Companies regularly seek to expand their boundaries into uncharted territories, but significant growth doesn’t require a complete brand redesign. For some companies, reinvigoration can come through the implementation of smart marketing techniques — one of these is affiliate marketing.
Traditional methods of marketing no longer work like they once did: Physical advertising, from billboards to product posters, doesn’t carry the same weight as it did many decades ago. As the digital age has continued to progress, marketing has similarly needed to undergo its own sort of progress. The modern age has required marketers to jump on the digital bandwagon to reap success.
Social media has made it easier than ever to interact and communicate with people from around the world. To better get in touch with these people, it’s worth using social media and other techniques to get viewers for your material.
What Is an Enterprise Business?
Enterprise businesses, at their core, are businesses focused on continued growth. They are businesses settled within a niche, creating the best products with the largest, strongest team available to them. They are committed to the expansion and are regularly aiming to achieve more success with each quarter, developing strategies to make continued waves within the marketplace.
Notable Enterprise Businesses
An electronics expert, Siemens has been making specialized technology for many, many decades now. Known for its ability to craft specially made products for any industry, Siemens is a well-known name for any business requiring electronics assistance.
Microsoft is well-known for its in-home computers, but they’re best known for the software they sell to other enterprise businesses. Its business and tools division is the primary area where the real money is made, creating incredible amounts of revenue and profit.
Another all-around company, Oracle is known as a data management enterprise. In the past decade, they’ve become regarded for the private clouds they offer to users and other enterprises, allowing for massive amounts of data to be stored away safely. From disks to storage to software, IBM is one of the most premier enterprise businesses, with expertise applied across the technological space.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is most concerned with creating relationships with customers. How that is maintained is different from the marketing strategies of the past. Affiliate marketing now utilizes the best of modern-day technology to connect enterprise businesses directly with their intended audience, all while offering the ability to track the efficiency of such programs.
When considering an affiliate marketing strategy, there are a few different aspects that go into the process: the merchant, the affiliate, and the audience member. As an enterprise business, you sit in the place of the merchant — the business sharing and selling its brand, products, and services through representative marketing techniques.
Affiliates for your brand can include the likes of another business or one of many different social media influencers. These people can effectively market your brand to others via numerous channels and mediums, from video streaming to Tweets to Instagram stories. By sharing your brand with their audience, they’re helping to extend your business’s reach, all while hoping to increase engagement with your company’s store.
Utilizing Affiliate Marketing Software
To get your enterprise business’s affiliate marketing strategy off the ground, you need to have a basis to work from. While some businesses decide to create their own affiliate tracking platform, it can be a complicated process from the start. Yet your business doesn’t have to go through a difficult startup; affiliate marketing software is designed to make creating your affiliate strategies easier than ever.
Refersion’s affiliate tracking platform is made with enterprise businesses in mind, helping to craft affiliate strategies with absolute ease. Rather than worrying about creating your own platform, you’re provided with high-performance tools that allow your enterprise business to effectively track the efficiency of your affiliate program, from managing affiliates to analyzing customer engagement and conversions.
Getting Started
The best benefit of crafting an affiliate marketing strategy is that the startup process is relatively inexpensive. The most work your company is required to do is spend time creating and fine-tuning your strategy. With reliable affiliate tracking software, you can begin while already having your feet grounded beneath you, making it easy to set aside time to begin finding and onboarding affiliates.
Outbound Marketing Without the Stress
One of the best parts about having an affiliate marketing strategy in place is that it takes most of the marketing stress out of your hands. By having a team of contractual affiliates, you’re receiving a team full of influencers and brand representatives who effectively speak volumes about your brand to their own audiences.
Yet, while you’re putting much of the work in their hands, you’ll still need to take the time to ensure your affiliates are prepared for success. Whether you decide to craft an onboarding training session for each affiliate, offer regular “office hours” to answer any of their pertinent questions, or creating marketing materials they can share with their own audience, you can give them the tools needed to successfully market your enterprise business to their viewers.
1. Letting Your Affiliates Run the Show
Just as your company may hire freelance writers, editors, and contractors to help get certain projects to completion, you can utilize your affiliates as customer service representatives. While they won’t be able to answer specific questions about your business, from questions concerning the status of orders to internal processes, they can give an idea about what your brand and what its products and services stand for.
While promoting a product of your enterprise business, they should understand your product and brand inside and out. To do so, it’s important that you provide them with all of the necessary information to do just that.
You wouldn’t allow any internal employee to talk about your business without knowing how it works both inside and out, so you shouldn’t allow an affiliate to do the same. While you want them to stay true to their own language and personality, it’s important that you provide them with some informative guardrails so they can present your products and services in the most knowledgeable, enticing light.
