There’s never a bad time for anyone involved in the world of affiliate marketing to start putting together their best possible marketing campaign and get ready to take advantage of the next major sales push. Given that the pandemic will almost certainly boost online sales using American Express and other cards, that means that there are more opportunities open than ever before for profits to be made via holiday marketing.
The right marketing campaign, in the hands of the right affiliates, can make a huge difference to your business. However, it’s not always easy to know how to craft the perfect marketing campaign, and how to implement it to the best of your abilities. That’s why we’re going to run down some of the best affiliate marketing campaign hints and strategies for the coming month.
Reliable Partners Make for a Reliable Marketing Campaign
The first thing to say is, for best results in a marketing campaign, pick business partners that you have a solid working history with. As a merchant, that means ensuring that you work with affiliate marketers that you know are capable of bringing in leads, and making effective marketing campaign decisions that have a concrete effect on your business. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re going to want to work with companies whose product you see a definite value in.
There’s no point offering to partner with a company who does not look set to do especially well during the promotional period. It’s essential that both merchant and marketer are up to each other’s standards. Otherwise, both marketing campaign and the product itself can easily go to waste.
Read more on the Top 10 Affiliate Programs.
Influencer Marketing Is Growing in the Gaming Industry
You may not realize just how widespread the gaming industry is these days. But when you consider that just about everyone has at least one game downloaded on their phone, you can see just how ubiquitous gaming is today. It’s also a level playing field, with men outnumbering women by only 10%. That makes it an ideal platform for investment in, in terms of new marketing strategy trends.
Influencer marketing campaigns take advantage of two major platforms, Twitch and YouTube Gaming, to bring an audience towards games-related content. Gaming influencers are an effective marketing campaign at the moment, especially considering the increased traffic these sites have been seeing during the pandemic. They push everything from new technology to £5 deposit bonus offers, and are set to become one of the biggest new marketing trends of the coming year.
Make Sure You Have a Marketing Campaign Strategy Planned in Advance
It’s essential that you have everything set up and ready to go for your marketing campaign a long way in advance. This means ensuring that you’ve already communicated in detail with your affiliates, letting them know exactly what’s on offer in your marketing campaign, and how far you’re willing to adjust things. Without these kinds of guidelines set down in advance, it makes it very difficult to put together an effective marketing campaign.
If your affiliates, or your merchant, are flexible when it comes to marketing campaign decisions, it makes it much easier to make any necessary adjustments during the campaign. It’s highly likely that you will want to change your marketing campaign over the course of time, and by setting down acceptable parameters and ensuring everyone understands each other, it makes it far easier to make marketing campaign changes on the go.
Promotions Require Collaboration Between Merchants and Affiliates
It goes without saying that pretty much every marketing campaign utilizes some kind of promotion to keep customers interested. As we’ve said, it’s crucial during such a campaign that the results and profits are constantly monitored. If you or your affiliates put in place a marketing campaign that isn’t getting the desired results, you need to be ready to drop it if necessary, or work out a more effective marketing campaign to run in tandem. If, on the other hand, your marketing campaign is showing definite results, you may want to consider continuing it for a week further. The best marketing campaign strategies are a result of collaboration between merchant and affiliate marketer, and both parties should ideally have some suggestions to bring to the table.
Rewards Can Motivate Affiliates to Succeed
As a merchant, you’re going to want to get the absolute best you can out of your affiliates during a marketing campaign. That means that, while working out your own successful marketing campaign strategies, you’re probably also going to want to offer some kind of extra reward to your affiliates. This is where contests come in. By creating a leaderboard for your affiliate marketing campaign, and the opportunity to get a reward at the end of the campaign period, you can motivate them to push your products even further.
With the right marketing campaign approach, you can expect to bring in some pretty hefty profits. As a result, it’s also a period where you’re going to want to balance the potential rewards you can offer affiliates, against the extra business they’re likely to bring in. Obviously a marketing budget balance needs to be found, but with the right marketing campaign, there’s no doubt that your company will make back by the end of the season any rewards it invested in at the beginning.
Intelligence Tools Can Give the Most Detailed Insights Possible
Artificial intelligence tools are steadily becoming the industry standard. These programs can give you a detailed insight into what’s working for your competitors, telling you just about everything there is to know about their marketing campaign data. They can provide you with successful lander templates, show you what products are trending in real-time, keep you updated on any new marketing campaign insights, and basically put you a step ahead of your competition.
If you’re an affiliate marketer looking to get an advantage over your industry, intelligence tools are worth considering for a marketing campaign. While they are not cheap on annual subscription, they are shown to give affiliates a real boost. They’re also available in a multitude of different forms, meaning that you can focus on specific industries and markets depending on what your specialty is. While an intelligence tool is by no means essential for creating a reliable marketing campaign, it can nevertheless make a massive difference to the choices you make in the course of your marketing campaign.
Spread Your Messages Across a Range of Different Channels
Whether you’re a merchant or an affiliate, you’re going to want to use every single weapon in your industry to get across the message of your latest marketing campaign to your customer base. That means utilizing available marketing campaign channels to the best of your advantage. However, that doesn’t mean spreading your marketing campaign equally across all channels. For instance, current research shows that Facebook is now being used by more over-65s than ever before, while Instagram is showing record rises in the numbers of subscribers. That means that, if your marketing campaign is targeted at an older customer base, Facebook might be an ideal channel by which to reach them. However, if you’re aiming for younger customers, you should be focusing your marketing campaign more on a channel such as Instagram.
