Modern brands are realizing the advantage of merging the unique strengths of affiliates and influencers to create engaged customer journeys—from awareness to retention.
- Affiliates (conversion experts) turn interest into action, ensuring potential customers move seamlessly through the purchasing process.
- Influencers (content pros) create engaging and authentic content that resonates with their audience and builds trust in your brand.
Suyog Karnawat from YouTube Shopping and Andrew Franklin from Shinola discuss integrating affiliates and influencers for omnichannel marketing. Discover valuable, actionable insights into how brands can leverage these two powerful channels to drive full-funnel return on investment.
Key takeaways from this blog
- Integrating affiliates and influencers into your omnichannel strategy enhances brand reach, engagement, and conversions by leveraging their unique strengths.
- Optimizing customer touchpoints with affiliates and influencers ensures a seamless journey from awareness to retention, driving higher conversions.
- Establishing a comprehensive roadmap and clear goals aligns affiliate and influencer efforts with business objectives, fostering stronger brand-partner connections.
- User-generated content (UGC) boosts credibility and customer satisfaction and provides valuable insights for refining marketing strategies.
- Continuous testing and diversified payment models for affiliates and influencers lead to effective, adaptable, and sustainable partnerships that maximize campaign outcomes.
Key considerations for merging affiliates and influencers into your omnichannel strategy
1. Optimize touchpoints with power players
Touchpoints are like stepping stones across a river. They guide customers from one side (awareness) to the other (purchase), ensuring they stay on the path and aware of competing messages.
Optimizing these touchpoints with the strategic use of affiliates and influencers elevates the customer experience and drives higher conversions. Guided by these power players’ combined reach and credibility of these power players, each step along the customer journey becomes more secure and confident.
Andrew expands on each player’s value along the funnel.
But how can affiliates and influencers work at each touchpoint?
Affiliates can:
[Awareness] Drive initial interest through features in commerce content.
[Consideration] Offer in-depth comparisons and product information on review sites.
[Purchase] Push sales by offering exclusive discounts with email campaigns.
[Retention] Send special offers with card-linked rewards.
Suyog identifies a trend where influencers move away from their traditional role as introducers to provide full-funnel advantage.
2. Establish a comprehensive roadmap and clear goals
A well-structured roadmap provides a clear vision and direction, aligning efforts with overarching business objectives. This alignment guarantees that each step the brand, affiliates, and influencers take contributes to the collective goal.
Understanding what success looks like for your business helps determine how each partner—whether an affiliate or influencer—contributes to the program. This clarity enhances the delivery of tailored experiences that support and strengthen each relationship, fostering stronger brand-partner connections.
Andrew highlights the role reporting plays in gaining clarity into partners’ contributions to business goals.
3. Tap into user-generated content (UGC)
Trust influences consumers’ buying behavior and engagement with a brand. Affiliates and influencers come with trusted communities, offering your brand a valuable opportunity to leverage this credibility through UGC.
Suyog shares YouTube Shopping’s UGC strategy for preventing regrettable purchases and ensuring over 90% customer satisfaction.
UGC provides authentic and relatable material that seamlessly integrates across various channels, ensuring consistent brand messaging and enhanced customer experiences. The key is collaborating with partners to create great content that aligns with brand values.
Andrew sheds light on the importance of striking a balance between offering brand guidelines without lowering the volume of the partner’s voice.
Additionally, the analytics derived from UGC campaigns provide valuable insights into performance, helping brands refine their strategies for better outcomes. By integrating UGC into their omnichannel marketing efforts, brands can achieve a more holistic and effective approach, ultimately driving cost efficiency and incremental growth.
4. Improve integrated strategies with continuous testing
The integrated approach doesn’t thrive on a set-it-and-forget-it model. Continuous experimentation can bring invaluable perks for your brand and program success.
- Identify effective strategies and elements for enhanced campaign performance.
- Provide detailed insights that inform better decision-making.
- Keep marketing strategies fresh and adaptable to market changes.
From defining goals to analyzing a single element at a time, Andrew shares advice for strategy testing.
5. Diversify payment models
Optimizing payment models for affiliates and influencers creates effective and sustainable partnerships. Different types of affiliates and influencers respond best to varied compensation structures, and understanding these preferences can significantly enhance your marketing efforts.
For instance, tiered commission structures motivate high-performing affiliates, while gifting can help micro-influencers create genuine content.
Andrew gives his insights on aligning compensation to campaign goals. He also shares Shinola’s experience working with macro-influencers who favor fixed-rate payments and micro-influencers who prefer the commission-based model and product swaps.
Andrew continues to provide valuable tips on allocating the budget for ongoing affiliate costs, including:
- Evaluating the totality of affiliate performance rather than treating commission as a fixed cost.
- Dividing budget into two categories: fixed cost for items such as gifting, and commissions as a percentage of sales driven by partners.
Questions asked following the webinar
Andrew: It’s best to establish this as an expectation from the start and include it in your campaign brief. Your brief should clearly outline objectives, expectations, guidelines, and deliverables, ensuring that your partners align with your brand goals.
Andrew: When contacting creators to collaborate for the first time, you’ll want to avoid using generic messages. Mention specific reasons why you think they’d be a good fit for collaboration. This shows you’ve done your research and are genuinely interested.
You’ll also want to be clear and concise, outlining who you are, what you’re proposing, and why you believe the partnership benefits them. Lastly, creators receive numerous requests and may not respond immediately. Give them reasonable time to consider your proposal before following up.
Suyog: Yes, any channel meeting the eligibility can leverage the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program.
Suyog: We can’t share specific numbers, but we are seeing strong interest in the affiliate program and more creators experimenting with tagging products. We’re excited about the additional monetization opportunity the affiliate program unlocks for our creators.
With regard to making it easier to connect with creators, we are actively exploring new ways to make it easy for merchants to discover and connect with creators whose content and audiences are relevant to their business.
Elevate your omnichannel game for sustained growth
Integrating affiliates and influencers into your omnichannel strategy offers a potent blend that maximizes reach, engagement, and conversions. By aligning these power players with clear goals, leveraging user-generated content, and continuously testing strategies, brands can create a seamless customer experience from awareness to retention.
Watch the full webinar to delve deeper into these strategies and hear firsthand from Andrew and Suyog firsthand.
Learn more about the full-funnel advantage of an integrated affiliate and influencer strategy:
- Drive full-funnel results by integrating your influencer and affiliate marketing programs [blog]
- How merging affiliate and influencer marketing expands reach, strengthens credibility, and accelerates conversions [blog]
- Awareness to retention: How affiliates and influencers connect the entire customer journey [infographic]
