Affiliate Program Management and Social Media Marketing

Two areas that you might not think have any relation to each other, but actually skills to excel in each very much compliment each other.

I believe that an absolutely critical quality in managing a successful affiliate program relies on social management. It’s all about staying socially engaged with the affiliates. Delivering them updates, interacting and responding to questions and issues, and also crafting the program to “catch” an affiliates interest.

Of course product, site design and conversion, merchant reputation and market are all critical as well however these aspects are also of critical important to the overall sales effort for a merchant (direct sales). These things need to be tip-top before the affiliates even get involved.

So provided, that the above features (product, site, etc.) are all above grade or unique in relation to your competitors, the advantage that can be gained through your affiliates will be achieved through the management of the program. I’ll go into exactly how a program can set you apart and be your competitive advantage in a later post, but my intent here is to discuss how important “social” is to managing and succeeding with affiliates.

You will probably be in competition with other merchants for high quality affiliates just the same as you’re in competition with those merchants for customers. By proactive social management of the affiliate program, you can set your program apart from your competitors and give yourself a significant edge.

In addition to the above mentioned overall value propositions for sales, affiliates must be engaged with your program and motivated to put in the work to drive customers. The groundwork exists, laid prior to program promotion, by setting up the terms and tracking for the program, and providing tools to use such as banners, links and a value proposition to work with.

Now the affiliate must be motivated to actually build your links into their site, and start a campaign to drive visitors to their links. This is one of the hardest parts of affiliate program management.

It’s much easier for an affiliate to click a button, “Apply to Program” than it is to get an affiliate to decide to put in the effort and put up some links. A few qualities help:

1. Staying actively engaged in the program by putting out updates, creative and program news. Affiliates love to see an actively managed program rather than one “coasting” along. It’s easy to see when a program is managed in an “after thought” kind of way.
2. Responding quickly to any affiliate inquiries.
3. Designing interesting creative or copy that affiliates will feel confident to put on their own sites.

All of these aspects, with their corresponding similar aspects in customer social media management, can help break you out from the pack. A good affiliate manager lives and breathes this stuff. It’s a natural progression for someone with affiliate program management skills to also be adept and engaged in social media marketing.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing Pt.2

The age of anonymity and privacy are done. Facebook, Google+ and social media have pretty much seen to that. It’s easy now to track down who and what a person is all about. This can be an advantage for business and for affiliates.

Now is the time for publishers to really focus on building quality content for their visitors, and building a community with their visitors. This was the TRUE purpose that affiliate marketing was developed for. Building content/community and sharing products or services with that community and giving them a means to support a publisher’s endeavor.

Consider:

• People love to get recommendations. Despite how much advertising you throw at someone, a recommendation will always trump brand / advertising / anything else.
• We support each other. If your audience believes in your content / product / service, they WILL want to support you. Look at the rabid fanbase Apple or even Google has been able to built. Go to a Nascar race and you’ll see dedicated Ford, or Chevy supporters (and customers). 

If a Publisher builds community through valuable content, people WILL support that publisher and value the publisher’s recommendations on products. However, this is doubly difficult if you are “anonymous” or generic. I believe publishers must build a personality and personal connection with their readership. Trust is critical on the web, and especially in regard to transactions. Knowing who you are allows contributes to building trust.

Google punishes outright paid links. In the past there have been services that have reached a modicum of success where a site/merchant could pay a blogger or publisher for a link or a post. How effective were these services? Well, they are mainly used for SEO and “link juice” purposes, and very rarely used for generating real sales and attention. These service seem most attractive to the decreasing sub-set of folks that still believe “page rank” is important. However most of the publishers grabbing these paid link opportunities generally had very thin content sites, and very little community built up around them.

There’s a gap here just waiting for “affiliate marketing” to step in. Publishers producing valued content that pick and chose products to promote (if they have an affiliate program). Publishers can recommend the products THEY use or they believe in to their audience. If an honest relationship has been built, and the publishers let’s his or her audience know this is how they are able to support themselves to keep producing content, distrust, pettiness and hesitation over clicking a referral link evaporates.

Bam! Win-win! So, how can we get there? It’ll take commitment to the program from the merchant and dedication and a “long tail view” from the affiliate program manager. We at AMWSO take very seriously this commitment to quality Affiliate Program Management.

In a couple days I’ll discuss more why we as an industry sometimes have trouble reaching this ideal.

Word of Mouth Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

If you're involved in marketing, then you know the latest trend receiving much discussion involves conversation marketing and word of mouth marketing. Affiliate marketing never seems to get a lot of respect from other marketing designations, but I believe affiliate marketing can fit perfectly within the new conversation paradigm.

Conversation / word of mouth marketing is getting a lot of attention because it's effective. The world is interactive, and large corporations must adjust. It's almost as if we're taking a step back, to the neighborhood business, where you could  go right up to a store owner and manager, and discuss any issue. Now large corporations have to adopt back to this role on a global scale. The Internet is truly making us a global village. Additionally, word of mouth is not something new, but now the marketing world is waking up to the power of people that has been extended by the Internet.

I would put forth that any business with an army of happy and motivated affiliates is much better positioned to get into the conversation than a company without. All it takes is leveraging the relationship with the true value-adding affiliates by treating them as true partners.

Part of the bad rap that affiliate marketing earned for itself has come from the desire to drive hard revenue growth via the channel. The affiliate concept began as a way to bring new customers to a business. It evolved into a pure sales growth vehicle via rewards sites, trademark targeting search affiliates and even coupon sites. It has been argued that these type of sites really add no value to the brand and the marketing experience, thus the whole of affiliate marketing gets relegated to some sort of grey area in marketing circles.

Affiliate marketing has the potential to come out of the grey. Consider the idea of using an affiliate program as a means to approach your brand advocates and customer enthusiasts. Consider by bringing them into the affiliate program, it provides an additional means of feeling a part of the company/culture and environment. Now consider the potential impact on "the conversation" that all of these motivated brand enthusiasts can have.

A well run, balanced affiliate program will already have content based, value adding affiliates as well. These affiliates are already involved in the conversation. Build that relationship with them, harness the power of word of mouth, and get your message our onto more waves, for more people to experience.

Affiliate marketing is not a new concept, but it can be adopted to the marketing 2.0 world with incredible results. If you don't have an affiliate marketing program, consider starting one today. Not only will you receive cost-effective sales, but it' a a channel by which to jump into "The Conversation."

A First for Affiliate Applications on Facebook

I've seen a lot of chatter around about, how will merchants use systems like Facebook for affiliate marketing, or even how will affiliates use it, lots of chatter, little action, until Scott sent me an application he has developed to look at, bingo!

Scott (aka Mallicious) has created a really cool, coupon sharing, snipping and commenting application for Facebook, that allows any user to plug in the coupon system to my profile, share it, share individual coupons, snip coupons for later use and comment them

We are the first social shopping engine to combine coupons, deals and price comparison to help consumers discover deals through their social graph.

Users can quickly and easily create their own deal feed that is automatically combined as "Social Deals" for each of their friends. Consumers can now get gift ideas, discounts and coupons from their personal social circle.

The main coupon system page shows lots of data for the individual coupons too, snipped how many times and community comments. Might be I've overlooked, or not been invited to use other Facebook applications that open the way to merchants to get involved, but this is the first affiliate marketing application on Facebook that I have seen that adds value and looks like it can succeed in leveraging a social network.