Developing a successful marketing plan is no small feat. This fact alone is the reason why you cannot wait until the last minute to create your business’s holiday marketing plan. You’re in luck if you’ve already planned ahead for Christmas, but what holidays up until that time are you prepared for? If you’re prepared for Black Friday, that’s good news; but you’re in bad shape if you haven’t thought about planning for Cyber Monday yet. Here’s why.

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Why Cyber Monday Matters

2020 will mark the 15th anniversary of Cyber Monday, continuing the Black Friday sales from in-store to online-only. At this point, it’s become standard for post-Thanksgiving shopping to be extended into a four-day weekend, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.

The extension to Cyber Monday made big waves when it was first developed in 2005 because of the convenience it provided to consumers. No longer did they have to rush to wait in line with other shoppers, or fight in the aisles to get the last action figure for their child’s headlining Christmas gift. Now, consumers can shop from the comfort of their home, receiving deals that are competitive to those seen on Black Friday.

As a business, it’s important you make the most of this shopping holiday, extending your marketing plans beyond Black Friday. Whether it’s an affiliate marketing strategy or an email retargeting campaign, you can develop processes to help get consumers shopping in your business’s digital store. Here are some of the best ways you can develop a Cyber Monday plan sure to garner the attention of the right consumers.

Plan ahead.

First off, the biggest thing your company needs to do is plan ahead. You’re competing with many other brands during the holiday season, vying to convince consumers to shop with you above others. To successfully attract attention, you’ll need a well-thought-out plan devised ahead of time, one that begins garnering customers before Cyber Monday comes along.

Get your website optimized.

People spend a lot on Cyber Monday, and all of those sales happen thanks to visiting digital storefronts and making purchases. Before a consumer can access your products, they need to make it onto your website. And if your website isn’t working properly come Cyber Monday, you’re not going to get the traffic you hope to see.

Prior to Cyber Monday, you need to ensure that your website is ready for an increase in traffic. Things you and your UX/UI and development team should go over involve site speed, site uptime, and mobile compatibility. These are surefire ways to guarantee your website is a) working and b) navigable by a first-time site visitor. The last thing you want is for your website to crash on the morning of Cyber Monday.

Run a small business? Put some time in offline.

It’s a good idea to get online for Cyber Monday if you run a brick and mortar retail store, as you can gain digital sales from locals and others around the world. But not being limited to the digital realm can be a benefit for your business.

Prior to Cyber Monday, consider doing some advertising around your community where you inform customers of what deals they can expect for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This can include placing flyers in local cafes and restaurants, renting out a billboard for the week, or placing posters on other local businesses that are okay with you doing so. This is a simple way to avoid the digital marketing scene, which is sure to be overcrowded in the weeks leading up to these post-Thanksgiving shopping holidays.

Cross-promote and develop partnerships.

There’s no need to go through the holiday season alone. Consider partnering with fellow businesses and brands for Cyber Monday, either where deals are offered to customers that shop at both companies or where you promote sales happening at a fellow business and where they do the same for you.

The simplest method of doing this digitally can be through an email campaign or the creation of an affiliate marketing strategy for Instagram — where products of your own are partnered/bundled with other brands for photos, stories, Reels, and more.

Prepare Now for Cyber Monday

Whatever method your business decides to utilize will prove fruitful. As long as you’re preparing for Cyber Monday, you’re ready to welcome consumers with open arms for one of the nation’s biggest shopping holidays.

Register for our free live webinar that will show you how Refersion can power your Influencer marketing campaign.

Tips on Executing a Successful Cyber Monday Marketing Plan was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Affiliate marketing has changed a lot since it first came onto the scene. At first, you sent someone an email or handed them a business card, directing them to your site, where they bought the products you were promoting. And that was that.

The digital explosion brought on by the growth of the Internet permanently changed the game. Internet ads started to become more relevant than traditional ones, like billboards, television, and print. Affiliate marketing became more than a niche, blossoming into its own industry.

What is an affiliate?

An affiliate promotes a product or service through an online presence that can take several forms. Bloggers, and those with popular Facebook pages can all leverage their presence to earn commissions for referrals and purchases.

How do you become an affiliate?

Companies can pull affiliates from their best customer pool. If you love a brand and repeatedly patronize them, you could receive an email offer to become an affiliate. This is a good strategy because a company’s best customers will be the most excited and/or knowledgeable about what they sell. As a happy customer, you’re the best candidate to represent this business to your friends and followers. If you have a robust social media presence and high engagement with your followers, you’re an ideal candidate to become an affiliate.

You can also approach companies and offer to promote their products. Be careful with this, however. The people you go to have to reside in an online space compatible with yours. You shouldn’t approach an outdoor accessories brand if you’re a gaming nerd, for instance.

Most importantly, familiarize yourself with Refersion’s Marketplace. Here, you can search for offers from brands, look at the perks they offer, and see if you match what they’re looking for. This is a great way to find and compare a multitude of offers all in one place and find the partnership that’s right for you.

What is a social media influencer?

Affiliate marketing, under the power of social media, has evolved to produce a new kind of rep: the influencer.

Are you a social media trailblazer who tries out and reviews new products and recommends them to your followers? If you already do this, even if you’re not being paid, you’re an influencer. If your brand choices are an integral part of your personal identity, you’re on track to represent your favorite brand as an influencer.

If you love the idea of influencing others in your social circle into adopting your brand choices, becoming an influencer may be right for you. You can build a community identity that revolves around your favorite brands and discover new products along the way. If being an influencer is your dream job, the idea of becoming an affiliate is just the icing on your social media cake.

What is a micro-influencer?

Though as an influencer, you may have a small presence (typically 2,000 to 15,000 followers), your social media circle is likely to be highly engaged. This means that your conversion rate is primed to be higher than those with hundreds of thousands of followers. The intimacy of a smaller group can make your influence more real and direct. You’ll also cost less to work with than social media stars who may demand higher commissions or even flat-rate fees per post. That’s part of what will make you attractive to potential partners.

What is a super influencer?

Social media users with more followers can use their larger presence to market products or services in a slightly different way. To be considered a “super” influencer, you generally have to have more followers than a “micro” influencer, but that range can span tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers.

The biggest aspect of being a “super influencer” isn’t just your follower count, however. It has to do with how well you engage your audience and whether you have a part in shaping industry trends. If you’re someone who discovers brands, products, and the latest styles and quickly spreads the news to your inner circle, you’re a natural-born influencer.

