The use of technology in the marketing landscape in recent years has dramatically aided businesses in increasing brand awareness and generating more sales opportunities. This is particularly true in the vase of ‘affiliate marketing’ which primarily involves recommending others’ products or services and getting a share of the profit generated through each sale.
Artificial intelligence is one of the leading technologies that are being used for promotional purposes, owing to its ability to predict consumer behavior. Not only does AI offer real-time insights, but it also reduces workload, sorts loads of data, and minimizes errors. This is why many experts have predicted that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in affiliate marketing will exceed $40 billion by 2022.
How has AI impacted affiliate marketing in recent times?
Artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in the past few years. It has helped marketers all over the globe deliver excellent customer experiences by creating a better understanding of customer behavior and expectations. This has helped marketers offer more personalized experiences with lesser resources in record time, saving many businesses from perishing.
Let us now look at the main applications of AI in the field of marketing:
- Personalizing user experiences to boost sales
- Improving traffic, customer acquisition & retention
- Better decision-making and content performance
- Understanding user demographics and predicting customer behavior
- Marketing automation and increased productivity
As more and more brands come online, the popularity of affiliate marketing is increasing steadily. 38% of advertisers use affiliate marketing to acquire new customers in the US. This is why more and more advertisers prefer machine learning and AI. So let us explore how AI can transform affiliate marketing:
Strategy creation
Creating the perfect marketing strategy for your organization is easier if you have the right data with you. Online marketing campaigns typically generate a lot of data. However, manually deriving accurate insights from vast data pools can be a very challenging task.
AI helps advertisers collate, correlate, and sort data to identify customer patterns much faster, helping in the creation of better campaigns. AI can help you understand your customers like no other medium – from prospect demography to payment methods and their preferred communication channels. Additionally, since AI can predict human behavior, it makes you aware of probable sales figures.
AI algorithms can quickly match people with the products that they would want/need. Thus, by displaying the right content/ads to the right individuals and helping firms choose the right publishing partners, AI helps affiliate marketers make the most of their digital campaigns.
Voice & image-based search
The way we search for products and information online has also changed in the presence of AI. While the previous decade limited us to ‘type and search’ using keywords (while offering limited suggestions), today, visual and voice searches are the most popular ways to find items and information online.
Today, almost 50% of Google’s search queries come from voice search, making it a powerful tool for affiliate marketers. Images and screenshots are also being used online to search for information online. This is why many popular eCommerce platforms are allowing users to search for products directly by uploading images. In addition, more and more mobile applications today have a voice search feature enabled, which includes everything from shopping, food, and groceries to entertainment apps.
Popular international brands such as Domino’s Pizza, Starbucks, etc., have already begun integrating voice search features, allowing their customers to place orders with Alexa and Siri. Similarly, affiliates also need to ensure that their content is optimized for visual and voice searches to deliver the best results for their business.
Improving content
Curating the right content for your audience becomes more manageable with AI. When you can clearly differentiate your mobile and web audience and understand their tastes, framing the right verbiage and promotional language becomes easier than ever.
Besides adding to content quality and freshness, AI also allows advertising agencies to pick the right sources for their content. For example, AI can help writers create catchy subject lines for their posts and help marketers capitalize on the latest social media trends for ‘moment marketing’.
Efficiency & cost-reduction
AI empowers affiliate marketers by accessing and analyzing data effectively, which improves the efficiency of campaigns. When campaigns run more effectively due to personalization and lower efforts to produce better results, the total expenses drop drastically.
What is voice broadcasting?
Voice broadcasting is a mass communication technique that allows sending of voice/audio messages to multiple phone numbers at once. Both commercial and public entities use this method to get their notifications across instantly to a large number of people at once.
Commercial voice broadcasting involves maintaining a database of customers as well as digitally recorded voice messages to be broadcasted. Several organizations, therefore, use voice broadcasting to get their news/updates across to thousands of customers/prospects inexpensively.
Voice broadcasting is economical, easily deployable, and has tremendous potential in marketing and campaign designing. If used correctly, it can help firms excel rapidly without breaking the bank. As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, there is a possibility that voice broadcasts too will be automatically detected and converted to other formats. Voice broadcasts are on their way to becoming much more prominent in the future through their applications in surveys, reminders, and notifications.
Benefits of voice broadcasting
Voice broadcasting offers an array of advantages which are listed below:
- Minimal infrastructure required: Voice broadcasting has minimal hardware requirements, and all data related to your marketing campaigns can be stored in the cloud. The data can also be accessed at any point and shared with customers without much hassle.
- Almost no human assistance needed: Voice broadcasting can work without any manual intervention due to the latest advancements in VoIP technology. Once all the voice and customer data is stored and configured in a VoIP system, such messages can be scheduled or auto-triggered based on user preferences.
- Wider reach: Voice broadcasting allows you to reach thousands of customers in record time. Be it offers, notifications, or any other information, sharing it instantly with a large number of customers is simpler with voice broadcasting.
- Industry agnostic: Voice broadcasting can be used in any industry, irrespective of its size and nature. Thus it can be used by any organization for promotions and customer awareness.
- Multiple applications: Businesses may need to send out promotional, informative, or information-seeking messages, all of which are possible with voice broadcasting. Firms can also use it for lead generation, surveys, client communication, and much more.
- Easy scheduling: As mentioned above, voice messages can easily be scheduled at your convenience. This makes it simpler to manage campaigns and reach out to audiences at the right time.
