Social media has certainly flourished over the past few years. A variety of marketing tools now exist to improve the results. There are also many methods for interacting with customers through different channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few. Often, influencer marketing is talked about when it comes to digital marketing. While influencer marketing may be a relatively new concept, the term affiliate marketing, been around for years. Do you still think it’s relevant? We must admit, both influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are very fruitful for reaching your audience and turning them into consumers. You may miss opportunities to grow your business if you don’t understand how each strategy works and how it differs. In other words, you shouldn’t stick with one strategy all the time. Instead, you should figure out which strategy suits your current goals and may bring more business.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when brands promote products on other websites than their own, even though individuals are called affiliates. These websites or individuals act as third parties who can connect businesses with consumers and earn a commission for each successful sign-up, registration, or sale. An affiliate marketing strategy to attract traffic, leads, and purchases. Affiliate marketing focuses on creating partnerships with companies, blogs, and publishers, unlike influencers. It’s an advantage of affiliate marketing that you do not need to look for affiliates to match your audience. Anyone can be an affiliate, but affiliate programs mostly benefit people with large and engaged online followings.
Affiliate marketing offers the following benefits:
- Initially, you need only invest a small amount.
- Companies only pay for leads that convert into sales.
- Since it does not require a lot of effort to set up, it is an easy implementation.
- Results can easily be measured.
- Marketers can use affiliate links in a variety of ways.
- Since the company is only paid when sales are made, it is cost-effective.
- If there are prospects, then the lead can buy only one product or multiple products.
- Easy to measure sales boosts from the products you promoted.
- Additionally, tracking the number of new lead signups is also possible.
Although affiliate marketing has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages:
- People can take these as annoying false advertising or spam which can ruin a brand’s reputation.
- Several times, it was found companies fraudulently access a customer’s data such as email ids.
- The control over affiliates’ content is limited.
- When it comes to promoting product launches, new collections, seasonal discounts, special offers tailored to each affiliate, and more, compared to influencer marketing, it doesn’t work as well long-term.
Influencer marketing
The process of influencer marketing involves getting the help of people who influence purchasing decisions of people. They have numbers of followers on their social media platforms and people consider their opinion. Searching social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube reveals an abundance of influencers from various industries. By 2021, over 3 billion people are expected to use social media, creating a tremendous opportunity for brand exposure.
The influencer can help not only in sales but in brand recognition, awareness generation also. It works in various ways like 1. Influencers can recommend your product, service, and brand, 2. They can create special posts or content on your product, 3. They can create series on your product or service including tutorials, recommendations, etc. Now the followers aligned with your target audience can engage with that post and take actions further. Now they must tag you in the post or story under the name of ‘paid partnership’. As a result, you will be able to track reach, engagement, and other activities through various metrics.
Influencer marketing benefits include:
- Fast-growing brands can reach a large audience within a short period.
- Make your content strategy more effective.
- Building trust and credibility for a brand can be accomplished through it in a shorter period than usual.
- Your social media pages are getting more traffic as you gain new followers.
- Improve your SEO and ROI.
- It is a time-saving and cost-effective method to reach a wide range of audiences.
Disadvantages of Influencer marketing
- It causes more damage than good if you work with the wrong influencers. You can lose your brand value by making these influencer marketing mistakes.
- Choosing the right influencer for campaigns is a time and effort-consuming process.
- Measuring results can be challenging.
When to consider Affiliate marketing or influencer marketing for your campaign
According to the campaign goals
Make use of influencer marketing for promotions, campaigns, and special offers. Influencers have the potential to drive awareness to your brand because of their influence over their followers and their established trust. Affiliate marketing is more effective for marketing products and services, special offers, discounts, and more other than social media. Knowing your customers’ interests and needs will enable you to tailor your content to their needs. Affiliate marketing is designed to generate leads, this approach of speaking to specific customers with specific needs works.
The audience you are talking to
For a successful campaign, you want to reach as many people as possible. Your marketing strategy should also be based on your target audience. If they are more on social media, as a general these days then go for influencer marketing. You should use influencer marketing more often if you want to reach maximum people. But as the campaign is not always about reaching the people but generating sales also you can mix both the marketing tools. Using affiliate marketing, you can target a specific group rather than your entire audience. Utilize affiliate marketing to target specific websites where these power users spend time if you’re launching a new product feature or a whole new product.
As per the budget
Choosing an approach should also be based on your budget. The cost of affiliate marketing can be minimal at first. You can spend it after you get the result. You must wait for the result for that. If you want to have the option to stop a campaign based on your budget, use it in this marketing. By comparison, implementing an influencer marketing program typically produces bigger results, but requires a greater investment of both time and money.
Keeping Control
A creative strategy for promoting a brand’s products and services to consumers, influencer marketing allows brands to build and nurture relationships, and make their brand’s reputation more consumer-friendly. Businesses can use this marketing for a direct response as well as branding. Email marketing offers this level of flexibility, creativity, and customization. On the other hand, apart from leading the consumer to sales, the affiliate market has no control over the brand relationship with consumers.
Measuring the results
According to a recent study, affiliate marketing will pass media advertising as the preferred form of marketing by the end of this year, though nearly 90% of marketers agree that influencer marketing provides comparable or better results.
We hope this post helps you to understand the nuances between affiliate and influencer marketing. While designing your campaign with an Influencer Marketing Agency, you can now choose the best campaign tool between these two.