Affiliate vs influencer: which are you?

Affiliates are in the business of promoting things to make money. Having influence is part of the process, but if they weren’t getting paid for it, they wouldn’t be doing it. Affiliates are in business first, and influencers second. They may be willing to promote things they aren’t passionate about simply because it’s their job. This isn’t a bad thing, because professional affiliates are often very good at what they do. But their methods will vary from those of an influencer, and they will appeal to a different target audience.

Influencers, on the other hand, are enthusiasts first and marketers second. They love getting the word out about great new products, brand discoveries, and recent innovations. They’ve already cultivated a loyal following that is highly motivated to listen to their recommendations. Influencers often occupy niches that other marketing channels may not reach, and micro-influencers make up for their smaller followings by having better engagement rates.

Which one is right for you?

Ultimately, whether you choose to work as an affiliate or an influencer will depend on your social media presence and end goals. If you’re a big name, you can help a company raise brand awareness even though you may have lower engagement rates.

If you’re more of a micro-influencer, you will appeal to smaller companies looking to raise their conversion rates and keep their costs low. If your gig is a general approach that can raise sales levels and brand awareness across the board, choose to work with a brand that needs your skill set.

Are you an influencer looking for to-notch products to introduce your audience to? Look no further than the Refersion Marketplace. Join for free and browse quality products from today’s top D2C companies.

What’s the difference between an influencer and an affiliate? was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You’ve signed up for Refersion’s affiliate tracking software but you’re not sure what to do next. Do you just develop your first affiliate marketing campaign or is there more background work required? To get the absolute most out of your affiliate tracking software, there are some tips you should keep in mind. The following six approaches are ways you can make your affiliate tracking software work for you.

Join us for our free live webinar where we show you how Refersion can power your affiliate marketing platform.

1. Understand how your technology works.

First things first. You need to understand how your affiliate management software works. There are a few directions you can take to learn the Refersion platform once creating your account with Refersion. These include:

• Setting up your business’s page by navigating to the Content tab and adding a business description, your affiliate rate, and terms & conditions for affiliates to consider.
• Updating your Listing Status in the Marketplace to allow you to publish offers for potential affiliates to find.
• Understanding how the Marketplace works, and how offers are seen by affiliates, to determine whether editing is required to optimize the offers that affiliates see.

2. Check out your competition.

Before you hit the ground and start running, you should take the time to see what offers your competition are posting — you can’t compete in the marketplace if you’re offering less to potential affiliates. Once you know what your competition is offering, consider two other details:

a. Research the industry average for affiliate commissions.

b. Determine what percentage of commissions your budget will allow. With all of this information, you can begin publishing worthwhile offers to capture the attention of potential affiliates.

3. Utilize your data.

You won’t get much out of your affiliate tracking software unless you utilize the tracking aspect. Refersion’s software is optimized to provide you with data at any time, whether you’re interested in keeping an eye on your business’s KPIs, tracking links and coupon codes, or simply looking to gauge month-to-month performance.

The metrics you collect from your affiliate tracking software are made with business-engagement in mind, making it as easy as possible for affiliate managers to track the performance of their affiliate marketing strategy, taking useful information to inform potential business updates. In some cases, it can lead to you nixing certain coupon codes that aren’t creating conversions; in other cases, you might find that you have room to increase affiliate commissions during certain months, thus motivating your staff to achieve more.

All this is helpful information you’d otherwise miss by ignoring the data provided to you by your tracking software.

4. Test commissions with potential affiliates.

It’s better to keep engaged with affiliate marketing platforms rather than walk away once everything is in order. One of the best ways to stay engaged in the marketplace is to regularly test out different commission rates. While it’s obvious that higher commission rates are going to receive more attention from potential affiliates, you don’t want to pay more than you have to — you need to keep your business’s ROI in mind, after all.

Consider trying out a few methods to see how potential affiliates respond:

• Increase commissions for a short period of time to increase sales activity during a slow month.
• A/B test different commissions rates to see how people respond.
• Compare posts written with differing language to see how people are attracted to them.
• Create a unique offer that will stand out in the Refersion Marketplace.

5. Maintain affiliate relationships.

Along with trying to reach affiliates through the marketplace with varying offers, you need to also utilize Refersion’s communication features to regularly stay in touch with the affiliates you’ve onboarded.

Once you start connecting and working with and keep your existing affiliates happy, you should work to keep them in the loop, providing them with the necessary tools to gain conversions and make the most of your program. Some simple ways to maintain affiliate relationships include:

• Offering weekly office hours to answer any affiliate questions.
• Offering increased commission rates when a streak of conversions have been made.
• Creating a monthly newsletter to provide updates on business and tactics to be used in their marketing approach.

6. Develop an affiliate marketing strategy.

To get the most out of Refersion’s affiliate marketing platform, it’s imperative that you develop a thorough affiliate marketing strategy. This is an essential way to ensure you know where your business plans on going in the coming weeks, months, and years. With this strategy in place, you can effectively modify all of the above considerations to meet internal and external goals, pushing your company towards success at every turn.

It’s Easy with Refersion

With Refersion’s affiliate tracking software, it’s become easier than ever to manage your business’s affiliate program. Interested in how we can help your business? Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our experts today.

Register for our free live webinar that will show you how Refersion can power your Influencer marketing campaign.

6 Ways to Get More Out of Your Affiliate Tracking Software was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article was contributed by our partner Apogee.

The Influencer & Affiliate Marketing Industry is unlike any other online venture — with the potential to earn a significant income online. Brand ambassadors, affiliate reps, and even social media influencers have created a whole profitable career around the affiliate marketing industry. Like in any industry, there are a set of standards that every expert needs to follow to be a success in the field. Here are the best practices every affiliate and influencer should know to deliver the best results.

Understand each of the program policies.

When you join a new affiliate program, thoroughly read the program policies to make sure you understand how the program works. Also, pay attention to the terms of service — you don’t want to inadvertently violate the rules, which could result in voided commissions terminated relationships.

Make sure you understand your commission rate, the tracking gap length of your links and referral codes, and payout structure.

If there is ever a compliance question, simply reach out to your affiliate manager for clarification. Hit reply to the welcome email or the last newsletter you received.

Programs currently managed by Apogee allow you to order through your own affiliate links as well as use any coupon or discounts that are available. This lets you share every aspect of the purchase from start to finish, and gives you an authentic first-hand recommendation. Not every program will let you do this, so ask first.

Check current specials and promotions.

