Trends in Affiliate Marketing You Should Know in 2019

For those not in the know, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy which rewards affiliates for every customer they send to their partner company’s online store. It is easy to think of this as a sketchy approach, especially since it has its origins in supplement and beauty product selling. But it has become one of the main drivers of profit for e-Commerce websites for the past year.

The study conducted by Forrester Consulting predicted that affiliate marketing will have an annual growth rate of 10% through 2020. It is now responsible for 16% of the e-Commerce sales, selling almost at the same rate as email marketing and display advertisement. For this reason, as business owners, it is an imperative to look into the strategies involved in affiliate marketing.

Content will remain integral

As always, content will be the main driver of any marketing strategy. Businesses need to be able to strike a balance between pushing content for their audience and the search engines. Articles will still offer relevant content with how-tos, ultimate guides, editorials, case studies, and industry updates. There is also a shift towards the audio-visual, pushing content creativity into videos, images, and slideshows.

More than just optimising with keywords or satisfying the ad requirements of social media channels, content creation is also about shareability. If your customers find your content relevant enough, they will be more willing to share it with their followers, allowing you to reach a segment of the buying market you wouldn’t have been able to reach on your own.

Indirect discounting

The way affiliate marketing works is, the affiliates execute their own marketing strategies so that they are able to successfully turnover customers to their partner company’s websites. If these lead to sales, the affiliate will earn a commission from each successful sale. What happens is the affiliate gives part of the commission to the customers in the form of a cashback or a discount.

This is why you’ll notice some vloggers or bloggers giving out special codes so you can get a 10% discount when you buy from brands like Audible and click on their unique link. That is how indirect discounting works, and this trend is just going to increase in 2019 when influencer marketing is also on the rise.

Unconventional shopping categories

Electronics and food are still the leading categories when it comes to online shopping. But with the increase of disposable income per household, other unconventional categories are getting significant attention from online shoppers. These are clothing, jewelry, groceries, and medicines which shoppers usually go to physical stores for.

Online portals have partnered up with supermarkets, pharmacies and other major chains to be able to deliver these offbeat items to shoppers. This is a good opportunity, not just for affiliates looking to diversify avenues of income, but for partner companies who would like to take advantage of this increasing demand.

Voice search optimisation

For affiliates, this involves including long-tail keywords into the content, focusing on language that are more or less used in voice command. With the emergence of voice assistants like Alexa, it is becoming increasingly important to execute SEO strategies specifically for voice search, and researching the right keywords is a significant step.

Of course, even if you are doing affiliate marketing, you must still continue with other strategies. For instance, email marketing is still performing well in terms of leads and conversion. All you need to do is make sure you have the right email hosting and the right promo to showcase. So add affiliate marketing into your strategies for this year and see how it adds to your performance.