If you can’t decide what air conditioner to choose, obviously you will use Google search. You will find an article having a rating of the best air conditioners with the links in search results and order one of them. Such articles make things easy for the consumers and promote certain products.
If this sounds familiar, then you already know what affiliate marketing is and how it works. Let’s discuss this in detail.
Affiliate marketing is a perfect tool for those who don’t want to invest a lot of time, effort and money in advertising. It will attract customers and increase sales due to the partnership strategy. Since the affiliates are paid only after getting a certain result, this method will save your advertising budget.
Field service engineering websites have unique specific features that should be considered when developing a strategy and choosing affiliates. It is important to choose effective marketing channels: thematic websites, blogs, social networks and others. If we talk about online industrial training and engineering services, we can mention FSExpert. This is the online platform that helps companies to find qualified experts around the world for online and onsite cooperation according to the flexible and convenient work schedules.
But how exactly affiliate marketing can be efficient for your business?
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing for the Engineering Services Website
First of all, this strategy allows both the vendor and the partner to focus on their strong points that generate profit. Marketing and promotion are the affiliate’s responsibility, while the company focuses on the quality of the services.
Looking for new customers, the company uses partner platforms to expand the target audience reach with the help of affiliates.
You minimize risks because you pay partners only for those customers that have come to you by clicking the link on their website. At the same time the affiliates help you increase sales and improve brand awareness.
The audience that visits partner sites will go to your website and order services. This way you will increase traffic and your website conversion rate, especially if you use different helpdesk solutions or other customer care retention variants. It is no wonder that about 40% of vendor companies in the USA consider affiliate marketing programs as the most effective channel to attract new customers.
Such a cooperation brings profit to all parties: vendors reduce marketing costs, since they pay only for a certain result, affiliates earn on marketing, and consumers find everything they need in the easiest and shortest way.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
There are three main types of affiliate marketing to promote your business on the Internet:
- Unattached affiliate marketing
This advertising model assumes that the partner isn’t related to the promoted service or product, which makes it less attractive.
There is no direct connection between the content of the partner site and the promoted services or products. The affiliate publishes marketing materials on the website. The supplier is responsible for creative display advertising, but that doesn’t result in a close partnership between the parties.
This strategy is often used by the companies that offer a product of common use, for example, the previously mentioned air conditioners.
- Involved affiliate marketing
Involved affiliate marketing is the direct opposite of the first advertising model. It involves active promotion of services or products by an affiliate. The affiliate knows everything about the product and is ready to share its positive experience with others. Partners often refer to the supplier in the marketing materials, for example, when creating customer reviews and other media content.
This type of affiliate marketing has a great number of advantages. Blogs and social media platforms focused on a particular topic are usually used as marketing channels. The partner works as an expert. He has authority and specific knowledge, which attracts the target audience to the services or product.
For example, fseXpert uses partner blogs on a particular topic and social media platforms for product promotion. This platform helps users to find technical specialists and book meetings with them. It can be related to the following topic of interest: engineering services, industrial cybersecurity, electrical engineering, online industrial training, etc.
- Related affiliate marketing
This model has features of both involved and unattached affiliate marketing models, so it is an average option. The partner is responsible for the promotion of services and products related to the topic of the website, but there is no direct advertising.
In this situation the affiliate has enough influence and expertise to generate traffic, and its level of authority makes it a reliable source.
For example, a hotel can write a post on its website about the upcoming event that is connected with this hotel. At the same time, there will be no direct advertising of the event, which customers will notice immediately.
Affiliate Program Planning
According to TrueList, more than 80% of brands have affiliate programs. The affiliate industry is responsible for a total of 16% of online orders worldwide.
However, a successful affiliate marketing program requires strategic planning as any other promotion channel:
1. Determine your Potential Affiliates and Target Audience
Analyze your target audience to find out what type of content they like. When developing affiliate marketing strategy, examine the websites and other promotion channels that your target audience visit the most frequently.
Consider all this information when developing the program, and make sure that you share a common language with your potential customers. Choose those marketing channels that your target audience will be interested in.
Set specific goals:
- Determine the desired amount of income that you want to get from your partners monthly, quarterly or annually.
- Calculate the average order value (AOV). Divide the cost of all services sold by the partners by the number of orders.
- Analyze the key metrics: Conversion Rate (CR), Reverse Rate (RR) and others.
2. Study your Competitors
After choosing the affiliates and promotion channels, start researching.
Analyze your competitors to understand how they work with the affiliates:
- What type of affiliate marketing do they use to promote their services and products?
- Are they successful?
- Which affiliate programs give them the best ROI?
