Offering your best products to the world as a brand is not enough to come on top. There is a need for an extensive promotion plan and the right people supporting it.
Basically, to become the number one in business, you need to conquer the online world first and become very visible, very present, and a very obvious choice for the target audience.
In the world we live in today, the Internet has taken a huge part in our daily routines, work, and hobby-related doings, and using it to your advantage is simply a generous priority. Your brand can soar high or plummet low based on who you are going to pick to help you with the promotion.
Two options you can choose from are the affiliate marketers and the influencers. Here is a bit of information about both types along with their advantages and disadvantages so you can pick which is the ideal solution for your business.
Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate marketing is a very similar concept but it is much more direct as it brings more traffic to the brand’s website or products.
What the affiliate marketers do is write about the product of the brand in their blogs, describing it, talking about their experience with it from an objective point of view, and including a unique link that leads to the product of the brand where it can be directly purchased.
If a visitor clicks on the link and completes a purchase, the affiliate marketer gets a commission from the brand for promoting their product.
Influencers
Influencers are people, usually, celebrities, well-known or people with a huge fan base of followers on social media who are always present online on people’s stories and news feeds. They use their popularity and great exposure to promote a product of the brand they have partnered with by using it, talking about it, or any form of promotion they see fit.
Brands choose influencers and they together work out a plan on how to promote the product. It all comes down to positive word-of-mouth marketing wherein the influencer expresses their experience with the product.
Research has shown that people trust influencers to a great extent and will buy any kind of product if their favorite celebrity is promoting it. A study conducted by Twitter has shown that the tweets by influencers combined with tweets by the brand can increase the purchase intent of 5.2 times.
Pros of Both Types
Let’s take a look at the Influencer marketing. First of all, it has a controlled approach because the brand can identify and connect with relevant influencers in the niche and create a strategy that will benefit the two parties.
Thus, if you own a fashion business, connecting to fashion influencers would be the right thing to do – you can dress them and they will promote your products. Basically, as a brand manager, you will have complete control of who and how promotes your brand.
Secondly, influencer marketing gives incredible results. This is because, normally, every single person in the world is present on social media so your products can very easily get noticed by the target audience.
There is a study that says brands have made $7.65 in earned media value for every dollar they have spent on influencers. Plus, it is stated that influencer marketing acquires customers the fastest when it comes to online sales.
Finally, they are not as expensive as they are thought to be. That is unless you want to collaborate with the likes of an A-list celebrity, of course. Investing in influencers, is in fact, a cost-effective strategy that always pays off if the influencer lives up to the expectations.
Moreover, there is a category of micro-influencers that even though have a smaller base of followers, their followers are much more engaged. Related to this is the fact that about 97% of them would charge less than $500 for a branded post on Instagram, which in return, will make many times more profit for the brand.
On the other hand, there are the affiliate marketers who offer a very easy technique to implement – only by providing them with a unique link to the product that needs to be promoted they can set up a promotion plan, and the best part is that the brand will pay only for the results, i.e if visitors to the affiliate’s blog have purchased the item using the link on their platform.
This is particularly important for certain niches in the industry, for example, the online dating affiliate programs which can get to the target audience in a much quicker and easy way than with any other type of marketing.
The Bottom Line
Both types have their advantages and greatly benefit the brand. Moreover, a strategy that combines both an influencer and an affiliate marketer would be the best for the brand to get its real exposure online.
In this way, the products will reach many people and will help you achieve more than one goal. Plus, the combination of both will help you establish a deep and trustworthy connection with your potential buyers.
