Written by Mike Balducci, General Manager, Affiliates, E-Commerce and Payment Solutions
Written by Mike Balducci, General Manager, Affiliates, E-Commerce and Payment Solutions
To find the best influencers for your affiliate marketing program, look for posting frequency and links rather than likes and followers, says Mike Balducci, CreatorIQ general manager of affiliate, e-commerce and payment solutions. say.
The rapid growth in e-commerce that occurred during the pandemic is over.
After enjoying growth rates of over 20% for more than five years, e-commerce activity is returning to normal and is expected to dip into single digits due to the return to brick-and-mortar stores post-pandemic and overall economic conditions. I am. Decrease in discretionary spending due to recession.
As a result, marketers from all walks of life are under pressure to deliver results that translate into revenue, what some are calling “performance marketing.” In the creator-led marketing space, this means expanding the goal of creator-led campaigns from general awareness to lower-funnel results, specifically sales.
creator can help
One tactic that's gaining traction is integrating creator-driven campaigns with affiliate marketing programs, leveraging publisher partners who can promote branded products and earn sales commissions as a result. Our recent trends report shows that 69% of brands include discount codes or other affiliate links in connection with their collaborations with influencers, and 84% find this very or somewhat successful. It turns out that this strategy is considered to be
So, while brand awareness always plays a key role and drives tangible value, to justify investment in creator-led campaigns, it is important to have direct correlation to performance outcomes such as ROAS and sales and revenue. More metrics are needed, including other metrics.
Additionally, social commerce is expected to pose significant challenges to traditional e-commerce channels. Accenture's January 2022 report predicts that the global social commerce industry will triple in e-commerce, from $492 billion in 2021 to $1.2 trillion by 2025. It is predicted that it can grow rapidly. That growth is being driven by Gen Z, his primary audience for creator-led campaigns, and his 2020. Millennials — the same report says they will account for 62% of social commerce spending worldwide by 2025.
more fans than followers
But what's driving these trends are still organic, authentic experiences produced by creators with loyal and engaged followings. This reality is shaping how brands run creator-driven affiliate campaigns.
For example, brands have historically evaluated creator partners based on their content and number of followers. However, when examining the results of successful creator-led affiliate campaigns, that is no longer the primary metric for evaluating potential creator partners. When it comes to affiliate creator partnerships, other social media metrics have a stronger correlation to sales results.
Our data consistently shows that the smaller the number of followers, the more influence creators have over their audience and the more likely their associated affiliate campaigns will be successful. Put another way, she with millions of followers would rather work with one mega-influencer than he with 1/10th the following of hers would work with 100 influencers. , ultimately resulting in fewer clicks on your affiliate links. The smaller the creator, the better the affiliate's ability to perform as a publisher.
We're talking absolute numbers here, not relative to total followers. Some top performing creators fall into the nano category with less than 10,000 followers. They generate tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales results through affiliate partnerships. They may not have the most followers, but they frequently produce video content that goes viral on Instagram and TikTok. And the more frequency and reach your videos have on those platforms, the more sales results you'll get.
Links that go beyond likes
Digging deeper into the social metrics of top-performing affiliate influencers across our platforms, we found some other surprising results. The average number of likes and comments a creator receives on their posts is usually not the most important factor in an affiliate's performance. More importantly, the creators are willing to collaborate with brands, as evidenced by the number of recent posts and past posts.
Most traditional influencer marketers are quick to pass on creator profiles that have a lot of recent posts with a few sponsored posts, but the engagement rate is very low. But content and link posting frequency are a bigger indicator of affiliate performance than follower count, likes, and comments, so this is exactly the type of high-level affiliate marketer that affiliate marketers should be inviting to their affiliate creator programs. It could be a performance creator profile.
What this means for brands driving affiliate creator campaigns is a powerful influencer discovery tool that helps you manage and partner with hundreds, if not thousands, of creators at once based on an affiliate partnership model. This means that we need to work together.
This requires a lot of things.
Transparency and integration
First, you need the ability to integrate your creator management platform with your affiliate marketing platform to ensure consistent tracking between them. Tracking clicks and sales is great, but to scale and replicate that success, you need a detailed understanding of what's driving sales and clicks. The only way to achieve that is to own and operate a complete end-to-end affiliate/creator network yourself.
Affiliate platforms let you know which creators have made what sales, so you know who to pay commissions to. But beyond that, we don't know. If all you do is track sales, you're not learning much about how sales are achieved.
To see the big picture, full funnel, affiliate and creator platforms need to be integrated. See what social media activity is driving conversion results by seeing what creators are doing on different social platforms, how they're promoting their content, and tracking the results of that activity. You can get a broader understanding.
It combines upstream activity such as social media activity, publication, reach, frequency, and awareness of a creator's content with a downstream view of clicks, sales, and performance. It's complete transparency.
Find and manage creator partners
Second, it means leveraging the intelligence from these integrated platforms to discover and recruit more creators into your affiliate efforts. Once you've identified the creators and content that drive sales, you can use our Creator Discovery tool to find other creators with similar audience and social profile characteristics to recruit into your Affiliate Creator program. Masu.
Remember, it's a volume game. Working with 100 nano-influencers instead of one mega-influencer requires more searching, discovery, and management, but as the numbers show, the effort pays off. The more creators that participate in the program, the better the results.
But competition will intensify. Recruiting creators is similar to acquiring customers. They only work with a few brands that they love and use every day. Many, if not most, nanocreators have hobbies. Although they have a loyal following, they are not professional publishers, and certainly not professional affiliate marketers.
They are not part of an affiliate network, are not looking for brands to work with, and are unlikely to be successful if they try. There are too many unfamiliar questions and the interface is confusing. They don’t know how to find and work with brands within an affiliate network environment.
Integrating your affiliate network with a creator management platform built with a creator-first mindset not only reduces this friction, but also provides a better experience for brands, creators, and ultimately, customers. It simplifies and centralizes all the technology components needed to successfully run a creator marketing program toward performance goals, giving brands an easy way to measure and validate creator marketing and increase the number of creators they work with. .
