ROAS is a defining factor for CPA marketing and even more critical for affiliate networks. But it’s not always easy to increase your ROAS just by using standard practices that fall into the affiliate marketing definition. To truly improve your performance marketing results, you need to use the techniques that maximize your campaign’s purpose. Hence, here’s how to scale your digital marketing ROAS with affiliate marketing.
Benefits of Using Affiliate Marketing to Increase Your Digital Marketing ROAS
Before you start using affiliate marketing entirely, and scale your digital marketing ROAS, acknowledge all the benefits of using it first. You will have a better understanding of how to use it and what it can do for you. You will be able to balance your expectations and set realistic goals for your campaigns.
Perhaps the most crucial benefit of all is that you decrease your customer acquisition costs. Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than working with your past or existing customers. That is why reducing your customer acquisition costs can save you so much money. By paying your affiliates only when the customer they marketed to has completed a particular action, you won’t be paying for useless or empty marketing.
At the same time, it’s worth noting just how important and common affiliate marketing has become. Around 81% of brands, 84% of publishers are already using affiliate marketing (Forbes, June 5, 2020) – it’s no longer associated with scams. For example, Buzzfeed gained over $425 million in directly attributable affiliate transactions (Tapfiliate, March 18, 2020), showing how famous online publishers can profit from affiliate marketing. It is the kind of qualified affiliate you need to strive to scale your digital marketing ROAS.
Work with Qualified Affiliates
To improve your affiliate marketing strategy, you need to work with qualified affiliates with experiences and skills for carrying more complex promotional actions. Using eligible affiliates, you are more likely to get high-quality professional work done. For example, a promo that is integrated more smoothly into the affiliate’s content multiple promo posts connected, etc. It will prevent you from spending a lot and getting poor results in return. Moreover, qualified affiliates can improve your current strategy and make it more efficient by giving recommendations based on their past experiences.
How can you find and connect with qualified affiliates, though? The first option is to seek them out yourself on social media platforms. Try to find those who have worked with them before and get feedback or client reviews. Another way to connect is by joining unique websites dedicated to connecting brands with affiliates. Such websites usually have entire profiles for each cohort. You can consult these profiles and decide who you want to work with based on their reputation, experience, skills, niche, education, and so on.
Start PPC Campaigns to Boost Results
Though you might initially want to focus on launching successful affiliate marketing campaigns, starting PPC campaigns to boost your results can be useful. When you use pay-per-click ad techniques combined with affiliate marketing practices, you can get better results because of the two campaigns’ combined forces. Here’s how this works:
- Planning: Obviously, you first need to plan both the affiliate marketing campaign and the PPC ad campaign. Keep in mind that they need to be prepared as they will need to complement each other. For instance, if your affiliates are supposed to post on Friday, launch your pay-per-click ad campaign on Wednesday or Thursday to improve brand awareness. Then, make sure that the ads are changed on Saturday to have increased sales as their goal instead of improved brand awareness.
- Set-Up: Once you have everything planned, set up your affiliate marketing by getting in touch with your affiliates and negotiating their content. In addition to that, create your ads and set up the ad campaign so it is ready to be launched.
- Launch: Launch both your affiliate marketing campaign and your PPC ad campaign just as you planned. Make sure to launch them both in due time and make any necessary changes along the way.
- Results: Track and analyze the results of the combined campaigns. If you have launched both campaigns separately, compare the products to see if there has been any improvement.
Integrate Other Types of Marketing
Combining affiliate marketing with PPC ad marketing and integrating other marketing types into your strategy can bring better results and scale your digital marketing ROAS. Here are some types of digital marketing you can use:
- Guest Blogging: Building your website’s backlink profile will help it rank higher in search results – and guest blogging is perfect for getting links. If your website becomes more prominent, your brand’s reputation might also improve, which will help you find and work with more high-profile affiliates.
- Social Media Marketing: A useful online follower base can do wonders for even a small business. A dedicated social media follower base can even provide you with free marketing, aka word-of-mouth, which will work well for your affiliate strategy.
- Influencer Marketing: Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are quite similar, and the terms are sometimes even used interchangeably. But influencers don’t usually get a commission from every purchase you get from their promotion. Instead, you pay them a fixed price for their post, promoting your brand or products. Influencer marketing can support affiliate marketing campaigns quite well.
- Email Marketing: Email marketing can help you stay in touch with your past customers while your affiliates focus on acquiring new ones. It will balance your marketing efforts.
Analyze Performance and Adjust
Finally, you need to analyze your campaigns’ performance and adjust your strategy accordingly to improve your digital marketing ROAS with affiliate marketing. Though the practices listed above are effective, they might work better for some businesses and worse for others.
That’s why it’s so important to analyze whether or not your efforts are getting you somewhere. For example, if email marketing doesn’t make a difference for your affiliate marketing campaigns, maybe you need to focus more on guest blogging instead. Find what works for you and build your strategy on that.
Final Thoughts
All in all, scaling your digital marketing ROAS with the help of affiliate marketing is possible if you start using more powerful techniques. Start implementing the practices outlined in this article into your strategy to get better results from your digital marketing campaigns.