- Improved brand presence: Voice broadcasting allows brands to enhance their presence and reach out to thousands of potential customers in no time without spending a fortune. Moreover, voice messages have a high recall value and are instantly shareable, which further helps boost a brand’s popularity.
How to use voice broadcasting for affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing involves businesses rewarding their affiliate partners for each lead generated. Voice broadcasting is a great way to generate leads, create interest and engage audiences simultaneously, which is ideal for affiliate marketing.
Here’s how voice broadcasting can be used to enhance affiliate marketing:
- Alerts & notification calls: Every business wants to ensure that its latest offerings are promoted well to its target audiences. Affiliates can easily configure alerts and notifications for their clients’ offerings with voice broadcasting, resulting in more businesses. They can also broadcast such messages to individuals who have brought or searched for such items in the past.
- Branding: Voice broadcasting should be a natural choice for advertisers who want cost-effective branding with customized messages. Reaching out to a large number of audiences on a regular basis is also much more manageable with voice broadcasts. Additionally, well-made voice broadcasts create a decent image of your brand in the minds of listeners, boosting your brand value.
- Reminders: Voice broadcasts are an ideal and non-intrusive way to send reminders for offers and discounts that a business has. With the help of voice search today, users can set reminders for events, ensuring that businesses never miss out on a sale from an interested party. Broadcasts can also remind users about meetings, appointments, or demo sessions scheduled with a company.
- Surveys: Surveys can be a powerful tool for understanding the market and user preferences. Voice broadcasting can be utilized to collect information that can further enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Surveys can also be coupled with IVRs, and interested parties can be instantly directed to customer representatives, which greatly boosts the possibility of sales.
- Real-time updates: Businesses can stay connected to their customers and provide minute-by-minute updates on critical customer queries using voice broadcasts. This can improve brand loyalty and help companies sell their products better.
- Personalized messages: Voice broadcasting can be used to send personalized messages to different user groups, which yields better results for ad campaigns and improves their effectiveness. When users get a customized message from companies, they are likely to buy from them.
- Scheduled broadcasts: By scheduling ad campaigns beforehand, affiliates can automate their campaigns and generate revenues for clients effortlessly. Such broadcasts can be scheduled in minutes and create sales automatically, much to the delight of businesses sponsoring them.
Simplifying multi-level marketing with voice broadcasting
Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a sales technique that involves encouraging current members to promote products/services to others and bring new recruits who can increase sales. With the help of voice broadcasting, MLM companies no longer need to connect with every salesperson or follow up on their leads. The process of conducting surveys or updating their contacts on crucial events is also simplified.
With voice broadcasting solutions from providers such as Robo Dialer, organizations can instantly record a message and send it to their contacts. Such applications help MLM and sales teams stay aware of the latest happenings without breaking a sweat. Such teams can just record the message to be delivered, upload and schedule it into their system, and add the contacts to which they need to be delivered. Additionally, applications like Robo Dialer automatically send messages to answering machines and provide key insights to people who pick up such calls.
IVRs can further amplify the efficacy of voice broadcasting. MLM teams can also create ‘Press 1’ campaigns that allow their prospects to provide their responses to voice messages instantly. Thus each voice message can be used to gather data from prospects and contribute to lead qualification. Many MLM firms also have a representative at the end of the line. When users show interest in a product or service by pressing a button, they are automatically redirected to the agent, who can close a sale.
Most voice broadcasting systems have low start-up costs, which allows even smaller affiliate firms to make use of them. Such systems have in-built auto-dialers that can ring hundreds of users/leads per minute. Autodialers help organizations call a huge list of individuals one after another and notify company representatives when they receive a response from customers. Even if no one picks up such calls, autodialers leave a message for agents, informing them of the same.
Voice broadcasting with auto-dialing and IVRs helps affiliates save tons of time that would otherwise be spent dialing numbers manually and then qualifying leads. As a result, they help boost the efficiency of marketing campaigns and improve their return on investment (ROI). This also allows teams to hire fewer telecallers as most of the work is done at the backend.
Conclusion
With the right voice broadcasting technology partner, affiliate marketing can be improved from the ground up, helping organizations benefit greatly in internal communication and external promotions. In addition, as voice search becomes more important each day, organizations must find a way to optimize their content for such searches to stay relevant and grow. Being industry-agnostic and having multiple applications, voice broadcasts (coupled with IVRs) have already become a preferred medium of promotion for several organizations. However, how well they can adapt to the changing times and evolving technologies remains to be seen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the influence of voice broadcasting on affiliate marketing?
You can reach thousands of customers in record time by using voice broadcasting. With voice broadcasting, you can instantly share offers, notifications, and any other information with a large audience. Other influences are real-time updates for your audience, reminders and alerts, or surveys to help you gather information more easily.
How can you use voice broadcasting in affiliate marketing?
Voice broadcasting with auto-dialing and interactive voice response systems is a fantastic way for affiliates to save hours on calling numbers manually and then qualifying leads. This improves the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. The most of the work is performed on the backend, which allows teams to hire fewer telemarketers.
What are the benefits of voice broadcasting in affiliate marketing?
The main benefits are low startup costs, ease of use and increased efficiency. Several hundred users/leads can be called per minute using the in-built auto-dialers. Companies can use autodialers to make calls to a large number of individuals at the same time and notify company representatives when they receive a response from customers. The autodialer leaves an automated message even if no one answers these calls.
What is voice broadcasting?
Voice broadcasting allows the transmission of audio/vocal messages to a large number of phone numbers simultaneously. A vast number of people can receive notifications instantly using this method both from commercial and public entities at the same time.