Affiliate programs vary with regard to custom coupon codes, but most programs will offer a universal coupon code. Use this discount code as an additional incentive in your call to action to encourage your audience to click through and purchase the product.

With a managed affiliate program, you’ll receive a monthly email with current specials to promote to your audience. When you first sign on with a new affiliate program be sure to check what the current specials are, in case you have missed that monthly email.

Then, make sure to always keep the coupon codes or incentives updated as they may change. If you are using Gutenberg (WordPress), you can easily create a Reusable Block in your posts which can be edited in one place to update throughout your site.

Keeping the best, most recent coupon readily available to your reader is an important part of converting your posts to sales, as readers are always looking for the best deal.

Connect with your Affiliate Manager.

One of the biggest benefits of working with a managed affiliate program is having a dedicated affiliate manager. Your manager can help you maximize your earnings potential with guidance, suggestions, and even insider news about the company and program.

Your affiliate manager is your best resource for sales and specials from the brand, brainstorming ideas for content creation, making sure you are in compliance with the FTC, and more.

Affiliate managers occasionally have sponsored campaign opportunities, as well. These managers go to the affiliates they know will be a good fit for the brand. Building a relationship with your affiliate manager is a great way to maximize your earning potential.

Think about old content on your site that could work well with the new affiliate program.

Joining a new program does not mean you must obsessively create new content. You probably have old content that, with updates, would be a great fit for your new affiliate links.

To make this less of a daunting task, Pretty Links Pro, a plugin for WordPress, has an amazing “Replacement Tool” that lets you automatically add affiliate links to keywords throughout your site with just a few clicks.

Simply create the “pretty link” with your affiliate link and set the terms that you would like hyperlinked throughout your site. The Pretty Links Pro Replacement Tool lets you automatically add links without even having to open the post!

Unlike sponsored posts, affiliate posts can include links to several different affiliate products within the same post, offering an even better solution to your readers.

Think about what new content you can create around the products of your affiliate program.

There are several benefits to creating new content for your affiliate program. Not only does new content give you fresh posts to offer your readers, but it provides an additional place to interlink your site to the old content we mentioned before for your SEO benefit.

Additionally, when you create new content, consider sending it into your affiliate manager, who may have additional ideas for how to utilize the content. They may even send it over to the brand, which can turn into more opportunities for you in the future.

Remember, evergreen product reviews offer long-term affiliate opportunities that convert well.

Research the Best Sellers for New Content Ideas

Chances are, you chose the affiliate program based on a product or service that you thought would resonate with your audience, or fit with the content that you create. Many programs have dozens of products that can be used to create similar content that you can also use to convert.

For instance, let’s say you have chosen an affiliate program which offers delicious grilling herbs and rubs for the perfect brisket. Check the program best sellers to see what other products may complement that content — such as a great marinade or even a seasoning for vegetables to grill alongside the brisket. Voila! You now have two additional pieces of content.

Research Keywords before writing posts

The key to writing a great post with a high conversion rate is showing how an affiliate product can solve a problem for your reader. Once you know the problem and the solution, the next step is figuring out the exact terms that people are using to search for a solution.

Tools such as KeySearch and UberSuggest can help you discover keywords and long-tail keywords to target for your content, as well as give you an idea of the competition for those keywords.

Generally, you want to choose mid-level competition keywords with a great search volume to target for writing your content. You can use the additionally suggested keywords within your content to help strengthen the post and rank for those terms as well.

Remember, your goal is to use affiliate products to solve a problem. Properly optimized affiliate content targets a pain point that people experience and want to solve (keyword) and shows how easily the problem can be solved (affiliate product), along with a call to action and a simple way to purchase the solution (conversion).

Find Online Communities for Affiliate Marketers.

The affiliate marketing industry is always evolving and new ideas and opportunities arise almost daily. It is important to immerse yourself in the industry, not only to stay on top of the news but also to surround yourself with people who have the same goals and are on the same success path.

The best places to find these online communities are Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Once you join the community, be sure to actively engage with the other members by asking questions and offering support, as well. Check the resources in the community such as videos and files to learn from past conversations.

Look for Virtual Conferences to learn from the experts

Similar to joining online communities for tips and support, attending conferences — whether virtual or in-person — offer an enormous amount of opportunity. At Affiliate Conferences, you will have the opportunity to learn from industry leaders, connect with brands, and discover ways to strengthen your affiliate strategy.

Take advantage of every networking opportunity to grow your knowledge base and expand your audience. Ask questions and be ready and willing to listen to those with more experience.

Benefits of affiliate management

Whether you’re just getting started in your affiliate journey, or are a seasoned professional looking to take a load off your plate, working with a managed program can help. Apogee audits affiliate programs to find weaknesses and help increase efficiency. Joining a program that is already running smoothly is a great way to increase your earning potential by avoiding potential snags in the program. Take advantage of the increased resources available in a firmly established program and reach out for content ideas, promotional content, and seasonal sales drives.

Apogee works with many merchants using Refersion’s Marketplace to offer the best framework for both affiliate and merchant. Sign up for Refersion’s Marketplace today to search available affiliate programs and find the merchant and program that is perfect for you.

At Apogee, we also work with content creators to help them “Think Like An Affiliate” and earn income from some of the best programs on the market today.

Affiliate & Influencer Best Practices To Make Sure You Are In Tip-Top Shape was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is a guest post by Payment Rails, a Refersion integrated Partner. Payment Rails develops software to help companies pay non-employee compensation and comply with IRS regulations when paying 1099 and 1042 contractors. Payment Rails is not authorized to provide tax advice and we suggest all companies consult with their tax attorney prior to working with Payment Rails and while configuring any tax settings within Payment Rails

Join us on September 22, 2019, for our webinar with Payment Rails as we discuss methods to streamline affiliate payments.

Affiliate programs are a powerful way for many companies to market their products and services to consumers. Affiliates have communities of followers that typically have niche interests. The right affiliates can introduce a brand and their products to consumers who are most likely to make a purchase. Unlike paid advertising platforms (ie. Google Ads, Facebook Ads), Affiliates tend to have a more personal, direct, and long term relationship with a brand.

There are two main challenges to affiliate programs that set them apart from paid advertising:

1. Paying the affiliates on time for referrals
2. Following IRS guidelines for tax compliance (1099 and 1042 contractors)

Step 1 Paying Affiliates

Paying affiliates can be done in many different ways. A solution like PayPal is easy and straight forward, however many affiliates prefer to get paid directly to their bank account for a few reasons:

a) Only 2% of the world’s population has a PayPal account, more than 60% have a bank account (that number jumps to 90%+ for developed countries)

b) Most people can’t pay their bills and rent from a PayPal account, so they end up having to withdraw the money to their bank anyways, with an additional 3–5 day waiting period.