To find partners of your competitors and analyze your competitive landscape, you can use various analytical tools, for example, Similarweb.
3. Choose the Pricing Model of Advertising
Distribution of income between vendors and affiliates depends on the affiliate program, but the most popular pricing models are:
- Pay-per-sale;
- Pay based on CTR;
- Pay-per-lead.
Before choosing one of these pricing modes, define at what stage of the sales cycle the affiliates will be of the greatest value to you. If you know that, the choice will be much easier.
Remember that the pricing model is a powerful motivational tool that stimulates your partners to work harder and get positive results.
4. Indicate the Lifetime of your Cookies
When using affiliate marketing program, affiliate links and web cookies are used. They are small pieces of data from a website that are stored on the user’s computer when clicking on the link.
As a rule, the expiration date of cookies is 30 days, but it can be extended to 90 days or even more, depending on the business niche. The lifetime of cookies determines the period during which your partner can earn a commission for conversions. That is why so many partners choose affiliate programs with a long expiration date of cookies.
5. Choose the Type of Commission
- Site-wide commission — the partner gets payment for providing any service or making a purchase on your website from the attracted consumer.
- One-time commission — the affiliate gets payment every time when the customer performs a targeted action, for example, orders services.
- Recurring commission — the partner gets payment as long as the customer is registered on the website. It is often used in subscription programs.
One-time commission is the best option for a field service engineering website, since the goal of the affiliate program is to attract new customers.
According to statistics published on Referral Rock, the average rate is 5-30%. To calculate your average rate, you can study the market and try different options. Thus, you will attract enough reliable partners.
Of course, the amount of payment to the partners is directly related to the total income of your business. To make your calculation right, use the customer lifetime value (CLV) as a guideline.
The formula for the calculation is:
Average CLV = The average revenue generated from each customer per year x The average customer retention – The initial Customer acquisition cost.
Based on the data received, you can set a commission for the affiliate that will be lower than your average CLV.
6. Find the Perfect Partners
You need to find partners with high-quality relevant content and good search engine optimization that rank high on Google.
Affiliates should focus on one main promotion channel. That’s why you should work with multiple marketing platforms at the same time, rather than focusing on one channel.
Investing in different affiliates, you will get several content marketing experts for your business. They will help you to reach a wide audience and increase your website’s visibility in Google search rankings.
Here are some tips to help you choosing the perfect partners:
- They develop their own platform with high-quality content. Remember, if an affiliate monitors metrics and improves numbers, your website will get better promoted too.
- Partners can choose services and products they like and personally recommend them to your audience. That is why customers trust them as a reliable source of information, which also affects the opinion about the product or services promoted.
- Partners know what SEO is and use it in their marketing strategy. SEO is a good tool to promote your services more efficiently.
- Partners use reliable sales funnels. If they already have some working experience with other companies, they will use these skills to achieve excellent results when working with you.
- They are relevant to your business niche or offer products/services related to it.
Remember that the success of your partners is your success too, so it’s better to work in a team and build trusting relationships. Share with them some tips to promote your services, or give access to banners and graphics to simplify marketing activities. To motivate your partners, you can give bonuses for the best results. Moreover, you can use different extras to make sure they reach the necessary goal. For instance, if you are looking for the opportunity to get positive feedback from your first-time client, it is rather simple to provide the discount for the next order/service/anything else that the customer wants to work with your company. It will allow you to have not just satisfied customers, but returned people who will recommend your service his friends or relatives. And you will increase the area of your influence, maybe even find new partners if your new customers get all the necessary service and are happy to cooperate with you. Anyway, it will be just to your advantage.
The choice of tools for working with programs, links and affiliates is also very important. You can find many addons and plugins on the Web that will help you to make the choice (both on a paid basis and free of charge). Addons and plugins help to manage affiliate links, create lightbox popups and embedded forms, change general settings, configure integration, and etc.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods to promote business on the Internet today. It helps expand your audience reach quickly and effectively.
Recommendations, thematic studies and customer reviews are very important in today’s digital world. According to affiliate marketing statistics on Serpwatch, there is a huge interest in this advertising model. For example, almost 90% of advertisers admitted that affiliate programs were important or very important for their marketing strategies.
Study your competitors, develop your own affiliate program and determine the type of commission. All these affiliate marketing strategies will bring you closer to success and help you attract new customers.
About the Author
After the cooperation with the different manufacturers Amir Jones decided that field service engineering services are efficient for the nowadays industry. Moreover, it is very interesting to write about it. So, he helps to clarify with the basic principles and details of the process in such a way today, enjoying the process of writing and assisting people.
