August 2, 2022

Choosing An Affiliate Partner

By fazer_dev

What is an Affiliate Agency?

To answer this question, we need to know what affiliate marketing is and the role an affiliate management agency assumes as part of your marketing team.

Affiliate marketing is a digital channel in which two parties or more enter a partnership that is beneficial to the brand who’s advertising their product or service, and publishers who have expansive reach among particular audiences.

A typical scenario includes an advertiser (or merchant) who has a product to offer. A publisher (or affiliate) promotes the advertiser’s product to their large online audience. An audience member sees a brand show up in an appropriate publisher context, and that relevant environment infliuences a visitor to consider learning more or making a purchase. The advertiser benefits from the sale and pays a small commission to the affiliate for hosting that brand.

Since the power of affiliate marketing comes from targeted reach, brands need multiple publisher partner opportunities to drive their affiliate program. When you consider the broad publisher landscape, uncovering the right partnerships is no small task. Now you have a complex, time-consuming endeavor that requires cross-channel marketing skills as well as deep affiliate management expertise.

Think about this when it comes to your own marketing team: Who will manage these affiliate relationships? Who’s qualified to vet the best publishers, not just the usual suspects. Are there affiliate managers on your team with analytics skill to accurately track conversions and attribution so your affiliate dollars are spent with the right partners who will generate truly incremental revenue for your brand? This is the work of an experienced affiliate management agency.

What does an Affiliate Marketing Agency Do?

An affiliate marketing agency is a company that specializes in managing and optimizing affiliate marketing programs on behalf of brands or advertisers. The primary role of an affiliate agency is to help businesses expand their online reach, increase brand visibility, and drive sales or conversions through the affiliate marketing channel. An agency fully manages the affiliate program. The role of the agency involves a variety of tasks such as:

How to Find Affiliate Partners that Meet Your Needs

Finding affiliate marketing partners that fit your needs requires a systematic approach and careful consideration. Here are some steps you can follow to find suitable affiliate partners:

  1. Define Your Target Audience: Identify your target audience or customer persona. Understand their demographics, interests, and online behavior. This will help you find affiliate partners who have an audience that aligns with your target market.
  2. Research Your Industry: Conduct thorough research within your industry to identify potential affiliate partners. Look for websites, blogs, influencers, or social media accounts that attract your target audience and are related to your niche.
  3. Use Affiliate Networks: Join affiliate networks that specialize in connecting advertisers with affiliates. These networks provide a platform where you can find a wide range of affiliates and manage your affiliate program efficiently. Some popular affiliate networks include ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and Amazon Associates.
  4. Competitor Analysis: Analyze your competitors’ affiliate programs to gain insights into their affiliate partners. Look for affiliates promoting similar products or services in your industry. This can give you ideas on potential partners that might be a good fit for your program as well.
  5. Establish Clear Communication: When approaching potential partners, clearly communicate the benefits of your affiliate program, commission structure, promotional support, and any unique selling points. Show how working with you can be mutually beneficial.
  6. Offer Competitive Commission Structures: To attract quality affiliates, ensure that your commission structure is competitive within your industry. Affiliates are more likely to promote products or services that offer fair compensation for their efforts.

In-House Affiliate Management vs. Affiliate Management Agency

In-house affiliate management can be a good fit for some situations but not all. An experienced affiliate marketing manager can deliver good results for smaller affiliate programs. In the long term these results may be underwhelming. At a certain point, the organization should seek out an agency to grow the program. Typically, a good time to seek support is once performance has peaked and progression stalled.

Serious ROI comes from leveraging a wealth of knowledge, connections, and a dedicated team. To put it straight, an in-house team cannot compete with agency-level management.

In-house affiliate managers often work alone. They cannot rely on a centralized team the way an agency can. Instead, these team members are often in different departments. As a result, the affiliate channel falls by the wayside in a sea of competing initiatives.

Agencies have experienced teams focused on delivering results. While some companies are guilty of burying a single manager with dozens of accounts, a good agency knows this approach does not work. At ParterCentric, for example, we have an entire team dedicated to the program’s success. We dedicate 6-8 experienced departments to each account. This approach brings 6-8 unique perspectives, solutions, creativity and more to the table.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Company

Choosing the right affiliate marketing agency is crucial for the success of your affiliate program. Here are some factors to consider when selecting an affiliate marketing agency:

  1. Expertise and Experience: Look for an agency that has a strong track record in affiliate marketing. Consider their experience in your industry or niche, as well as their knowledge of current trends, best practices, and compliance regulations. Ask for case studies or references to gauge their expertise and understand how tenured their team is
  2. Services Offered: Evaluate the range of services offered by the agency. Ensure they can fulfill your specific needs, such as affiliate program setup, affiliate recruitment, network management, creative development, reporting, and analysis. Choose an agency that can provide comprehensive support based on your goals.
  3. Reputation and Clientele: Research the agency’s reputation and client reviews on reputable websites like Clutch. Look for testimonials or references from their existing or previous clients. A reputable agency will have a positive reputation within the industry and a strong portfolio of satisfied clients.
  4. Network Relationships: Consider the agency’s relationships with affiliate networks. Find out which networks they work with and how they can leverage these partnerships to benefit your program. A well-established agency will have connections with reputable networks, providing access to a wide range of affiliates. A bonus is when an agency is network-agnostic and choose the right network based on their clients’ unique needs.