The other challenge here is if payments are done separately from an affiliate platform, brands will have to export payment data, collect payment details from affiliates, and upload all the details into an offline payments platform. A platform like Refersion removes those manual steps by offering easy integrations directly to platforms like Payment Rails (which supports direct-to-bank and PayPal payouts).

Step 2 Gathering Tax Forms

Affiliates, in most cases (check with your tax attorney!), are considered independent contractors in the eyes of the IRS. This means that you’ll need to issue a Form 1099-NEC to US-based affiliates and a Form 1042-S to non-US affiliates at the end of the tax year.

Before you pay them, you’ll also need to establish their tax status. Typically, this is done by collecting a Form W9 (US Affiliates) or a Form W8-BEN / Form W8-BEN-E (non-US Affiliates).

In most cases, your affiliate platform will not do this for you and you’ll have to figure it out off-platform. Luckily, Refersion plus their Payment Rails integration solves this problem. Affiliates will be able to provide their tax status directly within the affiliate dashboard, and all their information is saved digitally.

Step 3 End-of-Year Reporting

For the end-of-year reporting, brands will need to create a Form 1099-NEC for each US affiliate paid more than $600 in the tax year and a Form 1042-S for every non-US affiliate paid in the tax year. Each form must have one copy sent to the affiliate, one copy sent to the IRS, and one copy kept on file with the payer (your company),

A 1099 takes two inputs:

1. Information collected on the W9/W8
2. Sum of payments sent to the affiliate.

Most affiliate platforms will help by providing CSV exports of the payments data, but leave you to upload all of the relevant data (payment date + W9/W8 data) into a 3rd party software of your choice, or manually prepare the forms.

Because Refersion with the Payment Rails integration keeps track of both the payments data and collects the W9/W8 data, you will be able to generate and electronically send all of the tax forms with a few button clicks.

Download Payment Rails and Refersion’s Affiliate Onboarding and Payment Checklist.

3 Steps to Paying Affiliates and Handling Tax Obligations was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re planning out an affiliate marketing strategy for your brand. With so many buzzwords being tossed around these days it can be frustrating knowing where to start. In this article, we’ll explore an integration with the loyalty and rewards marketing platform, Yotpo, and how it can be used to build a successful brand ambassador program.

Before we begin, let’s briefly discuss several popular types of affiliate programs. You’ll hear terms often thrown around describing these people that introduce brands to their social circles or audience.

These people are collectively known as affiliates or influencers. Don’t get hung up on the linguistics here, they mean the same thing. Sometimes they are also referred to as brand ambassadors, program reps, and even partners. For this article, we’re going to refer to them as brand ambassadors, because we’re talking about building a brand ambassador program. Once again, they are still technically affiliates, influencers, and program reps.

Affiliate marketing strategies generally revolve around three types of affiliates:

1. Social media influencers — Youtube personalities, Instagram celebrities, Tik Tok creators
2. Publishers who act as affiliates — Coupon websites, large websites like Business Insider, or blogs focused on niche topics.
3. Customers who become your affiliates — a.k.a. Brand Ambassadors

Building a brand ambassador program focuses on recruiting and incentivizing your customers to introduce your products and services to their social circle. This social circle can consist of family members, friends, or members of their community. Brand ambassadors can drive sales by introducing your brand to their circle, but there are other goals that can be accomplished by launching an ambassador program. Maybe you want to raise the average order value (AOV), simply use the program to raise brand awareness in the market, or create an exclusive community of loyal customers that you can use as your brand’s focus group. Make sure you think about what goal your program will be aiming at before going any further. Once you’ve settled on a goal, make sure you review the 3 KPIs of affiliate marketing.

How Brand Ambassador Programs Work

A great example of a brand ambassador workflow revolves around you creating an exclusive community for customers to be invited to join. This invitation is usually extended immediately after they complete a purchase from your store. We’ve written a whole article dedicated to converting your customers into affiliates. One thing we stress in that article is to offer your customer an aggressive offer that they can simply not refuse. Not only incentivizing them but also extending a discount that their friends and family can apply to their purchase when they are referred.

That sounds like one awesome deal, but you can go a couple of steps further. Do you remember when we mentioned an “exclusive community” above? Creating a private club doesn’t take a giant marketing team to develop. It can be as simple as making your customer feel unique and special. Creating excitement and exclusivity will help motivate your customers to join your brand ambassador program. Going one step further is where our integration with Yotpo comes in.

Yotpo offers a plethora of different services, but for the scope of our integration and your brand ambassador program, we’re going to talk about their loyalty service.

With Yotpo’s loyalty program, you can award customers points when they complete different actions. They can then use these points to earn things like store credit that can be applied to future purchases. There are lots of ways you can award points, for example here are a few popular ways; when a customer shares their purchase on Facebook, follows you on Instagram, spends $100 on your products, and writes a review of your store.

Our integration with Yotpo allows you to award your customers when they apply as an affiliate for your program, hence they become your brand ambassador. Your brain might be spinning right now, but let’s go back to the beginning and use a real-life example of what an ambassador program looks like.

Here’s an example from Mermaid Straw. They offer a textbook definition of a brand ambassador program. First, let’s look at their ambassador landing page. You’ll notice a few things listed here, an explanation of the program, perks for joining the program, criteria for being accepted, and navigational links to applying/signing into their program.

By examining the perks of the program we can see how Mermaid Straw uses incentivization to motivate their ambassadors. It’s worth noting that all of this is possible by using Refersion to power your program. Each ambassador is given a unique code to share with friends, family, and followers that gives them 15% off every purchase. Meanwhile, the ambassador’s code will give them a 10% commission for each purchase they refer. Ambassadors can use the code to give themselves 15% off as well. Finally, each ambassador is invited to join an exclusive private Facebook group where they’ll receive sneak peeks at new products and be part of a community of like-minded peers.

Another fantastic example is from Pura Vida Bracelets. Pura Vida goes even further with their brand ambassador program. While utilizing our Yotpo integration, Pura Vida awards its customers with special points when they register to become an ambassador that can then be used for rewards the brand offers. They’ve successfully tied their loyalty program with their brand ambassador strategy.

