The Ultimate Business Guide to Influencer Affiliate Marketing

Have you made a TikTok yet? Set up a business chatbot? Looked into using Artificial Intelligence? The growth rule for businesses persists: adapt or get left behind.

Digital marketing is constantly evolving with the introduction of new technologies, changing audience behaviors, and the social media revolution. Business owners know more than anyone that unless we adapt our strategies to the times, we’ll fall behind as competitors capture our audiences’ attention.

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One form of adaptation is influencer affiliate marketing. Have you ever noticed your favorite fitness guru talking her audience’s ears off about her new workout pants? Or a chef gushing about his top choice for panini presses and blenders? Both scenarios are examples of influencer affiliate marketing. For every niche, there are a plethora of influencers — and with every influencer, a marketing opportunity for a business.

Let’s cover everything you need to know about influencer affiliate marketing, including how to use data to your advantage, how to pick the right influencer affiliate for your business, and how to recruit your top choices.

What is influencer affiliate marketing?

Before we get into that, let’s start with the basics. What is affiliate marketing in general? Well, affiliate marketing has its roots in simple “referral marketing”, which is essentially when someone brings customers to a new business, and they’re rewarded — either with payment, discounts, or some other incentive.

Influencer affiliate marketing entails a business forming a partnership with an influencer to promote its products or services. It’s a type of affiliate marketing program. Influencers are essentially content creators with a target audience.

In return, influencers receive a commission based on how many purchases they propel for that business with their marketing. That commission appears in two different models:

• Pay-per-click, which offers the influencer a small commission for every customer that visits a business’s website.
• Cost per acquisition, which offers the influencer a percentage commission of each purchase that stems from their marketing.

Trackable affiliate links show both parties just how many people make purchases or visit a business’s website through the influencer’s direction and promotion. Then, based on the conversion rate and agreed-upon commission rate, both parties know what the payment should be.

Experts predict that the market spend for affiliate marketing in the U.S. will grow to over $8 billion in 2022. Businesses have caught on to the wave of influencer affiliate marketing campaigns, with 81% of brands working with influencer affiliates to promote their products and services.

But how does an affiliate influencer promote a business exactly? Being a social media influencer is one method, with 68% of affiliate influencers creating content on social media platforms to promote businesses. Becoming a blogger is another popular route, as close to 65% of affiliates use blogging and content marketing to promote businesses.

Let’s take a look at some of the tangible benefits of affiliate influencer marketing.

Why include influencers in an affiliate program?

Gain access to a new generation of customers

An entire generation relies on influencers for entertainment and information — Gen Z. This young audience is picky with their purchases, but trusts the judgment and taste of the influencers they follow.

Save time in seeking new customers

Influencers have prime access to a business’s desired audience. Through influencer affiliate marketing, an influencer with 500,000 followers gives a business access to the mobile devices of 500,000 potential customers that are already interested in that business’s field.

Engage with an audience that already trusts the influencer

Influencers make it their day-to-day job to capture their audience’s attention with carefully curated content. They often have strong relationships with their followers and can offer 360-degree promotion of a brand’s products and services.

What other advertising model lets you promote your brand with personal testimonials, live demonstrations, and calls to action to an audience that chooses to watch on their own mobile devices?

An influencer, or popular affiliate, won’t just add a marketing tagline or sponsor note to your product. As trusted industry experts or enthusiasts, influencers can use credible rhetoric to convince your audience of your product or service’s effectiveness. Plus, the marketing feels more authentic and engaging to an audience that already trusts the influencer.

Who can resist? Businesses leverage the already-established audience of an influencer affiliate to find more customers. Influencer affiliates gain passive income that increases with strong performance. With little to no investment and potential profits for both businesses and influencers, influencer affiliate marketing is a win-win situation.

Can businesses pick just any influencer for this kind of marketing? Certainly not. Luckily, there are things to look out for and technological tools to guide your selection for an influencer affiliate.

How to use data to choose the influencers best for you

You can’t just trust just any influencer with the important task of promoting your business. Not all influencers will offer you the same value, and some even have the power to cause damage if they’re not the right fit.

Here are some tips for using data to help you grow a highly effective targeted influencer network for your marketing:

Take a close look at an influencer affiliate’s followers

These days it’s easy to purchase followers if you don’t want to put in the time to capture them organically. Many influencers do this, sometimes with success. But other times, they don’t have quality followers. Before adding an influencer to your marketing program, ensure they have your desired audience by looking closely at their followers.

