Affiliates large and small, they all have their ‘edge’ and they can work for you, just give them a reason to! Dan’s affiliate war scenario!
I enjoy strategy type games so ill use battle scenario as an example, not sure why, its just feels appropriate! Lets say the merchants search agency is a piece of artillery. Its big and can have a devastating blow. A campaign can be loaded in and money thrown at it, thousands wasted because its only reviewed on a weekly, monthly or cost basis. But it can take ages to set up, manoeuvre into place and fire.
A search affiliate using their own money is more like some sort of half track tank, they can get a campaign live within an hour, their ads showing any sending traffic. If its not working they can have the campaign turned off and be looking at another angle before the artillery has even begun its campaign, never mind given a cooling off period after its done to analyse the results. What’s always amazed me is the speed that affiliate can work at and how quickly they can generate results.
Another example is the cross sell. An affiliate is freelance and can do pretty much what they want, which includes using complimentary merchant offers to get the sale. Recently one of the budget airlines had a sale on several of their routes, cheap flights always attract a lot of people to these routes as generally the flight can be the most expensive part of the holiday. An affiliate of ours was on this like a shot, while our artillery was stuck in a marsh somewhere wondering how to push an area without promoting another company the affiliate had moved in, campaign live, traffic in and sales in their account. A merchant can, but cant really promote another company on their site without complications, an affiliate can.
So a quick overview of affiliate pro’s:
- They are fast, very fast. They can responded to incentives and offers quicker than a traditional marketing person could imagine.
- Flexible, if it can be done an affiliate will find a way to do it.
- Effective, an affiliate makes things work because they need to. While an agency might see it as ‘another campaign’ an affiliate see’s it as next years holiday, the mortgage payment, kids college fund etc
