Trying to Grow your Start-Up? Here are 5 Ways Affiliate Marketing Can Help

Are you ready to get the word about your new product or service out to the world, but not sure where to start? If so, affiliate marketing could be a great first step! Read on for five great reasons to jump right in. 

1. Performance Based

One of top reasons companies use affiliate marketing is the performance-based commission scale. In other words, brands only have to pay affiliates for actions that generated actual traffic or sales rather than investing lump sums in traditional advertising tactics and hoping for the best. Affiliate marketing can provide significant insight to which online advertising efforts are benefiting a company the most.

2. Measurable

Companies that use affiliate marketing have access to tools that allow them to measure clicks, sales, and breakdown overall earnings per campaign. These metrics help managers strategically allocate marketing resources, gauge what campaigns outperform others, and streamline the affiliate commission structure. With the right tools, the entire online marketing process can stay organized and report precise results.

3. Scalable

Brands that use affiliate marketing can cut off traffic when they’ve maxed out their budget or when they want to take budget from one affiliate and allocate it to others. They can also put caps in place to control the pace at which sales are generated and to review the quality of traffic before giving an affiliate more leeway. When advertising through print and other offline advertising channels, companies don’t always have much control over incoming traffic. Affiliate marketing allows for flexibility that traditional promotional channels can’t offer.

4. Traceable

In addition to metrics and control over traffic volume, affiliate marketing efforts can be traced back to their source. Say you have three affiliates sending the same email campaign to different customer bases. After a while, you may find that one or two of the affiliates outperform the others. You can then decide to take budget from the lackluster affiliate and give it to your top mailer to make better use of your resources. Tracking tools also help in cases of fraud. You can trace which affiliate the fraudulent activity came through and not have to pay for invalid sales (assuming you have a legal contract in place outlining instances like this).

5. High ROI

While some may assume that the tools and resources involved in an affiliate program are very costly, there are several affordable options for companies of all sizes and industries. The ROI on an optimized email marketing campaign can be as high as 4500% if you work with the right network and remain diligent about optimizing your ads. Because the cost of print, radio and TV advertising has dramatically increased, affiliate marketing has quickly become the best option for brands that are serious about generating significant traffic volume without sacrificing healthy sales margins.

Are you ready to get started? Do you want to know more about how affiliate marketing can help your company grow? Click here to get in touch with our team!