Even before 2020, technology was reaching every corner of the world. Social media, as well as ecommerce, have become more widely accepted in society.
Around the world, digital media usage has increased due to the pandemic. From buying to selling to talking to hosting business meetings and classroom meetings, every area of life moved online in 2020, bringing a boom in the digital landscape across all industries, especially in technology. As the demand and need for affiliate marketers increased over the previous two years, businesses in every industry started investing more in affiliate marketing. This industry now tops $12 billion USD worldwide. As a tech startup, it is important that you seriously consider creating your own affiliate marketing program.
7 affiliate marketing strategies tech startup can use to increase revenue
In terms of strategizing, there are no specific answers. Businesses need to focus on how their brand can engage people most effectively, driving leads towards the sales funnel, and retaining these customers. The following ideas can help you get started.
Retargeting
There are times when customers leave your store (site, app, etc.) without purchasing for whatever reason. In order to influence your potential customers to reconsider your offer, retargeting allows you to make ads follow these customers in order to stay visible to them.
Typically, people who visit a store don’t intend to buy immediately; instead, they pop in to research the product(s) they are interested in – comparing the features and price with other products and other stores. A potential customer may not even decide to purchase on your site when it comes to making a purchase. It is crucial to maintain your client’s attention, and retargeting beats all other ad placement strategies with a 1,046% efficiency rate.
Create videos
As your company becomes more visible, it generates more leads. In order to increase brand awareness, you must find marketers who specialize in creating videos on their YouTube channel, Instagram stories, and other social media platforms. 83% of video marketers say creating videos have improved their lead generation.
Video production is no longer just a financial improvement for an online business, its importance has risen dramatically since the Coronavirus pandemic. 91 percent of marketers believe the pandemic has made videos more important for brands. This is a significant number that cannot be ignored. Businesses have adapted to the increasing amount of video consumption in the world and you don’t want to be left behind.
Coupons, deals, promotions
Your company can offer customers a couple of “treats,” such as sales and exclusive offers. According to 89% of consumers, price often influences their purchasing decision, so make sure to offer customers something special to entice them to buy your products, such as access to coupons or other deals.
By carefully timing sales and providing loyal customers with coupons, reward points, and discounts, you will increase the loyalty of consumers to your brand. A loyalty program is another action 81% of consumers are likely to take if one is offered, and this often leads to referred business from these customers. Your mobile app can be optimized to inform your customers of the next sale (it could be mobile offers, for example), but be careful not to overwhelm them with too many offers for too long – they may grow accustomed to it and not want to spend full price on anything.
Use lead magnets
People like free things. Visitors are attracted to the type of content that is free and encourages them to give you their email address and other bits of information – resulting in qualified leads.
You can break down large amounts of data from your leads into smaller pieces based on characteristics such as interests, needs, wants, and motivations. By segmenting the market, brands can better target their products, services, or content to their intended customers. For you to best cater to your leads, you can segment customers by using the four main methods: demographics, geographic locations, behavioral, and psychographic which is about a customer’s likes and dislikes, motivations and opinions, etc.
Lead magnets are what drive data to your website, enabling you to create a database to target your customers and, in turn, attract potential leads based on this data. You can make your company more competitive in the tech industry by using different strategies to boost your brand.
Use affiliates from multiple sources
Broaden your brand’s horizons. Engage an affiliate marketer who can create videos for YouTube and a blogger who can create blogs. Diversify by creating different types of affiliate programs to help you reach new people who wouldn’t have heard about your products before their favorite influencer told them about them. Look at your affiliate partnerships and visibility as part of your brand.
Follow up communication
You have collected the email address of different leads, use it. In order to send your qualified leads towards the sales funnel, sometimes you will need to follow up with these leads. Contacting them via email and phone is a crucial process for your business. Approximately 60% of customers decline four times before accepting any offers, while over half of the sales people (52%) never make an attempt to follow up with these leads.
When following up on a sales, email has been deemed 40x more effective than social media when it comes to customer acquisition. Your sales leads will need a push, however you should be careful with how pushy you are.
