Additionally, affiliate programs typically involve some sort of financial incentive for participants, while influencer marketing generally relies on building relationships with industry leaders. So, if you’re trying to decide which approach is right for your business, it’s important to consider your goals and objectives.
Thanks to the growth of influencer marketing and affiliate marketing, DTC and eCommerce companies have seen millions in sales and millions in conversions as a result of these strategies over the last decade.
Consumers now need to hear from social media creators before buying a product. Both affiliate and influencer marketing, in turn, are powered by their popularity.
Which Approach Is Suitable For Your Company?
In order to understand the best strategy to maximize ROI and drive sales, let’s look at affiliate marketing vs influencer marketing. Sometimes the distinction between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing gets blurred, but that doesn’t mean the compensation schemes are the same.
Brands do not pay affiliates for brand awareness, increased web traffic, or cold lead generation. Brands pay affiliates for making sales, so affiliates must be motivated and constantly work to boost their conversion rates in order to receive payment.
Brands can establish long-term KPIs when using influencer marketing, such as clickthrough rates, user-generated content, and increased SEO. Marketers partner with influencers to increase their credibility, authenticity, and sustainable inbound traffic, and marketers create content with the goal of promoting brands, products, or services. In return for their work, influencers can receive commission, product gifting, flat rate fees, or a combination of all three.
The Advantages Of Influencer Marketing
What are the main advantages of influencer marketing?
Build trust and credibility
Because social media influencers have built up a large base of loyal fans, they serve as a source of inspiration and inspiration for their fans. In addition, audiences are far more likely to trust the recommendations and opinions of their favorite creators than traditional radio and television marketing techniques.
Studies show that influencers help boost purchase intent by more than five times when they collaborate with brands on social media posts than posts without a creator partnership. Furthermore, 40% of people reported buying as a result of an influencer post.
Very focused and important
When partnering with the right influencer, your brand’s message always gets to your target audience.
In the example given, a brand that sells workout equipment is likely to target people interested in sports and fitness. If a fitness blogger partners with that brand, then the fans of that creator are likely to be interested in working out and would want to buy gear to help them train. If someone sees their favorite creator using the brand’s equipment to reach their fitness goals, the likelihood of becoming a believer of that brand tremendously increases.
A controlled approach is a method of business or writing in which you:
- Choose a certain topic
- Plan
- Write
- Publish
You control the entire influencer marketing campaign, from outreach and influencer recruitment to content strategy and distribution methods. These campaigns are extremely profitable if planned properly. The amount of returns these campaigns can generate is limitless.
Incredible outcomes
Brands of all industries can benefit from influencer marketing, regardless of whether their social media audiences are present. In fact, studies show that companies obtain customers faster and earn $6.50 for each dollar invested in influencer marketing than with any other marketing approach.
Only the finest quality content is hand-picked, so you can be assured of reading only the best of material.
The Advantages Of Affiliate Marketing
It is easy to implement
There is little bandwidth required to set up an affiliate marketing program. Once a mechanism has been established for generating URLs that are unique for each brand, all they have to do is track the conversions from each sale. The key, however, is to remember that brands must already be well-established in order to support a successful affiliate program.
Don’t waste money on non-productive activities
There are no costs or fees associated with affiliate marketing, as affiliates only receive compensation when a sale is made via an affiliate link. Advertisements do not provide brand exposure or clicks, and they do not cost money. Clicks to an affiliate link don’t result in commission, regardless of whether or not a sale occurs.
Increase website traffic and sales
An increase in search engine ranking is not guaranteed by including affiliate links, but traffic and conversions are both increased. The “halo effect” that occurs as a result of affiliate marketing makes potential customers feel more confident about the product or service and leads them to browse and click on your pages more often.
When Brands Make A Decision, What Should They Consider?
Before deciding whether influencer marketing or affiliate marketing is the best option for a brand, take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.
An example of influencer marketing is a blogger post about a new product.
An arrangement between an affiliate marketing firm and an internet business where the affiliate marketing firm pays commissions to the internet business for referring new customers.
What You Need To Handle Influencer Marketing Tools
The right tools save you countless hours and headaches when you first begin to use influencer marketing. However, finding the approach that suits you is tricky.
Here’s what you should look into:
Discovery and hiring are two of the most important things for a business
When looking for influencers who align with your company’s mission and values, choose a tool that provides you with information about influencers who share similarities to them. You should also be able to evaluate each influencer based on how many followers they have and other credibility indicators.
Relationships are the most important part of our life
As your influencer marketing program expands, look into a system that consolidates all of your creator contacts in one location. It should have a unified email interface, individual creator accounts, and other devices that help you build lasting connections with your influencers.
Searching for simple content
A fantastic piece of content can be repurposed in many ways by collecting all of your influencer content into one media library. You can search by relevant keyword, hashtag, etc. to find it again.
Reporting and analytics
It is important to be able to track performance metrics and demonstrate the success of your influencer marketing program through a tool.