Having the right recipe for brand ambassadors will guarantee you success. Let’s review the keys to success.

1. Recruit — Aggressively push sign-ups to recruit your customers.
2. Communicate — Communicate, communicate, communicate. Communication is the key to keeping them engaged.
3. Incentivize — Combining discounts, commissions, and your Yotpo loyalty program will give them the proper motivation.

If you’re just launching your first brand ambassador program then we recommend finding the best offer that works for you. Remember, the more aggressive the offer, the higher chance your program has of recruiting ambassadors. If you already have a Yotpo account then you should definitely consider starting an ambassador program. Once you find the right offer you can then continue to build out the rest of your program.

For those brands that already have a brand ambassador program that is succeeding then you should give some serious thought to incorporating your loyalty program to further incentivize your customers.

Check out our support article on how to get started with this integration.

Refersion + Yotpo: The Recipe to a successful brand ambassador program was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article was contributed by our partner Swanky.

Feel like your social strategy needs refining? Struggling to keep track of the social conversations that matter most? As your account engagement grows, reacting, and responding promptly and appropriately to social media mentions becomes increasingly important.

If you’re not sure where to start, then fear not, for this is your ultimate guide to social media monitoring!

This post will delve into the tools, best practices, and personal KPIs that content creators can use to improve their social media monitoring strategy and up their influencer game.

Ready? Let’s start by exploring what social media monitoring actually is and why it’s important for you as an influencer.

What is social media monitoring and why is it important for influencers?

Social media monitoring is essentially keeping tabs on all types of engagement across your social and online channels. This reactive strategy involves tracking and responding to things like mentions, tags, questions, and messages, ideally in real-time.

A well-implemented social media monitoring strategy is essential for developing thriving relationships with your followers. It allows you to keep on top of messages and comments, making your audience feel heard and supported (not to mention impressing them with your responsiveness!).

It also helps you to understand wider conversations occurring in your social space, which improves how well you know your audience and enables you to serve tailored content that your followers will connect with.

Social media monitoring is also a great way to keep an eye on the competition, as well as your industry overall. It provides a clear picture of your niche and shows you exactly where you fit in comparison to other influencers.

Being aware of who is saying what about you online and really understanding how your audience reacts to your content is essential when it comes to laying the foundations for brand collaborations as well. As popular lifestyle influencer Zara McDermott alluded to it in a recent Q&A YouTube video, before cementing partnerships or endorsements, brands want to hear about your engagement, the sort of reach you’re getting and exactly who your audience is. A well-rounded social media monitoring strategy will enable you to confidently reel off this sort of information and demonstrate a thorough understanding of your social space.

What should you monitor on social media?

So, now that we’ve covered why social media monitoring is important, let’s explore which things you should be monitoring.

#1 Direct interactions

Here are some of the direct interactions and topics you might want to keep track of:

• @mentions
• Direct messages
• Retweets / Reposts / Shares
• Comments
• Photo tags
• Your campaign hashtags
• Your slogan

A top tip is to make sure you’re monitoring mentions of you as an individual where you haven’t been specifically @mentioned, including common misspellings and abbreviations of your name.

#2 The wider conversation

As an influencer, your job is to adapt to real-world topics and conversations to suit your audience. Without up-to-date knowledge of topics relevant to your niche or industry-wide conversations, it can quickly seem as though you’re out of touch. Therefore, deciding on a small group of topics relevant to your niche and then monitoring them closely provides a more complete understanding of the social sphere that you sit within.

With this in mind, more than simply monitoring direct interactions that you automatically receive notifications about, this social strategy involves tracking wider conversations, hashtags, and keywords, such as:

• Hashtags and keywords relevant to your niche or industry.
• General industry trends.
• Qualifying keywords like ‘recommended’, ‘best’, ‘improve’.
• Mentions of competitors’ handles.

#3 Social media metrics

The best social media monitoring strategy will not only track your chosen interactions and keywords, but it’ll also monitor key social metrics so that you can identify which content campaigns have had the best impact on your chosen KPIs. You want to be able to measure things like:

• Reach and impressions — so you can see how much of your content is actually being seen by your followers.
• Comments, likes, shares etc. — to perceive the rate at which your content triggers some form of interaction.
• Levels of awareness for you and your content.
• Sentiment around your content (or how your audience feels about your content) — it’s all well and good to receive a high volume of comments and shares on your content, but if the connotations are negative it could be a sign that you are out of touch with your audience.
• Your social share of voice, which is usually measured as a percentage of total mentions within an industry or among a defined group of competitors.

Social media monitoring tools for influencers

Of course, you could manually check each social media network individually for mentions, comments, and hashtags, but this would eat up valuable time that you could be spending creating content.

Fortunately, there is a multitude of tools available that will help you take your social media monitoring to the next level. After all, keeping tabs on everything from direct mentions to the wider social conversation is no small task!

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular tools and their best bits. Each of these tools suits different needs and budgets, so be sure to do your research (and make the most of any free trials!) before you commit to a social media monitoring tool.

Twitter Advanced Search

First and foremost, built-in analytics can provide some of the most valuable information to contribute to your social media monitoring strategy.

Twitter’s Advanced Search feature makes it easy to find specific Tweets that might be relevant to you. Monitoring Twitter interactions are often underestimated when it comes to influencers’ social strategies, but it can do wonders for building human connections with your audience. Alike or reply on Twitter can make a follower’s day!

Advanced Search allows you to create searches based on words, phrases, and hashtags in a range of languages. You can apply filters to refine your search based on replies, links, engagement rates, and dates. Plus, you can save up to 25 searches, making monitoring much easier.

There are plenty of options to make sure you’re tracking the most relevant Tweets!

Insights on Instagram

Another built-in tool, Insights is a free feature available to Instagram users who opt for a business or creator profile. It helps you learn about your audience by providing information about how they interact with your content, namely keeping track of metrics like reach, impressions, engagement, followers, and shares.

Just some of the metrics that Instagram Insights shines a light on. (Source: Keyhole)

By enabling you to decipher which posts have performed well in relation to your KPIs and which haven’t, you can produce better, more targeted content, with a higher chance of it being successful with your audience. What’s more, this knowledge leaves you better positioned to collaborate with brands your followers might like.

Google Alerts

Alternatively, in order to monitor interactions across the web and keep track of what is being said about you in your wider social space, Google Alerts can be highly beneficial.

The basic premise is that Google Alerts monitors the Internet for your chosen keywords. Then, whenever it discovers something relevant to your search criteria, you’ll receive an email direct to your inbox.