Optimize product page
The pandemic has spurred everyone to implement digital initiatives, and all have accelerated their plans as a result. The ability to adapt to your niche is an essential skill for your company to maintain if you want to be taken seriously. Investing in mobile optimization solutions can help you do this. In the past 10 years, cell phones have been getting smarter, allowing users to consume digital media more and more via mobile devices. The majority of social media users access social media platforms through mobile devices, and 55% of website views (both on social media and other websites) occurred on mobile devices in 2021.
The use of a mobile-friendly website will help, but it will be limited in comparison to a mobile app. Compare the user experience between an app and a website: which can send regular notifications about new products or discounts? During a mobile marketing campaign, should your customers be able to access the latest campaign information quickly, or does the user interface involve a few more clicks to find your targeted actions? The average US, UK, and South Korean Android user spent 4 to 5 hours per day on mobile apps by 2021 – the convenience and speed an app offers helps drive users to our company.
Why should Tech startups start an affiliate program?
Any company that wants to compete in their respective industry needs affiliate marketing programs in order to succeed. What are the benefits of this marketing strategy for digital products, you might ask? To be successful, a company – especially a startup – needs to utilize several areas of the digital landscape.
Improve SEO
It is of no use having a great product if nobody knows about it – working on your visibility helps your company get discovered. How can you draw traffic to your site if a search engine lists your company on the bottom of page 3? It’s very important that you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) in order to succeed in the tech industry. 69.22% of affiliate marketers worldwide cite SEO as their top traffic source.
How can you improve it? Hiring multiple affiliate marketers is a must in order to help spread your brand around the internet, which makes sense because 94% of the world’s publishers use multiple affiliate marketing networks. For potential customers to find your products, it is essential to work with a marketer who has a YouTube channel and uses relevant keywords to drive traffic towards your website. Although YouTube is useful, you should also find writers who write for blogs and social media sites in order to improve your chances. Encourage your affiliate marketers to create valuable content, especially reviews of your products, in order to generate leads, especially since 65% of affiliate marketers generate traffic through blogging.
As soon as your company gains some leads, you should create an email list based on the information these leads have shared. It’s time for you to begin your email campaign, where you can work with your affiliate marketers to create newsletters in which each section of the newsletter contains an affiliate link. Essentially, this is a tactic in lead nurturing, in which your marketer tries to entice warm leads by offering discounts, savings, or secret products not available to the general public.
You should ensure your business is truly capable of working with the omnichannel approach since you are operating through different avenues – including email and social media – potentially gaining a wide variety of potential customers. In order to retain your customers, you should make sure they can communicate with you by phone, email, or live chat. The reason is because customers finding your product anywhere they look – as well as being able to communicate with your company in a timely manner – increases their trust in you and their loyalty to your brand. On average, 89% of customers remain loyal to companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement.
Finding affiliate marketers is helpful, but time consuming. Consider what you could accomplish if you were able to get your most engaged marketers to recruit others. In the affiliate network, there are numerous tracking systems available to you to help track SEO and other bits of information, but only a few – such as Post Affiliate Pro – allow you to initiate multi-tier commissions (or Multi-level marketing, MLM). Along with assigning commissions based on affiliates’ conversion rates, MLM sets up a system that encourages marketers to recruit other marketers and then to be paid for the actions they complete.
It Is Cost-effective
It is likely that you will take into account the cost of affiliate marketing before you decide to participate. Are you more or less likely to be able to compete in the tech industry if you have more or less affiliate marketers? Tracking the metrics you use and, of course, adapting them to them, will help you ensure that your affiliate marketing programs provide you with a reasonable return on investment (ROI).
Your SEO strategy affects your affiliate marketers and how they operate. When discussing their commission rate, keep in mind that marketers are willing to work if the rates are fair. Consider the cost-per-click (CPC) model for example, where your marketers post an affiliate link in their banner ads, in your newsletters, on their social media accounts, etc., and is paid for each click these different places receive. Increased traffic means more leads are converted into sales, which is reflected in your marketing team’s analysis of your SEO and your Google analytics. Hiring and paying affiliate marketers will be relatively inexpensive compared to the amount of revenue they help generate.
