Affiliate marketing is a promotional tactic where businesses collaborate with an independent party, often a content creator or social media influencer. The content creator promotes the company’s product using an affiliate link, and in return, they receive a commission for each sale made through that link. Affiliate marketing is a fast-growing industry that provides a multitude of benefits for companies and seems like an easy way to market a brand or product, but a strategy is needed to guarantee the desired results. In this piece, we outline considerations for building a successful affiliate marketing strategy, including how to move forward with acquiring and leveraging affiliate marketers as well as how (and when) to get started.   

Selecting an Affiliate Marketer 

1. Determine Your Goal for Affiliate Marketing  

Like any other marketing campaign or channel, there are lots of considerations to make when forming the best strategy for the best results. The easiest way to begin will be based on the goals created when deciding whether affiliate marketing is the path your company will take. The goal for affiliate marketing can vary, but essentially, the goal is to boost sales through engagement or increase brand awareness through reach. Taking a look at the type of product you sell also comes into play. Ask yourself: Is your product niche? Do you want to increase your target audience? Who can afford your product?  

2. Leverage an Affiliate Marketing Platform 

Affiliate marketing platforms have a wide range of influencers who organizations can select and work with to create a marketing campaign. The platforms have different priced levels of engagement based on how much the platform versus the company will manage the campaign. If your organization sells products online at bigger eCommerce stores, like Shopify or Amazon, each already has an affiliate platform and links. Shopify, for example, uses Shopify Collabs, while Amazon uses Amazon Associates.  

A successful independent affiliate platform is ShareASale, which has generated $19 billion in revenue for companies and is very diverse in the range of affiliates it offers. A more niche affiliate platform is OpenSponsorship, which only has athlete affiliates/influencers with a goal to create sports marketing campaigns for different products.  

Platforms can get tricky, especially with macro-influencers who are in high demand. Sometimes a company will have to talk to an agent first and may never get to speak to the affiliates themselves, making the experience feel less personal. Also, it’s possible affiliates may only be using the platforms to network with companies and want to take their agreement off the platform to solidify a deal. This makes it frustrating for a company especially if they invested significantly in the platform.  

3. Find an Influencer Affiliate Through Social Media 

An influencer can become an affiliate marketer if they have a following on social media and use a link from a brand when promoting a product in return for the product and/or monetary value. As such, browse through the social media platform you want to use and look at competitors’ influencer affiliates, if they have any, and top influencers for specific products. Viewing past videos or posts can also give insight into the type of work the affiliate can produce so you can see if they will be able to help you reach your goal. The influencer affiliate needs to know how to sell, in addition to how to create content to promote the product. This is the most organic way to find an influencer, as it will enhance the experience for both parties, potentially leading the affiliate to do a better job when promoting the product.  

After analyzing your goals and products, an important thing to take note of is the number of followers the influencer has. This can play a big part in ensuring the influencer affiliate can generate more sales or brand awareness, as a macro- or micro-influencer will each offer something different.  

Macro- Vs. Micro-Influencers  

Micro-influencers, with roughly 10K-100K followers, often have more trust with their followers, resulting in a better ROI due to higher engagement rates. Micro-influencers are perfect when promoting a niche product, introducing a product to a new audience, or testing the waters with affiliate marketing as it is much cheaper than using a macro-influencer.  

An example of a successful micro-influencer and brand collaboration is HelloFresh. They leveraged affiliate marketing by using 15 micro-influencers to post about their 21-day experience eating HelloFresh meals that the company provided. The influencers shared a total of 461 posts, generating 5.5 million impressions.  

Macro-influencers, often with 500K-1 million followers, are great at exposing your brand and products to a lot of people, very quickly. Macro-influencers are extremely successful because of the rates they charge and the work they produce.   

An example of a brand leveraging macro-influencers is GymShark. GymShark, a UK-based athletic clothing brand, used six sports-focused macro-influencers to spread awareness about an online challenge they created, encouraging followers to post using a hashtag. This was widely successful, with 252.6 million views on TikTok and over 785,000 posts on Instagram. GymShark was able to give recommendations throughout the challenge to keep participants motivated and excited while also promoting products and boosting brand awareness.  

One potential challenge with leveraging influencers could be high competition as it results in high prices. Also, if the followers are not into the product the creator is promoting or not in the target market, this strategy could be a bust. On the other hand, promoting a product through an influencer affiliate whose followers are your target audience and can sell their audience the way you intended can drive sales exponentially. 

Some companies also give influencers a discount code to give to their followers. This is the same intention of using an affiliate link. If a follower uses the influencer’s discount code, the influencer gets commission from the sale, making it a win-win-win for the company, influencer, and buyer. 

Next Steps: Solidify Goals, Strategy, and Affiliate Marketer  

Finding the right influencer affiliate for your organization is just the first step. Next, an agreement about posts and payments must be established. Creators can post stories, TikToks, reels, pictures, and videos with their affiliate link attached. Each one captures a different audience and the product from a different view. Currently, short-form videos are a leading way to market products as the viewers are most engaged with that content. Stories will be cheaper, as they disappear in 24 hours, but macro-influencers will still charge exponentially more than micro-influencers.  

Payment comes from the affiliate link, which can be based on the number of clicks on the link posted, the percentage of completed payments, the amount of action taken, etc. If successful, this becomes a win-win solution for both the affiliate marketer and the company. Compensation depends heavily on the type of influencer used because it can be in different forms, whether it’s the trade of the product for a post or the product plus monetary compensation. Recently, micro-influencers are bringing in more money and being used more by companies because they drive higher sales and ROI. Brands pay anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 per post for macro-influencers. 

Why Should You Invest in Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate marketing combined with influencer marketing can both increase brand awareness and boost a product’s sales with just one post. Overall, affiliate marketing using influencers often lowers CPA, builds brand loyalty, and can be extremely effective. More and more we’re seeing brands report affiliate marketing as being their most successful channel. After all, the average ROI for brands using affiliate marketing is 1400% as every dollar spent gets an average return of $15.  

When thoughtfully curated, affiliate marketing can be one of the best marketing strategies to implement for your business. Reach out to Clarkston’s sales and marketing experts to learn more and see how we can help you make the most out of your affiliate marketing investment.