Full Guide to Affiliate Marketing for Small Businesses
Affiliate marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your business and test new products or marketing campaigns while sticking to tight budgets. This guide has been created in collaboration with our good friends at Awin.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is where someone markets services and is rewarded for doing so. It’s a great way to build brand awareness and drive new customers to a business.
There are so many options for affiliate marketing, it’s hard to know what’s most suited to you, your target audience, and your business. Your resources are probably tighter than that of a big business, so we know that a good return on your investment is crucial for most SMEs (small to medium-sized enterprises).
Parcel2Go helps 130,000 SMEs and business customers with their parcel delivery needs, and the support doesn’t stop there. In this guide, we’ll explain how you can be successful with affiliate marketing for your business.
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing For Small Businesses
Affiliate marketing can be incredibly valuable for small businesses as it provides a cost-effective way to drive traffic, even for those with limited resources and low budgets. Worldwide, over 84% of content publishers use affiliate marketing according to statistics provided by Influencer Marketing Hub.
While it still requires care and attention to make sure that affiliates are suitable for your business, the use of affiliate marketing can be scaled to suit your resources. Here are some of the main benefits for small businesses:
Targeted Traffic
Instead of casting a wide net, using affiliate marketing for your small business allows you to be specific about the type of people advertising your products or services and who they attract. Many publishers have very dedicated and loyal audiences who in turn are very likely to be interested in your business.
Grow Brand Awareness
We all know that online sales are vital to SMEs but brand awareness is also important for reaching new audiences. Perhaps your business provides a product or service that is only needed at a certain time. Though your advertising may not be running to that person at the exact right moment, strong brand awareness will bring customers back to you when they are ready to be a customer.
The digital world is also awash with advertising and content. Potential customers are being bombarded frequently so building an innate connection to your brand will help customers differentiate you from your competitors when it comes time to make a purchase.
Improved SEO
The more content being created and backlinks pointing toward your website, the more authority it will have in search engine rankings. Of course, if you have more prominent affiliates with a large audience and some search engine authority already established, this will hugely benefit your own business’ SEO.
Diversify Revenue Streams
It’s been said before and it’ll definitely be said again: don’t rely on one revenue stream or online marketing channel. Those who put their eggs in one basket put themselves at huge risk if that basket gets a few holes in it or breaks entirely.
By using affiliate marketing as one channel in your marketing strategy, you’re actually spreading a web across multiple streams, as each new affiliate will take their own approach to affiliate marketing for your business or brand.
Scale Your Business
We’ve already mentioned the cost-effective nature of affiliate marketing and how the pay per sale technique is extremely helpful when running a small business. But this factor spills over into scaling your business too. It allows you to test completely new audiences without the threat of losing all of your marketing budget. You can even use it to try new products, run tests for seasonal campaigns.
You can measure campaign success and gain feedback without the significant financial burden of a complete new marketing campaign.
Associative Trust
Trust is a must in marketing. According to a Nielsen study, over 90% of consumers said that they trust people in their network who they know and follow. The thing about trust is that it’s tricky to build and can take time. A handy shortcut is to use the existing trust that your publishers’ audience already has in them.
You’ll be able to build that rapport with new audiences much faster if you come highly recommended or promoted by someone that they trust.
Test Overseas Markets
Testing overseas markets can sometimes be complicated, or even costly for a small business. Perhaps you have a product or service you know could benefit that audience, but don’t understand the intricacies of the culture, or even just the basic difference in language. Using affiliate marketing for your business can strip away this complication.
Your publishers already have an established audience in that space so you can more comfortably launch your business with less risk.
And if you decide to branch out abroad and need to navigate tricky shipping requirements for international markets, our International Shipping Hub has a wealth of information for you.
Know the Cost From the Start
Some styles of digital marketing bidding systems will bid what the algorithm deems to be an appropriate amount for an ad placement, while others work on a cost-per-click basis. Both of these strategies can be successful but pose challenges for small businesses that can’t afford to see their marketing bill skyrocket based on an algorithm, without a more predictable return on investment.
Another benefit of using affiliate marketing for your business is that you are in control of the cost and you can set clear boundaries for what the cost of the campaign will be.
Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
For those with a small business where funds are often more restricted, it’s incredibly important to have at least some key indicators and a loose strategy in place.
Your affiliate marketing strategy should fall under the umbrella of a holistic marketing strategy. Having said this, many small businesses are turning away from traditional methods of marketing and focusing solely on utilising a digital marketing strategy.
Statistics show that 63% of companies said they felt their biggest challenge is to generate traffic and leads. With affiliate marketing, those clicks that you’re looking for can be generated by someone else, someone with an established audience in a space you’re looking to expand into. But you should put a plan in place that understands what kind of audience you’re hoping to reach, how you’d like your brand to be represented by other people and how you’ll measure your success.