You have a product that people want, and with the power of a good blog and video reviews behind them, you are able to reach the target audience thirsty for your brand. With that in mind, people are also willing to provide a review if/when asked. Engage your leads and customers and ask for their opinions – you can even solicit their participation in a raffle. This type of engagement will increase the amount of user generated content you receive. In consideration of the customers, let’s proceed to the next section of this article.
Targeted Traffic
Emphasize the customer experience (CX) in your company. Be flexible in your approach when using your affiliate marketing strategy. Businesses search through the affiliate marketing ecosystem for a reason, they work within their niches and have the attention of the merchant’s target audience. This means that as an affiliate merchant, targeting and then nurturing leads that come to your website is a priority.
Think about it this way, you wouldn’t read a blog about gardening at this very moment when you wonder why your tech startup should engage in any form of affiliate marketing. This blog is geared towards providing solutions to potential customers like you to the Post Affiliate Pro website (welcome!) that are relevant to your specific needs. It is a pretty effective strategy, despite how simple it may seem.
You can use tracking cookies on your website, they play a critical role in basic and complex operations on most websites, providing merchants a way to understand the behavior of their visitors and how that behavior can be improved. There are countries and regions around the world where the use of such cookies is regulated, as the security of a user’s privacy has become a concern, but transparency about how you use your cookies will build trust. Tracking cookies collect, process, and share all kinds of personal (sometimes sensitive) information about visitors to your website. Search and browser histories, IP addresses, on-site behavior, past purchases, and Google searches are often used to serve targeted advertisements back to the end-user as they move across the web.
Keep in mind, Google’s Chrome plans to phase out third-party cookies in 2023, but most other types of cookies will continue to be used throughout the internet adhering to the emerging data privacy laws.
Aside from cookies, customers are more likely to think highly of your business when you meet their needs and expectations, while staying transparent. When you work on enhancing their CX, you will count among the 84% of businesses that have experienced an increase in revenue and when you provide customers the chance to give feedback, 68 percent of users will always oblige. Reviewing and leaving feedback is a way to encourage user-generated content (UGC), and customers love to participate. Make your customers feel appreciated by creating a reward system or a lottery, too. Providing frequent reward opportunities – for providing product or company reviews, referring your company to friends, etc. – is great practice for customer retention and it steadily increases brand visibility. With 72% of satisfied customers telling at least six friends, it is difficult to argue with this figure.
Social Proof
The previous section noted that word of mouth is a good way for customers to learn about your product and convince them to buy it. However, affiliate marketing strategies give you the freedom to think outside the box. Achieving success requires acquiring multiple affiliate partners, and this cannot be overstated. As a result, companies assume they would need to partner with a macro influencer, such as a celebrity to enact a certain type of social proof (celebrity endorsements can be effective). Even so, working with a micro influencer (a person with roughly 10 to 100,000 subscribers or followers on their platform) is an area of affiliate advertising you should not ignore. Hence, micro influencers such as bloggers can assist your company with its email marketing efforts by attaching affiliate links to the different sections of your newsletters. Micro influencers are motivated to follow the funnel towards a sale when you provide affiliate products and encourage them to review the different types of products your company wants to sell.
Access foreign markets
The limitations of selling products overseas have greatly diminished in the digital world of today. In 2023, online retail sales will grow to $6.17 trillion USD, making the ecommerce platform a highly lucrative market. In the same vein, Latin America, the US, India, China, and other nations have all seen their ecommerce sector grow in 2020 and 2021. Affiliate marketers in these countries are an easy choice, as they possess access to an audience you could not find in a more cost-effective manner. Keep your eyes peeled for affiliate marketers in these top global e-commerce markets.
