How Is Affiliate Marketing Rivaling Traditional Wholesale Business
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Sales and marketing – the subject that determines business success. Wherever you are, you have to try and reach your prospects and convert them to loyal customers. Regardless of your business domain, marketing is essential. Sales are also part of business growth. Conversions determine your business growth and returns. But which marketing method has the best conversion success? We have detailed the various ways affiliate marketing rivals with traditional wholesale. To make the subject easy to understand, we break it down to simpler words. Affiliate marketing is a form of digital marketing aimed at creating brand recognition and engagement. On the other hand, wholesale is the art of selling off products at a lower price compared to the market average price. The wholesale business model aims at making more sales and selling in bulk.
Will affiliate marketing overtake wholesale in the business? Read on to understand why affiliate marketing stands a chance in the market far better than wholesale packaging. These pointers are fundamental when determining the success that affiliate marketing holds.
1. Influencer Marketing
An influencer is a person who moves customer decisions according to their marketing strategy. These kinds of people or agencies are famous on various social platforms, and through their trends, customers have grown solid trust in them. Many followers believe that influencers promote the best products in the market – an example is when they share photos and videos of themselves using such products.
In most cases, influencers do direct promotions, and you pay them for publishing your product. It is related to affiliate marketing – but the terms of agreement vary. As a marketer, they will craft content that promotes your product. Since their followers already trust them, they are eager to try the product. On average, marketing with influencers brings a 650% ROI. You do not have to reduce the price of your product to generate profits.
Take the example of the piece, “How to Optimize for Voice Search: 4 Simple SEO Strategies” by renowned Digital Marketer, Neil Patel. Here, he presents some very valuable information on optimizing a site for voice search. As you scroll down the post, you’ll see that he subtly mentions a research tool, Answer the Public, that could help his audience in creating questions that the site owners can optimize their content to answer for. It is one great way to get relevant traffic to the site and get people to use the products on it.
2. Reach a Wider Audience
Whether you are selling physical or digital products should not be a concern for your business. An affiliate marketing model helps you to extend your horizons. Having more people to market your brand helps your products reach people in many parts of the globe.
This scope is unlike wholesale business. More people knowing about your products put you in a better position to close sales. Wholesale businesses may not thrive against this method because the environment is the same, and the people you meet are almost the same all day.
3. Better Control Over Your Expenses
We know that even the wholesalers have to market their businesses. Depending on your target market, you may opt to advertise on television, radio, newspaper, or flyers. But the print media is somehow expensive when it comes to marketing. It also involves uncertainties. You have to spend and spend more and more – repeatedly – to get people to know about your products and maybe consider trying it.
Contrary to this, affiliate marketing almost guarantees you complete control of your marketing expenses. Each affiliate promoting your product brings you sales or conversions – depending on your business model and affiliate agreements. You pay only for qualified sales. It means that you do not pay anything to affiliates before you make profits.
4. Better Conversions
Affiliates know your business model. They also know their audience. Targeting the right audience for your products is easy with affiliate marketing. Marketers who are into affiliate businesses know how to maintain their content on a specific niche of interest to their audience. Therefore, their links are almost always relevant to their audience. In a simpler language, the affiliate marketer’s audience is your target audience.
When the affiliate has a consistent flow of traffic, you can expect a steady flow of new customers to your online store. You can retain your customers by using an eCommerce mobile app to encourage them to buy your products at a convenient time. More and faster sales mean better business performance when you keep in mind that you do not reduce your prices in the name of wholesaling.
5. Build Brand Trust
Affiliate and influencer marketing raises an intriguing effect on their audience. The way they promote the products with content online is not the same manner you can use to advertise your local shop. Affiliate marketing aims at creating customer trust before they can make a sale. With adequate and high-quality content, marketers can enhance the customer’s perspective on your product.
By the time the buyer clicks through to your product page, they already have the confidence that your product will help them to solve their problems. This scenario is unlike the radio adverts where you pay as per the number of words and times the ad goes on air. Because of the limitation, you only pay for short ads that do not catch the trust of your audience.