You can set up a Google Alert in just a few simple steps!

A key benefit to look out for is the functionality to specify alerts for regions and languages, which helps you as an influencer determine your content based on conversations within your niche.

Brand24

If you don’t mind paying for a tool to support your social media monitoring, Influencer Marketing Hub labeled Brand24 as their top social media monitoring tool of 2020.

This tool offers paid plans to fit for small and large scale influencers, ranging from $49/month to $199/month. You can test it out with a 14-day free trial, too!

Brand24 gives you instant access to mentions across social, news, blogs, forums, reviews, and more, organizing them in a dedicated feed. Not only that, one of the key benefits of Brand24 is that it provides insight into the sentiment your audience has for your content, segmenting mentions into those that are positive, negative, and neutral. As well as this, it offers a rather snazzy visual Discussion Volume chart, meaning you can easily see if there are any surges in your mentions.

Track your mentions and keep an eye on key social metrics like reach and interactions. (Source: Brand24)

Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite Insights is another tool that offers customizable pricing for its detailed social monitoring. It analyses your social mentions in real-time, giving you a clear picture of social sentiment. You can also get a helpful visual representation of what people are saying about you online with the cool word cloud feature!

Hootsuite Insights gives a clear visual representation of all the metrics that matter for your social media monitoring strategy! (Source: GetApp)

A key strength to look out for is its ability to filter results to spot trends in audience location, language, and gender. Monitoring isn’t just limited to social channels either — you can access blogs and forums, as well as setting custom alerts. Another benefit is that you can share this data with multiple people — perfect if you’re a larger-scale influencer with a team supporting you.

Summary

By now, you should have an understanding of why social media monitoring is so important and how you can introduce it to your social strategy as a content creator. Not only this, but we’ve also explored a number of tools that will help you master the art of monitoring and track how well your content is being received.

So, what are you waiting for? Take our top tips on board and implement your shiny new social media monitoring strategy today!

About Swanky

Swanky is a leading Shopify Plus agency specializing in web design, eCommerce migrations, marketing, and growth strategies. We have years of experience delivering creative digital solutions and innovative customer experiences for ambitious, fast-growing brands all over the globe. To find out how Swanky’s team of experts could transform your eCommerce store, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

About Refersion Marketplace

The Refersion Marketplace is the World’s fastest-growing influencer network filled with products from industry-leading D2C brands. Join for free and find the best offer for your niche today.

About the author

Alana Hushon

As part of Swanky’s Agency Marketing team, Alana enjoys writing about the exciting world of ecommerce and helping to create engaging content for online retailers. She is particularly focused on social media marketing and the role that influencers play in modern consumer culture.

A Content Creator’s Guide to Improving Their Social Media Monitoring Strategy was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Black Friday has become a well-known event within the public and throughout the marketing world. Taking place the day after Thanksgiving, Americans flock to retail outlets and digital storefronts to take advantage of the year’s best deals. Whether they’re in the market for a television, a new appliance, or some clothing, it’s likely that a customer’s store of choice is going to have a major sale on Black Friday.

Join us for our free live webinar where we show you how Refersion can power your affiliate marketing platform.

But Black Friday is no longer a one-day event. It’s now morphed into a four-day weekend, with deals shifting throughout the weekend until shoppers are brought into Cyber Monday, where major deals hit the internet, allowing customers to make purchases from the comfort of their home. COVID-19 is changing the way we’re viewing a lot of “regular” things in life, though. Social events are few and far between, celebrating holidays is a head-scratcher, and the idea of shopping in-person can be fear-inducing for some. While our world is changing for unexpected reasons, what news does this spell for Black Friday? And how can marketers and affiliate marketing strategies adapt to keep the tradition alive?

Why Your Business Needs Black Friday

While shopping deals have spread from Thanksgiving Day all the way to Cyber Monday, Black Friday is still the most popular shopping day for customers — it’s likely become so ubiquitous that it makes sense to take care of your holiday and personal shopping on that day. 2019 was a hallmark year for Black Friday, too, as shoppers spent more money than during any other time, putting their hard-earned money to work by finding the best deals possible.

Yet COVID-19 presents a strange situation for 2020: Will people still be interested in shopping when the fate of the economy seems so uncertain? The fact is that people are willing to shop — especially when they find a deal — and while shopping in-person isn’t likely to be a thing this year, it’s more than likely that people will be doing their holiday shopping online. Because of financial limitations, people might be looking for the best deals they can get, which is understandable, so now is the year to really hook customers in every way possible.

How can this be achieved? By capturing their attention prior to Black Friday and maintaining it until that day comes, all achieved thanks to an affiliate marketing strategy, email campaigns, traditional advertising, and more.

Planning in Advance for Black Friday

With great expectations come great preparations. Your business needs to establish what it’s doing far in advance of Black Friday even happening. Why? Because you want to ensure that you have everything set-and-ready for when the day arrives; moreover, you should guarantee you’re communicating with customers far in advance of the day approaching.

The former is important because you want to ensure your business’s website doesn’t crash when more visitors than normal go to the site all at once. Issues that can come from a sudden rush of traffic include third-party components failing, unequipped servers lagging, and web pages failing to load for some users.

The latter is imperative because it helps to entice customers to actually shop with your business on Black Friday, rather than just hoping they arrive. This includes reaching out to them on a regular basis beforehand, letting them know what to expect so you can make sure they shop with you when it matters. Here are a few ways you can achieve both of these goals in relation to Black Friday:

• Plan ahead.

In reality, there isn’t much time until Black Friday comes along. In terms of establishing a marketing plan, three months isn’t that much time, so it’s important that you begin putting in the work now. This is especially true since your competitors are likely doing the same, hoping to get the attention of customers of your niche.

This doesn’t mean you need to immediately start advertising to your customer base about Black Friday; however, it does mean getting them partway in the door before that time comes. This can most easily be achieved by getting them to follow you on social and media and having them sign up for your email services. Both of these are simple avenues that allow you to remain in constant contact for the next few months, letting them become acquainted with your brand while remaining aware of what’s going on. Once November comes around, you can begin putting out content related to sales expected on Black Friday.

• Check the performance of your site.

Along with preparing your customers for the season, now is the time to ensure your website is ready to handle the increased traffic. This is one of the most imperative steps of preparation. Even if you’re able to land customers prior to Black Friday, they will not return if they had a bad experience with your website. This is solely due to customer’s expectations of websites to work efficiently and quickly — 40% of customers state they will not return to a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and more than 50% of users will abandon that same website under the same conditions.