SEO Is as Important as Ever
Search engine optimization remains your best friend when it comes to pushing products for a marketing campaign. Obviously, you can benefit from ensuring that your site copy makes use of relevant keywords in content marketing, helping push you to the top of search results. But you should also consider how you list your actual products. Using effective keywords in item descriptions can help boost their place in search results. This successful holiday marketing campaign strategy works for gifts, but also the many other items needed for specific holiday periods: homeware, lighting, decorations and more. You’d be surprised at the number of items that, once relisted, can benefit from a SEO boost.
Pinpoint the Year’s Most Profitable Purchases
You need to ensure your marketing campaign is focused on the next major trending products. As we’ve already pointed out, affiliate marketing sales intelligence tools can go some way to showing you what the current trends are. But you’re going to want to stay an even further step ahead. Market intelligence tools are good for showing trends, but you need to have a really solid insight to understand what the likely hit products of 2021 will be.
A little research can go a long way in this regard, and you should ensure that you put some amount of time into finding out what seems like a good bet for a marketing campaign this year. Given the ongoing pandemic, the market could prove surprisingly fertile. For instance, puzzles, yoga and kitchen purchases have all proven to be unexpected success stories in the last year and a half. If you can stay ahead of these kinds of trends, you can put together the most sophisticated marketing campaign possible.
Mobile Optimization Is a Necessity Rather Than an Option
It may seem obvious, but we feel like it’s worth reminding you: you need to ensure complete mobile optimization if you want to see success from a marketing campaign. This doesn’t just mean ensuring that your site can be used on mobile. It means making the most out of the platform. The best mobile sites use a range of tools and techniques that optimize the user experience, making them far more likely to spend time on your site and invest in products.
In recent years, graphic and animation innovation have been a major feature in web development, and are a particularly effective marketing campaign on mobile. If you present the user with a simple but imaginative mobile site, utilizing the scroll feature, customizing the background, and providing tools to easily navigate your site, you’re far more likely to see success from a marketing campaign.
Email is Still the Best Tool for an Affiliate Marketing Campaign
While we’ve mentioned the importance of using social media in your online marketing campaign, it’s still crucial that you don’t neglect email. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of reaching out to your customer base. It’s also an opportunity to set up an organic connection between you and them, especially when personalized. AI software is now being used to create personalized emails for an entire mailing list, taking into account purchase history, geolocation, age, gender and more. Both marketer and customer surveys speak to the success of personalized emails.
By making a customer feel like a valued individual, rather than an address on a list, you’re far more likely to get their attention, and as a result to increase your conversion rate from a marketing campaign. The other important thing to mention with an email marketing campaign is that you need to be persistent, to some degree. It’s not enough to settle for a single email letting customers know about your marketing campaign. You need to send follow-ups, reminders, and a last-chance call to let them know your marketing campaign promotion is about to come to an end. And, if your marketing campaign is working well, it’s worth considering extending an offer, and letting customers know.
Previous Successes May Offer Insights for Your Next Campaign
While the world may be going through extraordinary times, that doesn’t mean that a successful marketing campaign from a previous year can’t provide you with some reliable techniques for this year. While trends do obviously change from year to year, and no marketing campaign is going to be exactly the same as any other, online sales have certain dynamics that never change.
There’s always an opportunity to be had with a reliable marketing campaign, and you may find that year on year, you see greater returns on certain products than others. While it’s essential that any marketing campaign is tailored to current circumstances, if you review the tactics you used in previous successful years, you can find new ways of applying them this year.
Stagger Your Marketing Campaign in the Run-Up to Its Final Period
We’ve talked about the importance of planning your marketing campaign strategy far in advance. However, this doesn’t simply mean coming up with some effective promotions, and having them ready to for the entire promotion period. It’s crucial that you consider which products you’re going to push in your marketing campaign, and when. For example, if you’re offering highly customizable items, which may take some amount to prepare for shipping, you’ll need to bear it in mind. You should ensure that you heavily promote these kinds of products in the lead up to the promotion period, ensuring that people have plenty of time to become familiar with them and take an interest in purchasing.
Conclusion
A marketing campaign is one of the most reliable tools you have for bringing in profits. But as we’ve seen, a lot needs to be taken into consideration for a successful marketing campaign. The above are some of the best tips and strategies for crafting a reliable marketing campaign strategy, and getting a head start on your competition. As we’ve pointed out, the best possible affiliate marketing campaign relies on two things: careful planning, and adaptability. By putting in the work beforehand, you can ensure that you have a dynamic affiliate marketing campaign that can change according to new developments. By adapting your promotions on the fly, you can ensure that your marketing campaign remains effective all the way up to its conclusion.
Any predictions for the most successful marketing campaign strategies of the year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
About the Author
Thomas Glare is a freelance blogger. Through his extensive research, he has written many articles and blog posts about digital marketing and how to yield results in a short period. Thomas spends time interacting with important stakeholders in the marketing sector to get first-hand information.