You can identify junk followers from inactive accounts and unrelated comments on the influencer’s content. If 10 out of 11 comments on their social media posts say things like “Message me to make $5,000 in a week” or “Follow me for naughty content:” run far away!

Of course, sifting through followers can take up a lot of precious time. Luckily, tools like Followerwonk help analyze followers on various social media channels for free!

Related reading: Finding YouTube Influencers for Your Business

Examine engagement rate and patterns

Followers aren’t your saving grace for affiliate influencer marketing. In fact, followers don’t matter at all unless they regularly engage with your influencer’s content.

Does the influencer have a lot of likes and engaging content? Do they receive frequent replies and reactions to their stories? Do their followers regularly save (bookmark) and share their content? These are all things that go into engagement rate and quality.

Influencer marketing analysis software helps you analyze engagement quickly and effectively. Klear, for example, analyzes daily social media interactions on an influencer’s profile to provide unique data about engagement quality.

Be wary of competitors

The last thing you want is to pay or incentivize an influencer to market your product while they simultaneously promote your competitors. In this case, the audience will be vulnerable to your competitors and you won’t experience the same value. Either steer clear of these affiliates or offer them a deal to encourage them to switch and exclusively market your business.

Vet content for tone and resonance before outreach and campaign building

Influencers all have unique styles and their own brand values. The influencer affiliate you choose should be as consistent with your own brand values and style as possible.

How? Simple. Consume their content. Then analyze its compatibility with your business before moving forward with outreach or campaign building. Tools like Dovetail analyze raw customer research data to help you assess the effectiveness of a certain strategy or type of content.

Even after you’ve signed on an influencer, take a good look at the content they’re creating for your brand before they go public. Make sure the tone and style resonate with your business, goals, and desired audience.

Use Similarweb to evaluate potential affiliates

Our Affiliate Research tool set, part of Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence, gives you a comprehensive overview for any potential affiliate’s domain. This in-depth analysis of the selected affiliate site provides you with all the intel you need to understand whether they’re the right fit for your partner strategy.

Be sure to review the marketing channels sending traffic to their site as well to see if it aligns with your own strategy. Take a deeper look at their website traffic and engagement profile to reveal how audiences are engaging on their site and what devices they’re using to visit the site. What does the trend of their visitor numbers look like? Understand how their traffic fluctuates over any given period. Also check out the search terms they’re optimizing for or bidding on – so you can grasp whether they have a mix of paid and organic tactics to maintain traffic numbers as well as much more.

It’s important to look at the above website metrics and insights over time. If you can see stability and growth in those traffic metrics, that’s a great baseline for a good affiliate partner.

The Outgoing Traffic feature also provides a clear understanding on the quality of the referral traffic you’re going to be receiving, as well as who else the potential affiliate is sending traffic too – you may see a few familiar faces in there in terms of your competition – giving you an understanding of how they engage with them as affiliate partners too.

How to recruit influencers as affiliates

Make it easy for them

As a business owner, you might already have a wealth of content that your influencer affiliate can use. Whether it’s Instagram video reels or careful research positioned into a draft Facebook post, share it with your influencer affiliate. As long as the content aligns with your affiliate influencer’s brand, they’ll be happy to share it and welcome the time saved!

Of course, offer them windows to promote their own goals and branding into your content as well. Providing them with your own content isn’t a set-in-stone template for their content; however, it’s a helpful tool to make promoting your brand as profitable and time-effective as possible for the influencer.

Promote their brand

Remember the win-win scenario we mentioned that’s common for affiliate influencer marketing? Add another win for your influencer affiliate at no cost to you by promoting their brand. For example, you might offer them a dedicated page on your website, publish a blog post about them, or promote them on your business’s social media pages.

Reward your best influencer affiliates

Some influencers will be more helpful to your business than others. Reward them accordingly and let them know how special they are.

For example, you might consider offering a quality influencer a promo code for an extra 10% in your referral rate than you’d usually offer. Reserve this discount for only the best influencers — ones with strongly established brands, mass-quality followings, and a history of experience and success with affiliate marketing.

To sum it up

Affiliate influencer marketing gives your business a wealth of opportunities for audience engagement, brand awareness, and sales generation. And luckily for businesses, advanced technology and innovation offers us countless tools to make data-driven decisions about affiliate marketing strategies.

by Similarweb