The Items You Require To Handle Affiliate Marketing
The right tools are essential to a successful affiliate marketing program. In addition to being a necessary component of an affiliate marketing program, they can also be a powerful tool. When they are not used properly, they may overwhelm your team and turn affiliates off from working with you in the future.
Here are the most significant tools you should consider for your affiliate marketing campaign:
The act of generating and tracking affiliate links is reliable
Apart from generating unique links for your affiliate community, you also want an easy way to track revenue produced by each affiliate and attribute ROI to each individual performer, as well as the program as a whole. It’s also nice to have software with campaign briefs that include requested copy for influencers, product placement guidelines, and so on.
Discount codes managed smartly
Be sure to look for a discount code management tool that will let you disable and track discount codes that have been prematurely leaked, thus preventing your tracking and margins from being affected.
Non-standard affiliate pages
You should create custom, branded landing pages to house your complete creator campaign proposals so that you do not have to go through any middlemen. Any materials and messaging should originate from you. Look for a tool that allows you to build such landing pages to save time.
Campaign workrooms integrated
A real-time inventory, affiliate management, and shipping and tracking integration is a must for any program. These integrations allow you to view real-time inventory, assign affiliate products, and deliver and track those products all the way to the post office.
How brands leverage affiliate and influencer marketing together
When employing an influencer and affiliate marketing strategy, you can reach relevant audiences and accomplish more goals at once. An affiliate program, for example, can help your brand achieve higher conversion rates while also increasing brand awareness, trust, and credibility through your influencer program.
The right software allows affiliate and influencer marketing to take place at the same time. Brands may use tracking links within influencer content to track conversions from affiliates, while also monitoring and analyzing influencer marketing campaigns to enhance their long-term results.
Calculating the affiliate marketing and influencer marketing ROI Paraphrase: Finding out how much profit an influencer marketing or affiliate marketing tactic can generate.
The most important part of running a successful program is assessing the return on investment of your affiliate or influencer marketing campaign.
Make sure to decide on the measures you need to determine the success of your campaign before you begin.
If you would like to learn more about how to track and measure your specific campaign goals in influencer marketing, Total Guide to Influencer Marketing Measurement may be a valuable resource. It also contains a guide on how to calculate exact ROI for your influencer and affiliate marketing campaigns.
Which Brands Are Winning With Influencer Marketing Campaigns?
Adidas
Adidas is a brand of shoes and clothing that is popular among athletes and people who like to workout. It was founded in Germany in 1954 by Rudi Dassler and has grown to become one of the world’s leading sports brands. Adidas shoes are very different from other shoes in that they have a flat sole, which gives the wearer more stability and makes it easier to run and jump. Adidas clothing is also very different from other clothing in that it is made from synthetic materials rather than natural fabrics. The company offers a wide range of products including shoes, clothing, sports equipment, and accessories. Adidas is also active in many other aspects of the sports world including sponsoring teams, organizing competitions, and running facilities. Adidas is currently headed by A.N. Other Adidas executives include Norbert Dohm, Peter Hochenauer, and Henk Rogers.
Adidas attempted to target a younger audience by utilizing an influencer marketing strategy on Instagram, a platform with more than half of its users aged under 35.
Adidas partnered with influencers like Iga Wysocka and Selena Gomez to launch the MyNeoShoot contest. The campaign attracted 12,000 contestants and boosted their follower base by 41,000. In addition, sales rose by 24%, whereas Nike sales dropped by 9% over the same period.
LinkedIn Corporation (formerly Lynda.com)
In order to increase the number of learners who use its online courses, Lynda.com (now Linkedin Learning) collaborated with a number of YouTube influencers.
Jack Douglass used Lynda content in many of his videos, which garnered more than 25 million views. Their most successful influencer marketing campaign reached 46 million people, who were subscribers of YouTubers like Rooster Teeth and The Fine Brothers.
LinkedIn paid $1.5 billion for Lynda.com in 2015.
Which Brands Are Successful With Affiliate Marketing Campaigns?
Online bodybuilding communities
Using tools provided by BodyBuilding.com, an affiliate may drive traffic to its website and earn a commission based on each affiliate’s success.
Each tool includes text links, banners, and articles affiliates can use on their websites and social posts. The URLs assigned to each tool measure the amount of traffic generated.
New customers are paid an 8% commission rate by BodyBuilding.com affiliate marketing programs, and a 3% commission rate by repeat customers.
The company Petco provides pet supplies and services
Every time a customer purchases something at Petco thanks to a referral from an affiliate, the affiliate gets 8% off the sale.
When an application is approved, Petco partners send seasonal banners, graphics, text links, and marketing support to help affiliates drive as many sales as possible. In addition, they are provided with a username and password so they can view reports on how their links are performing and how much revenue they have earned.
Conclusion
It depends on what your objectives are and how much time you have. Both affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are profitable if implemented correctly, but both may damage your reputation if mismanaged.
The only way to ensure your program’s success is by choosing the right influencers and affiliates and having the right tools. If all the pieces are in place, your brand may well end up being the next household name on every consumer’s lips.
At Influx we can help you grow your business by driving traffic through influencer marketing. If you’re interested, contact us today!