Common Mistakes When Hiring an Affiliate Management Agency

Here are some common mistakes that come up when evaluating a partnership with an affiliate management agency:

Choosing a one-man/one-woman show

For powerhouse brands and high growth businesses, relationships are key. Having an experienced team behind you with years of relationship-building on the publisher side means faster onboarding of new partners, and better access to promotional advantages

Relying on agencies where affiliate is an add-on, not an area of specialization

No doubt, the affiliate landscape has been expanding over the years, and everyone wants to get in on the fun. But as the veterans know, affiliate is not a set-it and forget-it channel. Learning from in-market performance across industries meaning a specialized affiliate agency is best qualified to guide you to the most productive opportunities for affiliate ROI.

Avoid the Incrementality guessing game

As anyone in the affiliate space knows, measuring true incremental revenue from affiliate marketing programs is harder than it looks. Network data often conflicts with internal data sets. Commissioning based on typical measures of attribution are often just plain wrong. Choosing partners based on instinct means brand often turn away from the highest performing opportunities at hand. Make sure your affiliate management agency has water-tight technology to help you spend where resources truly drive incremental revenue.

Advantages of Working with an Affiliate Management Agency

In the performance marketing world, agencies only succeed if the client succeeds. Many affiliate agencies will have some performance-incentive (PI) component. This translates into a dedicated team doing everything they can to help their client thrive.

The advantages organizations see with agency management are not to be underestimated. An agency can help in the following ways.

1. Leverage Strong Affiliate Relationships and Network Connections

Agencies have a wide net of partnerships that give their clients a great advantage. This is done by identifying and recruiting the right affiliates and negotiating the best rates.

Affiliate marketing agencies have cultivated thousands of partnerships and connections with affiliates, publishers, and other content creators. A diverse portfolio helps maximize results at every stage of the customer journey, reaches a larger audience, and broadens revenue streams. An in-house team would have to start scratch and need to build connections over several years. Even the most connected in-house managers would be unable to match the level of reach an agency has at its disposal. 

For example, PartnerCentric touts thousands of partnerships and knows how to leverage those relationships to help position organizations at a favorable advantage. Because agencies have these existing relationships, they are uniquely qualified to negotiate the best rates.

Another advantage is the agency’s network connections. Affiliate marketing agencies can have relationships with several network platforms. This means they are not tied down to any one platform the way an in-house team would be. For example, PartnerCentric works with over 16 different networks globally. We have earned the coveted Preferred Agency distinction with some of the largest networks, such as CJ Affiliate, Impact and Awin. For this reason, partnering with the right agency with the right relationships is one of the many benefits of working with an agency.

2. Affiliate Marketing Agencies have Access to Historical Data

Good agencies have years of experience in the affiliate marketing space. Which means they have access to historical data. Agencies have benchmark data on every affiliate partner, client vertical, and paid placement opportunity. An in-house team is unable to reference such benchmarks. Benchmark data is used to optimize partner conversion rates, improve Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) and negotiate lower-cost paid placements.

3. Affiliate Marketing Agencies have Expert Affiliate Managers

Affiliate marketing is a competitive landscape, and expert knowledge is a must. Hiring an untrained affiliate manager to run an in-house affiliate program is a recipe for disaster. Or hiring an agency that claims to do affiliate marketing as part of a larger digital marketing mix can be dangerous because getting affiliate marketing right requires specific skill sets and expertise.

Agencies offer a robust team that invests time and energy into maximizing the client’s affiliate program. A desirable affiliate marketing agency will have seasoned account managers that have seen the space evolve and have evolved right along with it. They know what it takes to succeed and understand that it’s often a team effort driven by research, data, insights, and tech.

Is PartnerCentric the Right Affiliate Marketing Agency for You?

There are many ways to work with an affiliate management agency. At PartnerCentric, our clients benefit from the expertise of each of our functional departments to solidify the strongest affiliate strategy based on specific company revenue goals and expectations. With access to PartnerCentric’s proprietary technologies our teams evaluate the most promising partner relationships for incremental growth and return on investment while protecting margin on marketing spend. We partner with most brands in a standard retainer arrangement, combined with performance incentives, and all PartnerCentric clients have the option to access to our FUSETM Precision technology that reveals incrementatlity data across the marketing mix.

If you already have an in-house team that is effectively managing complex publisher partner relationships and accurate commissioning arrangements with any Network, you can join the growing group of PartnerCentric tech-only clients who have access to FUSETM, independent of our premium service offering. PartnerCentric offers immediate expertise, faster launch, and higher ROI. If this is something you’d like to learn more about, please get in touch.

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