2. Starting Your Enterprise Affiliate Marketing Strategy
- Getting affiliate tracking software
As mentioned previously, while your enterprise business can go about creating its own internal affiliate tracking software, it’s a lot of unnecessary work that might not be as effective as you may think. Relying on trusted affiliate marketing software can help to get your company’s strategy off the ground with little work, allowing your business to begin approaching, hiring, and utilizing affiliates without having to jump over too many hurdles.
Rather than burrowing yourself in the nitty-gritty of creating a piece of internal software, you can get your business off the ground and running, focusing on the high-detail facets of your affiliate strategy. Such fine-tuning will allow your business to focus on the overhead concerns of your affiliate planning, understanding where to focus your time, energy, and money.
- Making the most of your company’s website
Before your company can jump into crafting an affiliate marketing program and employing affiliate tracking software, you need to ensure all of your bases are covered first. For enterprise businesses looking to entice viewers to convert into long-term customers, you need to give them a good first impression.
While your affiliates can work to pair a sense of value with your brand and its products and services, a consumer has to be impressed by your website to truly be converted — a lackluster website will do very little to entice someone, and it may even cause them to leave in frustration.
Beyond just converting customers, you’ll also need to be able to entice potential affiliates. No one will want to represent a company with a website that is poorly managed and not updated for the modern age. To keep people interested in your website, you’ll want to work to make your site easy to use, navigate, and understand.
- Consider the help of fellow enterprises and influencers
While you’ll want to optimize your website and get a trusted affiliate tracking program to make the most of your enterprise’s affiliate marketing strategy, you’ll need to consider getting the best affiliates on your side. There are numerous ways to attract new affiliates to your network, but there are some trusted ways to do so. One of the best places to start is with past customers.
Anytime you make a sale, consider providing people with a follow-up prompt, emailed a month after purchase, to ask if they’d be interested in joining your brand. Not only are you utilizing people who know your business well, but you’re reaching out to past customers and instilling a sense of trust in them. By getting in touch with them, you’re telling them that you trust them with your brand, asking for them to provide their own expertise when enticing other people within their network to convert into customers of your enterprise business.
3. Affiliate Marketing Benefits for Your Enterprise Businesses
Affiliate marketing is all about creating interest in people, thanks to relying on the excitement, vigor, and honesty of fellow affiliates. You entice the affiliates to work at their hardest, and they, in turn, put in the effort to get their audience to your website to truly enrich your brand. So, why does this work? What makes affiliate marketing so beneficial to enterprise businesses?
- Making products and services emotional
Affiliates work diligently to help effectively present your enterprise business to their audiences. The way they achieve this is by presenting products in their own tone, aesthetic, and vision. One of the ways this resonates with audiences is through the focus on emotional value.
Audiences interact with an affiliate’s content for a specific reason, and that often relies on content that resonates emotionally. Whether it makes a person laugh, feel joy, or empathize with a person, emotionally resonant content can help capture the attention of a viewer, making them foster trust with the person creating the content.
Influencers presenting your products and services to their audience can utilize their own tone and aesthetic to entice people to check out your website. Whether your company sells software drivers, mountain climbing gear, or audio recording equipment, if an affiliate can elicit a genuine reaction out of a viewer while presenting your product, they’re bound to convert them into a trusted customer.
- Value with every post
Where some companies might rely on producing as much content as possible to increase potential engagement, your affiliates can work to produce valuable content through every post to entice more viewers to check out your website. The posts they create for their audience should aim to be genuine, focused on the value of your brand and how your products and services can enlighten their experience in life.
This goes beyond placing advertisements in a subway train station or posting ads to Twitter. Instead, you have a trusted individual sharing their opinion directly with their own niche audience, working to convince them that your business is worth their time, money, and faith.
- Onboarding your audience
Think of affiliate marketing as the first step to getting potential customers aware of your brand, as if you’re onboarding them with your enterprise business. Rather than just stumbling on your website, having a look around and deciding whether or not they want to purchase anything, these people are already aware of what you do, how it will value them, and why they should consider introducing it into their life. It’s a step ahead of any other marketing technique, making it easier for you to gain the trust of potential customers, all working toward increasing eventual brand engagement.
The Bottom Line
Selling your brand to potential customers is difficult, and there are many different ways to approach it. However, affiliate marketing makes that process a little easier. The addition of affiliate marketing software makes it even easier on your business, allowing you to fine-tune as you proceed, letting your business craft strategies to success.
