If you are looking for a new marketing solution to offer to your small business clients, then look no further. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic solution for those small businesses with a tighter budget who are looking to achieve similar results to those gained by larger businesses.
Affiliate marketing partnerships are an effective and low-cost solution that offers small businesses an easy route to obtaining a much wider audience, complete with loyal customers, regular conversions and engaged viewers, all packaged up in an easy-to-navigate, mutually beneficial partnership. It offers businesses competitive ROIs and can be a fantastic way to help small businesses grow.
As an industry, affiliate marketing is estimated to be worth an expected $12 billion this year, with more and more businesses turning to the marketing solution all the time. Now more than ever, companies are allocating more of their budgets towards affiliate marketing and turning to agencies and affiliate programs for small businesses have proven to be a huge success. Read on to find out more about the different ways in which affiliate marketing could be a great choice for small businesses.
Gain a wide and loyal audience
Affiliate marketing means that small business clients are exposed to just as large an audience as bigger clients are due to the help of affiliate partners. Working with an affiliate partnership company can help your brand to gain access to a number of marketing channels that they may not otherwise be able to reach such as influencer pages, bloggers, price comparison sites and voucher code sites. This puts small businesses in the running alongside bigger brands for the attention and sales of audiences.
As well as just reaching a wide audience, however, partnering with affiliates gives small business clients the opportunity to really connect with that audience. Affiliate partners, particularly influencers and content creators, tend to have extremely strong connections to their audiences and have often built a loyal and trusting following. This usually leads to an audience that is extremely engaging and significantly more likely to convert than consumers from other channels.
If you opt for a smaller-scale influencer such as a micro-influencer then you may benefit from lower rates and be able to grow your audience alongside the growth of your affiliate partner. This will help you forge strong bonds with both the affiliate and their audience and maintain and grow a loyal audience over time.
A new opportunity for small businesses
Although a lot of people are of the opinion that it takes a whole marketing team to manage an affiliate program, there are more and more affiliate programs popping up that can do the hard work for you. These programs are breaking down the barriers that are often preventing small business clients from being able to fully take advantage of affiliate partnerships.
Signing up for an affiliate program is often simple these days and can take just a few steps to complete before you are up and running, able to reach out and make connections with a whole range of affiliate partners to help you to choose the right one for your brand in no time.
A low-cost, high-reward option
Of course, with any new marketing initiative you are going to broach to a small business client, money is always a worry. However, affiliate marketing is actually one of the best value marketing channels out there, due to the way it is usually paid. An affiliate program most often asks for a base fee which can be as low as £75 a month for small businesses, and then anything to be paid on top of that is the commission for any successful sales made by your affiliates. This means that you are only paying for successful marketing, once a sale or conversion of some sort has already been achieved. This makes for an incredible ROI for you, as well as a great way to motivate and encourage your affiliate partners to push as many sales as possible.
Generally, small business affiliates drive around a £12 return on every £1 spent.
An innovative approach to marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to offer your small business clients a fresh and innovative new approach to their marketing. It provides a solution that is not just low-risk but also proven to be highly effective at not just attracting new customers and sales, but retaining them in the longer term too. It can offer a new marketing perspective, allowing for a diverse marketing portfolio as well as a wider and more diverse customer base. Effective marketing strategies at a low cost are few and far between in today’s industry, so this can be a fantastic way for small businesses to know that they are putting their money towards something that is going to get the results they are after. Most affiliate programs will be able to help a business work out which affiliates will be best suited to them and their needs and help to facilitate long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships.
