Many business owners are now turning to affiliate marketing as a way to improve their conversion rate – not the affiliate conversion rate, but the regular conversion rate on their website. Here is how you can use affiliate marketing on social media as a way to increase the conversion rate.
#1 Hyper-Target Your Core Audience
One way to boost your conversion rate with the help of affiliate marketing on social media is by hyper-targeting your core audience. Affiliate marketing is a strategy used for sending a certain message about your brand that you can fully control. At the same time, it allows you to control, who sends the message and to whom the message is being sent. Affiliate marketing also lets you work with partners who share your brand values making your message even more powerful. More often than not, such clear, powerful messages are very effective.
This kind of focused marketing transforms into hyper-targeting. Instead of trying to reach a wide range of groups, you focus your attention and efforts on a specific demographic or rather audience segment. Different types of content that you put out as a part of your affiliate marketing strategy can help you target different audience segments. In other words, you are able to “Divide and Conquer”: you divide your audience into segments and then you target each of these segments to conquer them all. Here are some tips for hyper-targeting:
- Know Your Audience: Before you even start doing anything, you must first learn everything you can about your audience and know them well to be able to structure your strategy well.
- Determine Where They Spend Time Online: Your next step would have to be determining where they spend time online. There are multiple social media platforms to choose from, so try to do some analysis before creating your business profiles.
- Start Using the Right Tools: Next, you will want to find the right tools for your affiliate marketing campaign. It won’t be only you functioning as an affiliate marketer, so make sure your partners use them too.
- Identify Consumer Values: Lastly, you should identify your consumers’ core values to be able to create content that will correspond to these values and, in turn, hyper-target your audience and improve your conversion rate.
#2 Leverage Someone Your Audience Trusts
Another way you can use affiliate marketing on social media to improve conversion rates is by leveraging someone your audience trusts. If you think about it, affiliate marketing is somewhat like referral marketing or word-of-mouth repurposed into something more actionable. Because most affiliate marketers are bloggers or social media influencers, it really does work as word-of-mouth would. Their fans and followers believe the bloggers and influencers when they make an accent on trust and honesty.
In addition to the benefits you get, your affiliate marketers also get a hare of what you make or get a fixed fee for sharing your link and making a conversion with it. If you make sure that your affiliate marketers are satisfied, they will also start trusting you more meaning that their own words about your products will be even more sincere and will resonate with their audience more which will, in turn, lead to even more conversions. It is a chain of actions that ultimately leads to more sales for you. Here are some tips to follow:
- Look for Engaging Affiliates: Affiliate marketers who engage with their audience will likely be the ones your potential customers will be most involved with. This is why you should look for engaging affiliates for long-term relationships.
- Only Partner with Trustworthy Affiliates: At the same time, you need to seek out partners who will be trustworthy affiliates. This way, you will know that their audience trusts them, and this audience will be likely to trust you.
- Make Sure They Like Your Product: You should also make sure that your affiliates like your product. Otherwise, they won’t be sincere when talking about it and your potential customers won’t get interested.
- Build Strong Relationships with Them: As mentioned earlier, try to build long-term relationships with your affiliates. This will ensure that you have regular marketers promoting your brand.
#3 Bolster Valuable Content
Affiliate marketing – whether on social media or not – requires high-quality content that will promote your brand and your products. This is why making sure that your affiliate marketers create valuable content that is useful for your (and their) target audience is so essential for the marketing to work and indirectly improve your conversion rates. Of course, good content will also improve your search engine rankings and your search engine optimization, so you can consider this a very important aspect of your strategy.
To create the best content for your affiliate marketing – or rather, to ensure that your affiliates have content of a good enough quality – you have to find good writers who will create this content. For example, these can be freelance writers from an online service like Online Writers Rating who have enough experience and the necessary skills to create such content. However, if you want to maintain a smaller budget, you can create the content by yourself though this will require more time and effort from your side. Here are some tips to use:
- Work with Your Affiliates: As mentioned above, try to work with your affiliates to ensure that they create good content instead of letting them do everything on their own and then getting disappointed by what they put out.
- Give Them Enough Information: Don’t withhold essential information from them. If you want them to promote your products well, you need to make sure that they know everything about these very products.
- Make Sure They Use Effective SEO Techniques: Definitely check the SEO techniques they are using to prevent the possibility of their content getting “blacklisted”.
#4 Build Your Backlink Profile
Directly connected to good content is your backlink profile. Affiliate marketers are technically the ones building it along with all the other websites, blogs, or social media accounts that decide to link back to your website. Search engines love it when there are many links pointing to your website and consider it as a sign of your website’s authority.
That being said, there are many ways in which you can improve your backlink profile by improving your affiliate marketing on social media and beyond. Though you should remember not to use any black hat techniques for acquiring backlinks because this could blacklist your website. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Use Specific Anchor Text: The anchor text is a somewhat confusing matter because some marketers say it doesn’t matter while others say it does. Nevertheless, being mindful about anchor text won’t hurt anyone.
- Identify the Best Keywords: Once again, the keywords your affiliates use in their content where they link to your products will also influence your search rankings and subsequently your conversion rate.
- Ensure That Affiliates Are Cross-Posting: If your affiliate marketers are cross-posting their content both to their website and to their social media, it can have a bigger effect than when they simply post it on social media or only to their blog.
#5 Use Special Promotions
Last but not least, you can use special promotions in your affiliate marketing on social media to boost your conversion rate. In fact, special promotions can be extremely helpful when it comes to attracting new customers while also retaining your existing customers (though when used with affiliate marketing, they are probably going to be more useful for getting new customers). Some people may be set off by the prices of your products and special promotions such as discounts can make the products more affordable for them.
That being said, you need to keep in mind that all the discounts, promo codes, sales, and special deals can only be effective if they are used correctly by your affiliate marketers. This is why you need to pay so much attention to who you choose to be your partner and start promoting your products. At the same time, make sure that you plan out your affiliate marketing strategy so that you offer promotions at the right time and on the right terms. Here are some tips to make use of:
- Offer Exclusive Discounts and Deals: Exclusivity is often one of the factors that make consumers become customers. This is why offering exclusive discounts and deals can signal to your audience that your aim is to give them a special treatment and satisfy them as they want it.
- Partner with Affiliates for Giveaways: You will be surprised by how effective giveaways can be. Everyone likes gifts – or at least a chance to win something for free. This is why hosting giveaways while partnering with your affiliates can help you reach more potential customers on social media and increase your conversions.
- Use a Specific Promo Code for Affiliates: The last thing to keep in mind is that you should separate the promo codes you use as a part of your own campaign and the promo codes you provide your affiliates with. In addition to that, offer an option for your affiliates to create their own unique promo codes that they will share.
Final Thoughts
All in all, affiliate marketing on social media can really help you increase your conversion rate. Just make sure to follow the tips from this article to get a better idea about how you can integrate these tactics into your strategy.