The rise of content creators in the affiliate space has been astronomic and it doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. This article will explore the best ways to work with content creators through affiliates. And how you can ensure that they fit into your overall strategy to drive the desired results.
Table of Contents
What are content creators?
Content creators are individuals who create content across a variety of sources including blogs, websites and social media platforms. There are many benefits to working with content creators through affiliates. Including, increasing brand awareness, amplifying your brand’s reach and credibility, and exposure to additional audiences.
The best ways to work with content creators through affiliate marketing
Choose the relevant content creators
The first step in working with content creators should always be to investigate the content creators who are suitable. Not only for your brand, but also the aims of the content you are wanting to push through this vertical. Ensure that you do not solely focus on follower count, but instead consider their engagement rate, and evaluate the trust they have built with their followers. Content creators can provide insights into their followers in terms of location and age which can also be extremely useful to ensure that their audience is in the relevant demographic and geographic.
Key Considerations:
Relevance: Does the content creator’s content align with your brand’s message and values?
Engagement: How active and interactive is their audience? A smaller but engaged audience is often more valuable than a larger but unengaged audience.
Authenticity: Does the content creator promote products in a way that feels genuine, or do they promote multiple products from multiple brands and therefore come across as disingenuous?
Build and maintain relationships with the selected content creators
Relationship building is at the heart of affiliate marketing and should not be overlooked for content creators. Building relationships with content creators will help to keep them engaged in your brand and your brand front of mind for them.
How to build successful relationships with content creators
Ensure that you are communicating with your chosen content creators on a regular basis. Whether directly via email or via an affiliate network. Keep creators updated about key campaigns and upcoming product launches and events so that they can promote these to their audience.
Develop bespoke commission structures for content creators
The ability to be flexible with commission structures is one of the main benefits of affiliate marketing and can also be applied to content creator campaigns. This is especially applicable if you will be providing the content creator with gifted products and no direct monetary investment. Providing content creators with a different commission structure outside of the standard rates can encourage them to continue to post about your brand after the campaign has ended as there is a monetary incentive.
Suggestions for content creator commission structures:
Devise a bespoke content creator structure at the start of all campaigns, with creators on different commission rates depending on relevance, engagement rate and follower count.
Continue to review these rates and provide a higher or lower percentage based on performance, which will act as an incentive to the content creators to increase their performance.
Increase the commission rates for certain products or services if you want to push these more than others. Inform the content creators of your desired focus and the increased commission rates on these products.
Provide content creators with unique tracking links
Tracking and reporting the performance of content creator campaigns is vital to measuring their success. Creating a unique tracking link via the affiliate network will enable you to measure KPIs such as clicks, orders and revenue. This can help guide future campaigns as it will indicate which content creators have resonated the most with your customers.
Provide Brand Guidelines and Best Practices for Campaigns
Providing content creators with brand guidelines and best practices for campaigns will enable you to limit potential repetitional abuse. The brand guidelines should be clear content guidelines that ensure your brand is represented well but that still allow the creator to maintain their unique voice.
Ways to provide guidelines
Brand Guidelines: Create and provide a brand one pager that covers tone, key messages, and dos and don’ts without being overly prescriptive. Ensure that this is present in the Affiliate Network.
Content Examples: Share examples of successful campaigns with content creators aiming to inspire, rather than dictate.
Allow Feedback: Encourage an open dialogue where content creators can suggest ideas or ask for clarification
Monitor and Optimise Performance Regularly
It is vital to track the performance of your affiliate campaigns to understand its success. Regular tracking will enable you to use data-driven insights to optimise your strategy, whether that means adjusting commissions, refining creatives, or revisiting the selection of content creators.
Monitoring Tips:
Analyse Results: Analyse KPIs regularly to keep track of individual content creator and overall campaign performance. It is also worth not solely focusing on the performance of the creators, but of the brand as a whole to investigate whether they are increasing brand awareness.
Regular Check-Ins: Schedule regular meetings with top-performing affiliates to discuss performance and strategies for improvement, keeping them engaged.
A/B Testing: Experiment with different creatives, messaging, and incentives to identify what resonates best with each creator’s audience.
Overall, collaborating with content creators through affiliate marketing can be a valuable part of your marketing strategy and should not be overlooked. When a campaign is well managed and optimised it can generate increased brand awareness and revenue. For more information on this story, or for support with your Affiliate Marketing, get in touch with one of Awin’s Agency Partners. Send us an email to team@modo25.com