For this reason, you should take the time to sit down with your IT and backend team to run through your website to determine whether or not it can handle the customer base you want to attract. Upgrades should only be minor fixes; however, that never justifies leaving them to the last minute. You don’t want it to be Black Friday and your website has crashed multiple times, thus ruining any chance at acquiring business that you might have had.

• Get your audience energized.

While you want to capture your audience prior to Black Friday coming around, you need to remember that these few days of sales don’t last long, and you need to remind your audience of that when the time comes. Getting and keeping the attention of your customers can be tough, and it’s common for customers to lose interest the farther out an event is — but this is just more reason why you need to continue reaching out to them once Black Friday is near.

This can most easily manifest in the form of urgency — a call to action intended to get their attention. In regards to Black Friday, this will look near frantic, reminding them what little time they have to act. This can include messaging related to the scarcity of items, the urgency of specific deals, and more, such as:

• “Get ready for our Black Friday deals!”
• “Deals you can’t get in-store”
• “One day to fill those stockings”
• “The perfect gift at the perfect price”
• “Get yourself a gift this Black Friday”

Whatever your approach, you want to take some measures that will allow you to hold their attention leading up to Black Friday, all while making sure they actually shop with you the day of.

Capitalizing on Black Friday

• Create an email campaign before Black Friday.

Reach out before it’s too late. Begin emailing customers who have engaged with your business and signed up to be part of your email list.

For current customers, that involves creating a campaign that makes them aware of upcoming sales, products that fit their needs based on past purchases, and potential gift bundles for holiday shopping. For past customers, it involves trying to find a way to bring them back into the fold.

• Retarget past customers and site visitors.

Maybe you’ve had a list of site visitors and shoppers from the past. Now is the time to make use of them. If they signed up for your email list when they last visited, consider reaching out with an email that lets them know what will be on sale coming Black Friday.

Take it further with customers who once filled their cart but abandoned it. This can include sending them a direct coupon for use on Black Friday — one inaccessible to the public. Simple things like this, and the above, can work to let customers know you haven’t forgotten them and that you are still appreciative of them considering you in the first place.

• Use time to your advantage.

As mentioned above, urgency matters when considering one-day sales. While shoppers are likely to bounce around, they’re also bound to make quick decisions if it sounds as if a deal is going away or if stock is low.

To take advantage of this, consider creating a sense of urgency with your content and across your website. Offer specific shopping codes that expire within a day; offer temporary digital sales that only last a few hours; make customers aware when stock is getting low on a product. Basic reminders of exclusivity and urgency can help fuel a customer from window shopping to checkout.

• Keep an eye on business.

If you’re using a platform like Refersion, now is the time to make the most of it. This, paired with technology like Google Analytics, can help you understand how customers are interacting with your website and content. By monitoring this, you’re taking the time to conduct research on what your customer thinks of what you have and what you do, such as:

• What pages do they most often click on?
• How long do they spend on certain webpages?
• Do they leave certain webpages without taking action?
• Are they opening your emails?
• How many people are engaging with affiliate content?
• How many of these engagements turn into sales conversions?

Receiving analytics from these questions can key answers that will drive your business in the right direction, allowing you to make tweaks as needed.

• Think multi-channel.

Utilizing just one avenue won’t do. The best way to reach your intended audience will be through numerous channels. Often referred to as an omnichannel approach, this marketing strategy is especially useful for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. By utilizing various types of marketing strategies, from affiliate marketing to social media, your business can effectively reach out to customers across the spectrum.

Marketplaces such as Instagram ads, Amazon storefronts, a brick-and-mortar shop, and smartphone-accessible web pages will allow customers of all stripes to shop freely with your business.

• Look beyond Black Friday.

Black Friday is a great day to bring people to your website to shop, but it’s not the only day of the season. The five-day shopping spree from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday should be capitalized on, where you provide different offers, deals, and sales every day, ensuring customers continue coming back to your site. Furthermore, you still have a whole holiday season to go until reaching Christmas and New Years’ Eve, which means you’ll have to continue finding ways to keep customers engaged.

This largely involves working to convert these one-time shoppers into long-term customers. How can this be achieved? By regularly communicating with them, providing them with excellent service, and guaranteeing your website online store is running as smoothly as possible.

An email campaign or affiliate marketing strategy are simple ways to stay in touch with your customer base, all while working to rope in new ones along the way. If you’re looking to make the most of your business this holiday season, you need to think ahead of Black Friday and begin structuring a marketing plan that covers the whole winter holiday season.

Learn How Refersion Can Help Your Pandemic Marketing Efforts

If you’re interested in how an affiliate marketing strategy can fit into your current marketing mix, consider learning about Refersion and how it can benefit your business’s marketing efforts and keep customers in the loop.

Register for our free live webinar that will show you how Refersion can power your Influencer marketing campaign.

Black Friday Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Driving Holiday Sales During a Pandemic was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Influencers have been around since before marketing was an industry. Throughout history, those with fame, wealth, and authority have wielded influence over others and have affected their decisions. From copying the fashions of kings and queens to using Santa Claus to sell Coca-Cola, influencers have come in many forms.

Trust is a necessary part of the customer experience. Ads run on traditional media outlets have become less effective because consumers no longer take advertising at face value. Paid celebrity endorsements were quite effective in the past, but are waning today due to the public’s increasing perception that such endorsements are rarely genuine.

Authentic testimonials carry the most weight with consumers, with 70% of teenagers saying that they trust influencers more than mainstream celebrities, and 86% of women admitting to using social media for purchasing advice. Almost three-quarters of consumers (74%) trust recommendations on social media. Friends and family are the most likely to influence a purchase, but there’s another group not far behind the curve.

Social media influencers

With the domination of social media in the online space, word-of-mouth is more powerful than ever. No longer is online advertising the purview of professional affiliates or pay-per-click ads. Anyone with an established social media account can tell their followers about a product or service and reap decent commissions from a single post.

Celebrities with millions of followers often make use of their follower counts by partnering with companies to create sponsored content and are highly paid due to the number of eyes they can attract.

In the past few years, a new subcategory of influencer has emerged. Making use of this demographic can have great results for any company with an online presence.

Micro-influencers

Big names and huge followings aren’t necessarily the best choice to promote products and services. Influencers with 1,000–10,000 followers typically have higher engagement and conversion rates on their posts. They can garner up to twice the actions, three times the views, and 12 times the comments per post or video than big-name celebrities.

