Table of Contents
Introduction
Understanding the difference between affiliate marketing vs. influencer marketing is key to maximizing your success. After all, every brand only has a limited amount of resources. Using those resources effectively is crucial to reaching your target audience and improving your return on investment.
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are similar and highly effective marketing strategies. But depending on your brand and your goals, one might be better for your needs than the other. Let’s break down affiliate marketing and influencer marketing in detail. By the end, you’ll know which is the best choice for your business and its goals.
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when one party in exchange for a commission or for marketing. Think of it as cooperative marketing between two sellers or brands. For example, affiliate marketing might include writing a blog post that highlights the benefits of a partner’s product. In exchange, that partner might also write a blog post outlining the benefits and advantages of your products. In doing this, both brands’ audiences are exposed to the other brand. This is a great way to promote audience growth.
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
You’ve probably seen posts on social media where someone says they are sharing an affiliate link. That affiliate link is how the brand determines how many new people came to their brand or made a purchase thanks to someone posting about it. This is common with who agree to shout out certain products on social or in “best of” lists on their blog or in their newsletter. In exchange, they either get a flat payment rate or a commission for each sale their affiliate marketing results in. Affiliate marketing can also happen on a broader scale. Many bloggers and entrepreneurs practice affiliate marketing by marketing products they don’t own, then making a profit on each purchase they cause. As an example, a customer may read a blog post about the best running shoes. If that customer clicks on the affiliate marketer’s link and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer gets a cut of the profits.
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
Affiliate marketing has several distinct benefits that make it a stellar marketing strategy. This is particularly true for heavily online brands or e-commerce companies.
Affiliate Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing: Which Is Best For Your Business?
-
Easy to start and implement: Affiliate marketing is easy to start and implement. You don’t need a lot of resources to get affiliate programs going. In addition, the raw material requirements for affiliate marketing are low. All you have to do is use plug-ins or widgets to make unique URLs for the affiliate links on your site. Then you’ll track conversions from each sale.
-
Cost-effective: Affiliate marketing is highly cost-effective. Since you only pay when an affiliate marketer brings a customer to your store and that customer makes a sale, you only pay for successful marketing. You don’t pay for impressions, clicks, or any other results.
-
Boosts website traffic: Affiliate marketing is phenomenal for boosting traffic to your website. That’s its primary purpose. More than anything else, affiliate marketing brings newcomers to your website.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is exactly what it sounds like: marketing with the assistance of influencers in your niche or industry. Influencers are essentially digital word-of-mouth advertisers and brand ambassadors. They advertise products to their followers and cultivate social media images that inspire followers to purchase the same products and adopt the same lifestyle habits.
For example, clothing influencers often buy and highlight products from different brands. They make videos or take photos, then show those social media materials to their followers on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. In exchange for advertising for those brands, the clothing brands give the influencers a commission or some other type of fee. Most influencers charge around $2,000 for a YouTube to Instagram view and $0.01 for a TikTok view.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing also has various key benefits and advantages to keep in mind.
-
Builds credibility: Influencer marketing can help build trust and credibility in your brand. If you partner with the right influencer, and that influencer’s audience trusts their recommendations and opinions, you can get that same audience to trust your brand by extension.
-
Targeted marketing: Influencer marketing can be effective if you want to focus your marketing budget on a target audience. Rather than marketing to the general public or anyone who happens to visit your site from Google, you can market specifically to the people most likely to buy from your brand in the first place. This targeted marketing is oftentimes better because it means every marketing dollar you spend will theoretically have a higher chance of generating revenue.
-
Controllable: Influencer marketing is highly controllable because you get to decide which influencers you partner with. That’s invaluable if you wish to avoid accidentally tarnishing your brand’s reputation or identity.
Choosing the Right Strategy
The most important differences between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are:
-
Payment structure: Affiliate marketing only requires you to pay each time you get a sale from the marketing effort, while influencer marketing usually involves paying the influencers upfront.
-
Goal: Affiliate marketing is about driving traffic to your website and completing transactions, while influencer marketing can be about multiple different things, including driving transactions, boosting brand awareness, building up an audience, increasing trust, and establishing long-term key performance indicators.
Because of these differences, affiliate and influencer marketing should be used for different goals or marketing purposes.
Overall, affiliate marketing is best if you wish to drive traffic to your site and maximize the bang for your buck with a limited marketing budget. On the other hand, an influencer marketing campaign might be better if you wish to focus on things other than revenue, such as brand awareness or audience loyalty.
You don’t need to be an influencer to do affiliate marketing. But, you do need an audience to leverage for affiliate marketing, though. You can purchase affiliate marketing services from other brands, partners, and influencers to start building your audience. That said, it’s oftentimes easier to be successful with affiliate marketing if you are also already an influencer. That’s because you’ll have a built-in audience ready to read and absorb your content, which you can use to plug products and services from other brands. An influencer can be an affiliate marketer. Many influencers practice affiliate marketing in conjunction with influencer marketing.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are both great marketing strategies. However, you should decide which marketing strategy to focus on. The odds are you’ll only have enough resources to plan and enact a complete campaign for one or the other. Keep the above tips in mind and you’ll make the best decision for your business going forward.
