Social media networks have provided businesses with a fascinating virtual platform to market themselves. Social media allows you to create content to attract and interact with customers and therein lies its real potential. How to become an affiliate marketer can also benefit from the reach that social media offers and create content like blogs, photos, and videos.
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing technique whereby a person or organization from outside your business provides promotion for it. Every time a customer visits your website or a sale is generated thanks to the affiliate’s efforts, they are rewarded with a commission. In the past, affiliates primarily used their websites and blogs to promote products, but using social media for affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular. 67% of affiliate marketers connect now with customers on social media.
Social media is an effective channel for affiliate marketing and is relatively low-cost, too. Most social media networking platforms offer paid ads, but there are organic ways to ensure your target audience is able to access your content.
Using social media for affiliate marketing can be quite profitable, but only if the content created has real value. Otherwise, you may lose the goodwill of your audience.
Image Source – Social Media Advertising
You do not need to be a celebrity or an influencer to be a successful affiliate marketer on social media. Social media platforms offer many tools to create content and share affiliate links. Once you assess your advertising goals, your target audience, customer segmentation, and your chosen social media network, you can optimize your marketing campaign for success.
Here are five tried and tested methods to use social media for affiliate marketing.
1. Affiliate links
This is a classic method used to gain clicks and earn money from every click. Affiliate program management is when the link is providedby the brand and tracks the insights. Every time someone clicks on the link through your marketing efforts, you earn some money.
If you use Facebook for affiliate marketing, you can add the affiliate link directly to your posts. Instagram does not allow you to add links to your posts, so you have two options: either put a link in your Instagram bio, or add the link in your Instagram stories.
Ideally, you could link your own website in your Instagram bio and customers can in turn follow the affiliate link on your website. Stories are an excellent way to promote a product or service, however. You can create content related to the product, post that on your stories, and all the viewer needs to do is swipe up.
Wherever you add an affiliate link, remember not to use a raw affiliate link. It looks unauthorized and people tend to avoid clicking them. Create affiliate marketing links that look trustworthy and authentic, so they can attract potential buyers. You can use link cloaking or you can shorten your links to inspire confidence in your audience. If the brand pays you per click, you need to entice your audience with a clean and simple redirect link instead of your raw affiliate link.
Image Source – Different social networking sites
2. Interesting and useful content
Content quality really needs to be top-notch if you want to gain more social media followers. Your followers are your main strength, and not only do you want to attract more, you need to retain the ones you already have. The only way to do this is to create content that your followers find valuable. High-quality, thought provoking content will help you gain the trust of your audience and maintain your credibility.
Content quality and your social media content strategy is dependent on the images and text of your social media post. 49% of marketers primarily use visual content for their websites and social media pages. The human brain interprets images faster than text, which means that affiliate marketers need to focus on graphical representation and visual content marketing.
Many social media platforms allow you to link images because customers are more attracted to a picture of a product than to its written description.
Merge images with the right set of words to increase the probability of your sales. Your content does not have to be a sales pitch. In fact, it should not be a sales pitch. Create an engaging write up about your chosen niche, industry news, product updates and fixes, etc. You can then subtly slip in an affiliate link somewhere or link a relevant image.
Having an affiliate marketing software is important for content-first approach when using social media. You need to rope in customers using compelling images and blogs. Once you have caught their attention, you can deliver your carefully crafted marketing message.
It’s a good idea to ensure that the majority of your social media posts are created purely for the purposes of engaging with your audience, without the inclusion of any affiliate links or overt marketing. You can then build on this engagement and create posts with affiliate links, but those too should provide something of value to your audience.
Personalization in ecommerce is an effective way to attract your audience and promote your brand. Affiliates can customize promotions to fit their audience once they have a good idea of what their followers like. Content is king. To build a loyal following that you can leverage for your affiliate business, you need to ensure your content game is on point.
Image Source – Content Marketing
3. Using video
Videos go viral more often than simple images do. From TikTok and Instagram Reels making waves every day in the world of digital content creation, to YouTube having more than two billion users, video content is a powerful game changer.