Detailed data and analysis
Keep an eye on the data. To do this, you need to invest in affiliate tracking software. Affiliate tracking software manages all affiliate revenue and marketing operations. With it, merchants can track sales-related data, assign an affiliate commission rate, share promotional materials, and measure conversion rates. In order to track links, the software gives reports to the merchants (and if given, the marketers as well) about the top campaigns and the click rates. Merchants then use these metrics to optimize their affiliate marketing campaigns and even see which affiliates are their top performers in order to reward them.
In short, affiliate tracking software will handle split commission duties for you, as well as MLM. The system relieves you of many of your duties and provides you with the important and relevant data your company needs to remain competitive.
How can tech startups find affiliates?
Now that everything regarding the “why” is out of the way, it is time to dive into the “how”. There are a few steps listed below that are ways for you to find the affiliate marketing program that will fit your marketing strategy effectively.
Search for niche bloggers
The act of blogging generates traffic. This is an important part of the affiliate network that you should not ignore. It is best to hire a niche blogger as an affiliate marketer, because niche bloggers produce content on a regular basis for their audience, whether through their own website or helping write your company’s email and newsletters. Over 65% of affiliate marketers generate traffic by blogging, and in our technology niche, we deal with more digital content, and marketers who write relevant blog posts – whether they are product reviews or comparisons to similar products – drive traffic faster than consumers who visit a physical store.
Social media groups and personalities
Another possible marketing resource is the ability to hire different levels of influencers (micro, macro, etc.). If your content creator can post on Instagram and YouTube, you can demonstrate your product in a more clear manner, which is different from traditional advertising methods. Sixty-eight percent of marketers make contact with their customers using social media platforms, sharing moments from their daily lives through video content.
In addition, because marketers can post their affiliate links from anywhere in the world, it is logical to assume that potential customers also use mobile devices. More than half of affiliate traffic is generated from mobile devices, indicating that mobile users are doing a lot of shopping on the go. The mobile app market is expected to generate more than $935 billion USD by 2023 due to the increase in usage and importance of mobile apps.
Affiliate networks
Affiliate networks haven’t been mentioned quite yet. In the case of companies that do not have the resources to create significant outbound marketing, not enough advertising presence, or simply want to expand operations into unrelated industries (in this case, anything other than the tech industry) then an affiliate network allows them to focus on what they do best instead of getting contact details from affiliate marketing.
Affiliate merchants may discover their products complement each other when they share valuable content – allowing for cross-promotional deals via social media or utilizing niche bloggers to drive leads to each other. Influencers should pay attention to the affiliate network, as it offers a chance to connect different companies.
Conclusion
It is crucial to establish a type of affiliate marketing program in the tech industry. Most of the brands in the world (about eighty percent) work with affiliate marketers in order to reach every person that fits within the different brand’s target demographic. In order for you to do the same, you should hire multiple affiliates that possess different skills and can reach your target customers through their own methods – videos, blog posts, or generating other types of content. Working with the right affiliate partners will cost, but the ROI is beyond worth the price of admission. The alternative is for your brand to fall between the cracks and remain obscure, because the lack of brand awareness (and its visibility) are detrimental to your company’s targeted goals.
If you are paying marketers without engaging your customers or following up on the leads they generate, then you are effectively paying them while not earning any money from their marketing efforts. Attention is important to customers, but they also want to be rewarded for their honesty and loyalty. Consider these factors when initiating promotional campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should tech startups get into affiliate marketing?
Marketers have a built-in platform for reaching startups to increase visibility and brand awareness.
What strategy should a tech startup focus on with affiliate marketing?
You should always be focusing on SEO, using lead magnets, and creating videos, blogs, and newsletters on a regular basis.
I’ve generated some warm leads, now what?
It’s important to follow up with these potential purchasers; they need a little push to make a purchase, but not too much or they’ll be turned off.
What kind of affiliate marketers should a tech startup look for?
Make sure you find influencers on social media, YouTubers, and niche bloggers.
How can tech startups find affiliate marketers?
Identify bloggers who write about items similar to what your brand offers and social media influencers who are able to create videos and have some expertise to review these items.
