Tips & Guides — 21 Jun 2022
How to make the most of your partner marketing budget
The total advertising spend is predicted to reach $873bn by 2024. Yet, with growing budgets come changes that frame a new marketing landscape. The cost of advertising through three main channels, which allocate 60% of all ad spend, has surged.
The advertising cost growth
108%
89%
87%
Amazon
Sky-high prices alongside the rapidly decreasing performance of traditional digital marketing channels and strategies force advertisers to seek new ways to promote their products. One such strategy is partnership marketing – a type of performance-based customer acquisition strategy.
A well-designed and well-managed partner marketing program can work magic for your business. It brings about the increase of revenue and profits, helps acquiring new customers, facilitates building robust relationships with existing clients, and more.
One of the reasons why partnership marketing is getting noticed by advertisers is its cost predictability and efficiency. Partner marketing allows brands to defer payments until they have obtained the expected results, whether impressions, leads, or sales.
Still, the partnership marketing budget requires careful planning. Advertisers want to know how much they should spend to achieve the desired results. Let’s explore the budget allocation and learn how to squeeze every bit of value from partner marketing.
According to Forrester’s research, 80% of advertisers allocate at least 10% of their marketing budget for partnerships to yield significant results. Thus, if you’re planning to spend $40,000 on marketing activities, $4,000 is the bare minimum you should spend on partnerships.
In fact, the spending on partner program launch and maintenance depends on many factors. Choosing an affiliate network over a platform or setting higher commission rates will affect the ROI.
Though partner marketing spending predictability is a benefit, sticking to a strict budget may let you down. Deciding not to spend a penny over your baseline is just the same as saying, “we do not want more profitable leads or high LTV customers.”
Being flexible about partner marketing spending ups the chances of improving your results. The best way to optimize the outcomes is to explore what offers and partners give the best return. Follow the tips below to ramp up your acquisition strategy in line with your needs.
Commissions you pay to affiliates are one of the best tools for maximizing your partner marketing profits. Commission rates you set should bridge the gap between publishers’ interest and your revenue goals.
However, affiliate rewards depend on the industry, preferable promotion tactics, and other conditions. Track your campaign results carefully, run tests, and define what commission maximizes profitability for your company.
Tiered commissions are another strategy for making the most of your marketing budget. Increasing the commission rate in accordance with the delivered results incentivizes your partners to bring more to the table. Meanwhile, a reliable software solution, such as Affise Reach, helps to automate calculating bonuses, so you save time on routine operations.
Partner marketing campaigns are not a thing that is set up once and forever. Thus, it’s a great idea to evaluate and optimize your campaigns regularly; you can stick to quarterly or even monthly audits and updates. This strategy will help you spot the GEOs, promotional channels, tactics and even affiliates that bring the best results and get rid of not efficient ones.
Keeping an eye on performance furthers framing accurate data-driven KPIs for future campaigns. Moreover, you can use the obtained data for partner marketing automation. For instance, with the Affise KPI automation feature, you can set up the KPI rule and maximize profitability automatically; the algorithm will block the traffic sources that fail to meet your KPIs.
The number of conversions your partnership campaigns generate deserves your attention not only because it affects the bottom line. A Low CR level may indicate poor traffic and a need to reapproach your marketing strategy. On the other hand, a high CR level most likely points to affiliate fraud.
According to CHEQ, the affiliate fraud rate is around 9% across all verticals. The worst part is that you may lose a vast portion of your traffic and revenue without even knowing it – fraud techniques are elaborate, which makes them hard to detect.
Luckily, advanced partner marketing software provides the tools for controlling the CR quality and quantity. For instance, Affise Reach has a first-class fraud prevention tool based on the industry’s most accurate fraud-detection algorithms. The system declines the suspicious conversions off the bat, so you don’t need to deal with them at the end of the month.
Data is a perfect base for making forecasts and building or gauging your partner marketing strategies. One of the great examples of a data-driven approach in partnership marketing is related to monitoring and analyzing your partners’ performance. Imagine that some group of your partners generate conversions resulting in a higher customer churn.
Suppose you can find who or what generates churn. In that case, you may make a reasoned decision to lower commissions for the selected affiliate partners, products, or services. It helps you win back the expenses related to higher customer churn.
To investigate such cases, you need a platform capable of providing in-depth multichannel analytics. Look for a solution that supports integrations with third-party services and allows real-time data transfer.
Remember that retaining loyal customers generates higher returns than acquiring new ones? The same rule applies to affiliates and partners, especially when we’re talking about top-performers. Thus, building relationships with the partners that deliver the best results is crucial for a successful partner marketing program.
Long-lasting relationships begin from the moment you find partners. The second step is detecting the ones that bring the biggest benefit to your business. Finally, you may develop the relationship by maintaining direct connections with top-performance and incentivizing them with unique offers, higher commissions, and other bonuses. Such solutions as Affise Reach allow you to run all the listed processes end-to-end.
If you want to achieve significant results with partner marketing, you should allocate at least 10% of your marketing budget. Partnership marketing gives you the flexibility to test various promotional channels, platforms, and methods to maximize ROI.
Budget flexibility allows you to improve your partner marketing constantly. To get a larger benefit, be ready to monitor your performance carefully and update your campaigns regularly. This habit, as well as the proneness for constant A/B testing, will help you build profitable long-term relationships with partners and generate revenue.
To bring the winning partner marketing strategy to life, you’ll need reliable partner marketing software at hand. Affise Reach allows you to readily discover new partners and influencers,lets you monitor your partners’ and campaigns’ performance in real-time and facilitates data-driven decisions with robust analytics with over 50 data breakdowns.
Our end-to-end ecosystem detects fraud with unprecedented accuracy, automates partner marketing-related processes, and helps build relationships with partners by incentivizing the profitability of your campaigns.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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