask industry experts and influencers about a topic you’re writing about. When you come to set keyboard to paper, make sure you reference them by name, then let them know once your content is live.

Example:  For Two Little Fleas, we’re currently running a series of interviews with organisations like The UK Bingo Association & Marie Curie Cancer Care who run Tickety Boo Games on their thoughts about the decline & comeback of the Bingo industry.

Just as we all like flattery, we all like to compete and win. Look into setting up your own awards for your affiliates, rewarding them for providing great user experience for their (and your!) players. This will win you plenty of social media attention and will generate links from all sorts of sources within your niche.

Example:  WhichBingo run an annual awards ceremony for their affiliates – well worth checking out for some inspiration. Their awards event has won them tons of great quality links from affiliates including Gala Bingo.

Build an “operator” review section into your website and hire a journalist quality writer to independently and transparently review site operators. Make sure you also include key facts about each site, alone with the pros and cons to ensure your readers find the reviews really, really helpful. Then take things a step further by encouraging users to add their own reviews and comments into the mix.

Once you’ve collected all of your reviews, you could even consider designing an “Approved by *YOUR NAME*” badge which you can then offer to operators. In many cases these badges will give their brand extra credibility and boost their conversion rate. That makes them even more likely to  display your badge along with a link back to – you guessed it – you!

Example: Two Little Fleas has placed badges on numerous operator sites, as an example though you can take a look at the one on the bottom of http://www.paddybingo.com/. (This site is owned by the same group company as Two Little Fleas)

Have you tried leveraging affiliate relationships to create amazing content and win powerful, natural links? What has worked for you? Where do you stand on the black hat/white hat divide? Share your views, tips and experiences below.

Pete is the lead Content Strategist for Two Little Fleas. Originally hailing from the UK, he lives and breathes all things seo, content marketing and of course - Bingo.

Tags: content marketing, content strategy, organic seo, seo

Merry Christmas All...

MichaelT

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