Having a strong strategy in place keeps you in control too. You can determine what sort of content you’ll be providing to your publishers and create a certain framework about how you’d like the message to be put across. You can’t dictate everything, of course, but with a solid plan you can mould the affiliate programme that you think will work for you.
This also applies to how you’ll go about approving publishers to the programme. Will you approve every applicant and filter them after depending on their results? Or vet them as they apply to ensure control over who has access to your brand message? There are advantages with both approaches but you should really determine beforehand how you’ll be filtering this.
How Much Should You Spend on Affiliate Marketing?
While there is no specific amount that can guarantee affiliate marketing success, it is important to set a budget as a starting point. But from there, the focus should not be on how much, but how you can use that budget most effectively.
A popular approach is to consider the 80/20 rule for affiliate marketing - working on the basis that 80% of your sales will come from just 20% of your partners. By following this rule, you can optimise your approach to make significant improvements to ROI.
Can I Do Affiliate Marketing Without a Website?
Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to do affiliate marketing without a website. However, this is if you are hoping to become an affiliate. Affiliates sometimes choose to promote through email marketing, social media, video marketing, specialised voucher codes and other strategies.
As an advertiser, it’s extremely difficult to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign for your small business without a website for publishers to push their audience towards. It makes collecting the data for your campaign nearly impossible.
If you are sending customers to a website, think carefully about which page you want them to go to and what offers you want your publishers to push.
What is the Best Affiliate Marketing Programme For Small Businesses?
It’s important to do your research to find the best affiliate programme for you. At Parcel2Go, we recommend using an established affiliate marketing programme such as Awin, set up specifically for small businesses.
As a small business, you can join an affiliate network while creating and monitoring your deeplinks. Here you’ll select products or services to promote and create your own affiliate programme which will go out to a network of publishers. It may sound complicated, but Awin offers tutorials covering how to start affiliate marketing for your business and affiliate marketing guides to support each step.
Another more manual process would be to look for influencers based on your social media and reach out yourself. However this is much more time consuming and you may find it more reductive in terms of actually reaching people who wouldn’t normally see your business or your content.
Be Selective About Who You Work With
With a great affiliate marketing network, you can be very selective about who you allow to represent your brand, as it should always be your goal to find the best affiliate programme for your business. Though some advertisers choose to automatically approve any applicant to their programmes, others are very specific about the niches that prospective publishers operate in - their voice, brand and type of audience all come into play.
You can choose to work with publishers who have widespread and diverse audiences or perhaps those that are smaller but operate as ‘micro-influencers’ and have dedicated followers that suit your luxury or niche product or brand. It’s completely up to you. A good affiliate marketing programme will give you a range of options.
Why Use an Affiliate Marketing Programme
Small businesses have always seen success with word-of-mouth marketing, therefore using a small business affiliate marketing programme should be no different. Though this type of marketing can seem a little daunting or overwhelming to some, there are many reasons affiliate marketing works for small businesses and beginners.
Great ROI
Advertisers using an affiliate marketing programme like Awin typically see a larger return on investment - specifically a 13:1 ROI ratio on Awin. Many small businesses who get started with affiliate marketing soon start to see returns on their valuable marketing budget of £14 for every £1 spent.
Easy-to-Understand Data
Awin’s affiliate marketing network provides both publishers and advertisers with all the relevant data to analyse programme performance, including deeplinks. This way you can be as up to date as possible on the success of your campaign or alternatively know when it’s time to take on a new approach. It also means you can be clear on which publishers are working well for your business.
Only Pay For Performance
One of the great benefits of using affiliate marketing for your business’ growing success is, you don’t pay for an overall campaign (albeit targeted) and hope for the best. You can choose to only pay your publishers when their affiliate link is directly associated with a sale. For small businesses with smaller budgets, affiliate programmes are a particularly cost-effective approach to marketing. This doesn’t just mean you’ll pay per click or pay per view regardless of results, as you may be used to with social media advertising or Google Ads.
Providing a Low Barrier to Entry
Setting your small business up on an affiliate marketing network like Awin is simple, and with no set-up costs, relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing while still providing a great return on investment. It’s also far cheaper than hiring a marketing team, or an easy way to grow online sales with a smaller marketing team. You don’t have to be an expert in all things digital and with affiliate programs designed specifically for small businesses and beginners.
Becoming an Affiliate With Parcel2Go
If you’re interested in using affiliate marketing for your business, have you considered becoming an affiliate yourself?
With Parcel2Go’s brand ambassador programme, you could become an affiliate and enjoy up to 10% commissions for every new customer you generate. That’s in addition to us topping up your Parcel2Go account with funds so you can save money on shipping while offering your customers and followers exclusive discounts and rewards.
We work with Awin so that you can join their affiliate programme as a publisher - at that point, you’ll get £3 cashback for every new customer you bring to Parcel2Go.