For instance, popular tech Youtuber— Marques Brownlee, often mentions about dbrand skins for protecting smartphones from physical damage and smudges. Having a relevant viewer-base of a 10 million magnitude that actively watches his trusted reviews allow Marques to build trust for dbrand among people.
6. Unlimited Performance
It is not everyday you are going to make many sales relying on wholesale. The retailers who buy from you in wholesale will have to exhaust the stock before they come for more. You, therefore, realize that the trend is not stable. Trying to do local adverts may not see sustainable changes. Even when you have a sale at your store, people may not be readily willing to buy from you, or their affordability may not be substantial.
With affiliate marketing, the performance does not fail. With time, you are going to get consistent conversions from your affiliates. Because their published content and promotions stay online for long periods, you can expect your products to perform better as the information reaches more people when they share online. The ranking of an affiliate’s website content also means a boost in the traffic you receive, and, consequently, the sales you make.
7. Affiliate Marketing Encourages Page Rank
Are you struggling to get your eCommerce store on Google? Affiliate marketing may help you to gain more visibility and credibility. As the affiliate tries to sell your product, they ensure that they deliver the best copy that ranks their blog and motivates the reader. That is the content Google likes. Linking to your site from such pages serves an advantage for your business.
Implementing the backlink for your site requires that the link points directly at your product pages and a way to track the affiliate sending in the traffic. Several page redirects or masked links may not be beneficial for ranking with authority backlinks. Implement clean URLs and encourage your affiliates to point at specific product pages.
When the backlinks come from high-quality web pages on the internet, Google can detect that you are selling the right product that people want. They will help you to reach more prospects by ranking your products on Google for people interested in your business model and searching your keywords. The result is improved sales from organic traffic.
8. It Improves Your Workforce
Hiring a marketing talent is not easy. Finding reliable and consistent workers may be a bit of a headache. But the cost of operating business with internal employees is going to skyrocket – whether you make sales or not. That is where affiliate marketing beats all modes of marketing in business. You may need staff for the store, secretary, and other departments. But you may want to reduce the number of marketers you have.
Affiliates form a great taskforce. Everybody working as an individual with their experience and creativity, you can make the best team ever around the globe. Each affiliate understands his market and how to get his audience to adapt to your product. And since each affiliate relies on their marketing tools to generate sales, you are going to enjoy the flow of customers. You only pay the affiliate for the results, not the methods or allowances.
9. It Improves Your Management Experience
Business management is not sitting in the office and directing the staff members to do this and that. In 2020, each business manager needs to be a leader. And a leader is a person who understands their subordinates and clients. Affiliate marketing puts you in the position to understand your business from every aspect – including your customers and affiliates (marketers).
With extensive tracking tools, you have all the information you need to know how the people promoting your product perform and where they acquire the audience they send your ways. This understanding helps you to manage your team adequately. You will know the strength of each affiliate, and you can design methods of helping them improve their business for yours to succeed.
10. Retargeting Customer with Special Promos
In some business models, affiliates can create special promotions for their audience. They can use coupons that reduce their income per sale but increase their conversions. When a person visits your online shop and sees that your products are a bit expensive, they will browse away. But when an affiliate gives them a discount offer, they will eagerly get the product.
While wholesaling can also reduce the cost of the products, some customers are only interested in a single item – which may not give them the discount they need to afford the product. The affiliate fills the gap between wholesale, discounts, affordability, and product price. As the affiliate solves the needs of their audience, they also solve your need for sales and their need for generating income. Everyone wins, and the business thrives.
You can see companies use this strategy with product reviewers all the time. Youtubers and other product reviewers often leave a special coupon code or a discount link for the affiliate companies they work with. It is another clever way to boost the sales of a product that otherwise may be going slow. Gearbest and many other e-commerce sites retarget customers with a special promo to their advantage.
Summing Up
Affiliate marketing has evolved over the years. While various methods of marketing change from time to time, affiliate marketing is almost a guarantee for handsome returns. It is up to the affiliate marketer to ensure that they make a sale for them to receive payment. Because of this, many companies opt for hiring affiliates to reduce their marketing expenses and improve their ROI.
About The Author
This blog is written by Jenny S, an experienced blogger in the eCommerce vertical.
