The competition is more fierce than ever in the subscription space. The events that took place in the last two years accelerated the growth of the industry considerably, forcing businesses to turn to affiliate marketing to boost their online presence and grow their reach.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based advertising model that involves paying a third-party publisher to promote your products or services. Among its many benefits is the ability to tap into a wealth of marketing experience without wasting precious internal resources.
Here are eight other reasons why your subscription brand should consider investing in an affiliate marketing strategy.
Offers a Low Barrier to Entry
Your subscription business will need to invest some time and money into building an affiliate program, but those investments are minimal compared to buying advertising and employing a team of staff.
Working with a reputable affiliate network platform also takes the stress and time out of setting up the program, as they will guide you through the setup, carry out the background work, and provide all the necessary tools and resources.
Is Low Risk
Paying for performance rather than for clicks ensures affiliate marketing is a low-risk form of marketing. You won’t be using your budget to create leads that need nurturing. Instead, your money will go directly toward converting customers into subscribers who you can focus on retaining moving forward.
As a performance-based method, businesses only pay for the sales generated by each publisher to ensure there is no wasted budget on ineffective advertising methods. Businesses set up the commission rates in advance, providing complete knowledge of how much each sale will cost them.
Other forms of advertising can make it difficult to quantify how cost effective the price of a sale is. With affiliate marketing, it’s clear cut.
Grows Brand Awareness
Affiliate marketing allows small and large companies to grow their brand awareness by increasing exposure to new audiences who may not have previously heard of them.
By working with a select group of affiliates, not only can you expose your products to new and different audiences, you can also create an awareness that could have the potential to extend beyond a single-product promotion.
Increases SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to be a subject close to most online retailers’ hearts. Affiliate marketing can go a long way in enhancing your SEO strategy through numerous backlinks to your site via your affiliates’ blogs, social pages, and websites.
This is particularly effective when your business works with higher-ranked partners whose audience can then share details about your product(s) or brand.
Provides Transparent Data
Working with a trusted affiliate network to manage your affiliate marketing provides you with access to a detailed dashboard and sales reports. As a result, you can monitor your data and tweak your strategy based on your statistics.
You can use the dashboard to effectively strategize — and make marketing decisions elsewhere in your business — by tracking how your affiliates are performing.
Builds Trust With Consumers
According to a Nielsen report, 92% of consumers trust the recommendations of people, companies, or influencers they know. Working directly with affiliate marketers who then promote your products to their established audiences, then, offers more opportunities for quicker and more direct sales.
A smaller subscription business may not be able to afford a dedicated internal department to run its marketing, so affiliate marketing would allow it to tap into a wealth of skills and knowledge through the range of publishers it works with.
This can open a variety of different specialties, providing the advertiser with the opportunity to work with some of the best in the business. To employ such a skilled workforce would be out of reach for many small businesses, but with affiliate marketing, every business can access a pool of qualified and experienced publishers.
Allows Complete Control
Affiliate marketing allows every business to be in complete control of its marketing while outsourcing the promotional work to publishers. The business can set its own commission levels and incentives and provide whatever creative it wants its publishers to use.
Every business can choose which publishers they work with, and signing up publishers who later become inactive will not impact the bottom line.
Integrates Easily With Other Marketing Methods
Affiliate marketing does not have to be a standalone marketing method. Instead, it can seamlessly work alongside other forms of marketing to boost a promotion or campaign. When a business focuses on a certain great product offering during a sale, for example, publishers can aid the promotional efforts and raise interest.
Marketing is tough yet crucial for success. Affiliate marketing offers a flexible approach that is cost effective, is easy to manage, and has a positive impact on your business and brand as a whole.
If you’re not sure if it will work for you or your products or services, look at some brands that already use affiliate marketing, and see whether others in your industry use it. Promoting your subscription offerings through affiliate marketing is an affordable, low-risk form of advertising that can yield guaranteed results.
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