Affiliate Marketing 101 for Food & Beverage Brands
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash
For PR and communications professionals, keeping up with the latest media and marketing trends is an essential part of the job. In recent years, this landscape has been changing at what feels like an ever-increasing pace. Stalwart print publications have shuttered, and more and more publications are making the jump to digital platforms. With that transition, the rules of traditional PR and marketing have been rewritten, and there have been countless new skills and tactics to learn to execute a PR strategy successfully.
Perhaps one of the latest crazes to take the PR and communications world by storm is affiliate marketing. If you're confused about affiliate marketing, why and when you’d want to set up an affiliate program as a brand, or the impact affiliate programs may have on your PR and communications strategy, we have the scoop.
What is an affiliate program?
An affiliate program is a performance-based marketing tactic, where brands can pay affiliate partners (media, influencers, couponing sites, etc) a small commission for the sales, traffic, referrals, or other action/lead that the affiliate drives to their website.
Some of the most popular affiliate providers include Share-a-Sale, Awin, Refersion, and Amazon Affiliates, though there are many others. Each program has its own unique structure and benefit—take time to research each platform and weigh the benefits each provides for your exact needs.
Why does this matter for my brand?
Affiliate marketing is the new print advertising—not only is it quickly becoming an essential tactic to raise awareness of your brand and product, but it's also an essential tool to help garner earned media coverage on digital platforms.
Publishers are devoting more and more resources to growing the teams that manage their affiliate relationships, and shoppable content is growing rapidly as print publications, unfortunately, continue to shutter.
Gift guides, product round-ups, trend stories, and even feature coverage can often now require an affiliate relationship to warrant coverage. The good news: since you only pay commission on sales driven by the affiliate, there's a direct and measurable ROI for these efforts.
What are some PR best practices for starting an affiliate program?
Once you or your clients have decided to take the plunge into the world of affiliate marketing, there are a few tips and tricks that you can leverage to execute your program successfully:
Learn which writers are covering affiliate content, and build stronger relationships with those contacts. PR professionals know the importance of relationship building in securing earned media results–treat affiliate writers the same way. Learn who they are, the details they need for editorial consideration, and foster those relationships to help your clients’ programs grow.
Provide strong visual content. Affiliate content still requires an editorial lens; media won’t cover products they don’t truly love, recommend, and can represent well to their target audience
Connect with affiliate aggregators, such as Skimlinks. Not only are these sites essential for certain publishers to consider, they also allow brands to cast a wider net with the affiliates with which they choose to connect
Connect with publishers on the backend of your affiliate program so your brand will be visible in their databases. While a large part of your affiliate PR strategy will involve editorial pitches, these backend connections are just as important to stay on editors’ radar.
These tips and tricks are just some of the many best practices that will help you implement a successful affiliate program as part of your overarching communications strategy. Interested in learning more or getting started?
Contact hello@thejamescollective.com for more details.
Written by Devinne Zadravec, account director in TJC’s NYC office.