Marketing channels should support and complement each other, working simultaneously to drive customers through the purchase funnel. We look at how you can make sure your strategy is unified, and your affiliate program is reaching its full potential.

With a large proportion of publishers sitting at the final stages of the acquisition funnel, it’s easy to overlook the potential of the affiliate channel to support what are typically earlier stages in the purchase funnel. Performance marketing can represent up to 30% of a brand’s online revenue; hence it can act as not only a meaningful acquisition channel but as support your other marketing strategies. We take a look at three critical areas of your marketing strategy that can be given a boost by your affiliate program.

Paid search

The affiliate channel can play a pivotal role in supporting your paid search strategy. By re-engaging abandoning customers, retargeting, and remarketing, publishers increase the conversion rate of your traffic, including that which has come via paid search. In doing so, they can have a vital role in helping you make the most of the traffic you’re paying for. What’s more, the brand visibility you get from working with a good mix of publishers can help increase your paid search click-through rate, feeding more traffic into the purchase funnel. To make sure you’re recapturing all the users you can, you should not only have a retargeting partner but also have both on and off-site remarketing in place.

Social media

Social media allows advertisers to reach a vast audience and while many brands have yet to turn it into a meaningful acquisition channel, the opportunity to engage so many users at once shouldn’t be overlooked. If a publisher promotes via their social channels, they may well tag (@) the advertisers’ social pages, in the process increasing advertisers’ social audience and engagement. Similarly, competitions provide an excellent opportunity to do the same. Look for publishers with large active social followings, especially content publishers who can secure high levels of engagement from their social user bases.

Offline

With more and more publishers offerings spanning offline-online, the affiliate channel can also have a role in driving in-store traffic and sales. Geo-targeting apps give publishers such as Vouchercloud the ability to push in-store offers to nearby users, helping divert customers from competitors’ stores and giving them an incentive to purchase. Meanwhile, cashback publishers have in recent years been finding an array of strategies – from mobile apps to card linking technologies and receipt upload – for giving customers cashback for their in-store purchases. At the same time, publishers like Emocial encourage multichannel engagement with a range of initiatives including in-store scratchcards. Working with publishers in this way will give you the added benefit of increasing the visibility of your offline stores so if you have an offline offering, ask relevant publishers about how they can encourage footfall and drive sales in-store.