Smaller communities naturally feel more intimate, which enhances the trust factor that is so vital to the influencer. With too-perfect posts and entitled attitudes, social media stars are losing face amongst the general public. Micro-influencers with smaller audiences retain the more personal connection that online consumers are looking for.

Losing trust

Some of the largest names in the influencer world have been rocked by scandals in recent years. Everything from ill-advised remarks to offensive publicity campaigns, to fake follower scandals and not tagging their posts as sponsored can land an influencer in hot water. Brands need to be aware of how consumers perceive an influencer because it will also reflect on the company they promote.

In 2017, when Logan Paul posted a video of a body in Japan’s Suicide Forest, there was a public outcry against his callous publicity stunt. Not only was it deemed disrespectful to the family of the victim, but inappropriate for his mostly teenaged audience. Paul has since posted several apology videos, but the controversy added fuel to the one PewDePie kicked off in the same year. YouTube then kicked off the famed 2017 “Adpocalypse.” As advertisers pulled their support, YouTube implemented a strict algorithm to identify “controversial” content.

Many innocent content creators faced instant demonetization for any content auto-flagged as “problematic”. A robot can’t screen videos and realize that war documentaries aren’t “promoting violence,” so the channel must request a manual review process, which can take several days and disrupt normal revenue streams. This underscores the point that even if an individual content creator is not at fault, industry scandal can affect every other influencer’s ability to reach their followers.

Regaining trust

Many platforms, companies, and individual influencers have pledged to fight against fraud, bot accounts, and inappropriate content in an effort to revive the industry’s reputation. After the glut of amateur social media stars flooding Instagram, asking for freebies in return for dubious exposure on posts, companies are rightfully wary of self-proclaimed influencers. So what can you as an influencer do to mend this trust? First and foremost, don’t expect companies to take your influencer claims on face value.

Back up the assessment of your marketing value with accurate estimations of your follower counts, engagement rates, and ROI. If you don’t have prior experience in these areas, don’t expect to be given freebies or premium commission rates. In the final analysis, consumer trust is an important and delicate commodity. Once broken, it can be hard to regain. By carefully choosing which companies you work with and reviewing ad content for potential red flags, you can help prevent the breach of customer trust that threatens the industry.

Join the world’s fastest-growing influencer and affiliate network.

Trust In The Age Of Influencer Marketing & Why It Matters was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The health and beauty industry is an evergreen industry: People are always seeking ways to improve and maintain their health while avoiding disease; thus, there is always a market for health and beauty products to be sold. It shows in the amount of revenue it generates each year, with $4.2 trillion being produced in 2017 alone.

Join us for our free live webinar where we show you how Refersion can power your affiliate marketing platform.

While it’s an easy industry to sell, becoming a business that stands out from the rest of the market can be difficult. There are so many businesses in the market, many hardly different from the next. So, you can take measures to help your brand stand out, such as entering into a more specific niche, but that won’t do much if you’re not properly marketing your business. If you’re looking to spread awareness for your health and beauty brand, one of the simplest ways to do so is through the creation and implementation of an affiliate marketing strategy.

Understanding Your Niche

Affiliate marketing strategies are structured around niches. If you’re a business trying to attract people with hair products, you’re not going to create a product and say “This is good for all hair.” Rather, you’re going to develop a line of products that works best for specific hair types, are made with all-natural ingredients, and so on.

When targeting a consumer base, you’ll need to identify the subgroup whose attention you want to grab. This will work best when utilizing affiliate marketing software, as it makes it possible for you to throw a finer net to increase consumer engagement and increase customer conversions.

Your niche as a health and beauty business can include interests such as hair loss treatment, IBS treatment, weight loss, skincare, and more. The possibilities are endless. It’s important you understand your business’s niche to be successful, both on your own and in the development of an affiliate marketing strategy.

Standing Out in a Large Market

So you’ve identified your niche. Now it’s time to work toward developing your brand and its affiliate marketing strategy to effectively capture your competition’s potential customer base, building an audience of your own.

As mentioned above, the health and beauty industry is extremely profitable, and it has no signs of slowing. Finding your niche and sticking to it is one of the smartest ways to promote business growth, as you can begin providing exact solutions to specific people in need.

Affiliate marketing makes this easier by allowing you to find these customers more readily, especially if you’re utilizing other businesses and influencers from different platforms. This can include featuring your product in a video of theirs, putting out a blog reviewing your product, or simply featuring it in a picture uploaded to Instagram.

Why You Need to Branch Out

So, developing an affiliate marketing plan is feasible as a health and beauty business, but why exactly should you join an affiliate network and make the most of affiliate marketing software?

Beyond it being a useful tool to add to your business’s marketing strategy, here are four specific reasons why affiliate marketing would be right for your business:

1. Promote your content to the right viewers.

Once you’ve found your niche, it then comes down to finding affiliates who exist within that niche and which can properly promote your business. Having the connection is a total game-changer, as it allows your business to get a step above the competition, as you’ll be essentially speaking directly with your intended audience.

2. Create a relationship with products.

When affiliates create content about your products, they’re likely doing it with their own flair, thus making it personalized for their own audience. In the case of influencers, this goes a long way, as it allows your products to take on an emotional weight they otherwise wouldn’t have if they existed solely on your website’s store page.

3. Utilize results.

Affiliate marketing software provides you an analytics tool that makes it easy to track the progress and success of your marketing strategy in real-time. By joining a network like Refersion, you’re receiving quality support with high-grade analytics, allowing you to follow audience engagement and tweak your marketing efforts whenever needed.

4. Increase ROI with every click.

Rather than spending on Facebook advertising or a traditional print ad, affiliate marketing makes sure you only pay when a conversion is made. That means paying for marketing that works for you, not on the off-chance it works.

Introduce an Affiliate Marketing Strategy with Refersion

Health and beauty businesses have a large market full of opportunities before them, but it’s what you do with those opportunities that matter. For businesses looking to make the most of their marketing efforts, it’s in their best interest to introduce an affiliate marketing strategy. With Refersion, businesses have the ability to track their progress in real-time, letting them follow and manage their strategy, guaranteeing it remains successful at every turn.

Register for our free live webinar that will show you how Refersion can power your Influencer marketing campaign.

4 Reasons Why Your Health & Beauty Business Needs Affiliate Marketing was originally published in Affiliate Marketing — Refersion Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.