With social commerce experiencing exponential growth in recent years, the need for brands to partner with affiliates that produce consistent and high-quality content has never been more important. If the content is lacking and mundane, how can brands expect to develop anything other than mundane relationships with their target audience?
Incentivizing affiliates to produce high-quality content consistently can offer brands high ROIs. Below are some ways brands can increase the quality of affiliate, influencer, and ambassador content creation in monetary and non-monetary ways.
Quality of Affiliate Content vs. a Brand’s ROI
If the last decade has shown us anything in the marketing world, it’s that content marketing has proven time and time again to deliver powerful results and lasting success for brands and businesses alike. The brands that adopted this mindset early on in the last decade have been reaping the fruits of their marketing labor for years now.
But what’s the precise relationship between content and returns? How does better content necessarily translate to better returns for a brand?
As a brand, partnering with an affiliate, influencer, or ambassador that can produce quality content for you is among the most effective methods of growing and nurturing audience engagement and trust. Brands need to provide content that not only answers their audiences’ questions but also resonates with them. Through quality content, brands are establishing a relationship with their audience, and like the best relationships, trust is crucial.
Today’s consumers expect the best from the brands they like and content that’s lacking in quality is not only suffering from not resonating with the audience, but is interpreted as disingenuous. Partnering with an affiliate, influencer, or ambassador that doesn’t give their 110% can prove catastrophic for brands. Today’s consumers can sniff out disingenuity in the content they interact with from a mile away, so when brands partner with poor-performing affiliates, their returns will be equally as poor.
When brands partner with affiliates that consistently provide them with high-quality content, they are solidifying their brand presence and increasing brand loyalty, and, as a result, driving sales and returns.
How Can Brands Manage Multiple Commissions with Multiple Affiliates?
As you may have gathered so far, providing commission-based incentives to your affiliates can be multi-faceted and thus a quite timely endeavor. So, how can brands effectively manage all of their affiliate relationships and their subsequent commissions and results they provide? Easy, they can automate them!
Unified Payments is a simple way for brands to automate commission payments and tax management for their affiliate program. With Unified Payments, all approved conversions result in monthly commission payments that are automatically distributed to a brand’s affiliates. This consistency in payment will strengthen a brand’s relationship with its affiliates, instill trust and loyalty, and incentivize affiliates to consistently produce high-quality content.
What About Non-monetary Ways to Incentivize Affiliates?
Merchandise, Discounts, Assets, and More
Monetary incentives like commissions are a tried and tested method to incentivize affiliates to consistently produce high-quality content, as stated above. Though, not all brands are in the financial position to go that route. This may be especially true for most start-ups nowadays. That doesn’t mean that all hope is lost, though. There are still ways to work with affiliates to get the results you expect without having to cash out for them immediately.
For example, offering things like free products, branded merchandise, discounts, or exclusive deals can go a long way in developing an incentive-based system for quality content. Non-monetary offerings such as these can help a brand stand out in the highly competitive marketing landscape, especially if their products are unique and resonate well with the affiliates they partner with.
Not every affiliate will necessarily be focused on just the monetary side of their relationship with the brand they choose to work with. This is why it can be quite beneficial for brands to include both monetary and non-monetary offerings for the affiliates they decide to partner with.
The Bottom Line
Partnering with affiliates is an ideal way for brands to grow brand awareness and drive audience engagement and trust. Partnering with the right affiliate can increase the quality and quantity of the leads a brand acquires and, as a result, sales and ROI.
Incentivizing these affiliates doesn’t have to be a painstaking task and that’s why Refersion is here to help with Unified Payments. Brands looking to take their affiliate content marketing to the next level should contact a Refersion expert today.