Product videos can help you improve average order value (AOV). What is AOV and how do videos help to improve your bottom line? To answer, we first need to understand the mechanics of cross-selling.
Consider an example where a video attempts to convince viewers to buy the product through a user testing app. Imagine now that a smaller complementary product is offered along with it. A small add-on would increase the value you offer the customer, would make the primary purchase more attractive, and could increase the overall amount the customer eventually spends (boosting the average order value).
Affiliate marketers can use videos on social media for the following:
· Product reviews
· Product unboxing
· Product demos and tutorials
· FAQ and how-to videos
· Wish lists
You can successfully monetize your affiliate marketing campaigns through video, if you are able to create video content that is interesting.
Image Source- YouTube
4. Community marketing
Community marketing helps businesses and brands connect to a specialized segment of the market. You interact, engage, and exchange values with this community on topics related to your niche.
An excellent example would be influencers who only talk about curly hair and how to deal with it. Social networks like Facebook allow you to create groups for community marketing. These groups are free to make and only organic efforts to build them yield results.
Being a community influencer is a focused way to concentrate your affiliate marketing. For community marketing, you need to build a profile within the community to be able to influence them. Profile building can be difficult, but once you have earned the trust of your target audience, there is no turning back.
As a community influencer, you have to be particular about the products in your market. Your credibility is dependent on the brands you associate with yourself, so ensure you partner with products with a good community profile.
5. Connect with other affiliate marketers
The whole point of social media marketing is to be social. Connecting with other affiliate marketers can help you support each other and increase your followers. With shared links and shared products, you can start appreciating and contributing to each other’s success.
Connecting with other affiliates promotes healthy competition and improves how you use social media for affiliate marketing. The positivity that results from encouraging and building each other up will not go unnoticed by your followers. Cooperation and networking can be rewarding but not only because of the tangible benefits–you can learn from your peers and improve your marketing skills as well.
Networking is important, no matter the industry. You can connect with other affiliates on popular social networking sites like Instagram or Facebook, or in a more professional capacity on LinkedIn.
Instagram and Facebook allow users to live stream to their audience, which has a number of benefits. When live streaming with another influencer, for example, you have access to their followers as well as yours, which significantly increases the number of people you are able to reach with your content.
Joining an affiliate network can also help you connect with other affiliates. A hybrid cloud infrastructure may be necessary for affiliate programs to ensure their affiliates’ social media efforts are successful. What is hybrid cloud technology? It is a cloud computing environment that has a public cloud and private cloud service, and also offers data storage on premises. Affiliate networks offer cloud hosting, dedicated servers, marketing services, and website building.
Image Source – Influencers on social media
Monetize your social media traffic today
Social media is a powerful tool in the digital realm for marketing and beyond. Hiring the right SaaS marketing agency and If used mindfully , social media can prove to be invaluable to your affiliate marketing campaigns. With most businesses being socially driven, social media can help fulfill your affiliate marketing goals faster than other marketing techniques.
As social networks continue to become an integral part of modern life, they have become the ideal platform for affiliate marketing campaigns. You can use the methods listed above to leverage social media for affiliate marketing, to grow a loyal following, build your brand, and generate commissions.
The aforementioned tips can help you create an automated affiliate marketing effectively for a profitablebusiness. It is not the easiest of businesses, but with a little effort you can achieve impressive results. Using social media for affiliate marketing is challenging yet one of the most promising ways for practically anyone to earn good money.
Hello Samuel, Great post to Monetize your social media traffic.
Whether you’re a brand or a content creator, affiliate marketing can be a great way to make more money online and social media plays a huge role in this. Being both free and user-friendly, social media has emerged to be one of the go-to channels for affiliate marketing. Social media has made it so virtually anyone can become an affiliate of your brand. Affiliates are no longer required to have a well-known blog or celebrity-status recognition to successfully promote your products. Instead, these platforms provide affiliates with the tools they need to create content and seamlessly share referral links to their built-in audience of followers.