In the fourth episode of Season 3, Lee-Ann offers some advice on the strategies that she has learnt from managing million-dollar affiliate programs. Listen to hear more about:
- How affiliate programs are managed
- The different lifestyle cycles stages that they get into
- The importance of having a very clear strategy mapped out
Check out the supporting documents here
Rate, Review, & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
“I love AffiliateINSIDER’s Affiliate Marketing Podcast.” <– If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing our podcast show!
Taking the time to do that, helps us support more people in our community to access digital and affiliate marketing insights, expert lead learning and the latest online marketing tactics that help Affiliate businesses grow.
Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast. We will be adding new episodes as we continue our 3RD SEASON throughout 2021.
In the fourth episode of Season 3, Lee-Ann offers some advice on the strategies that she has learnt from managing million-dollar affiliate programs. Listen to hear more about:
- How affiliate programs are managed
- The different lifestyle cycles stages that they get into
- The importance of having a very clear strategy mapped out
Check out the supporting documents here
Rate, Review, & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
“I love AffiliateINSIDER’s Affiliate Marketing Podcast.” <– If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing our podcast show!
Taking the time to do that, helps us support more people in our community to access digital and affiliate marketing insights, expert lead learning and the latest online marketing tactics that help Affiliate businesses grow.
Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast. We will be adding new episodes as we continue our 3RD SEASON throughout 2021.
Hi, and welcome to the affiliate insider podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers in the gaming industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliate and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, and welcome back to the affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast with me, Leanne Johnston today on where to take a short interruption break and our podcast schedule, because I've been asked quite a lot of questions lately about what it takes to launch scale and grow an affiliate marketing program. And I want you to just talk a little bit about how affiliate programs are managed, the different life cycle stages that they get into and why it's so important to have a very clear strategy and program mapped out. When you begin your journey as a business, opening up an affiliate marketing or partner marketing program in this podcast today, I'm going to share some of the things I've learned running million dollar global affiliate programs, and hopefully this is going to help some of the people listening to just understand where they can improve their strategy, get quicker results, and hopefully build a for their programs that lead to global success. So if you don't really know me, I am Leanne Johnston. I have been in affiliate marketing for over 25 years. I have been helping programs to grow to scale and to generate consistent sales through affiliate and partnership marketing. We've come a long way in this time. And as the industry continues to change and as we continue to deliver new services and new products, as technology starts getting a little bit more sophisticated, a lot has changed in terms of the strategy and the planning that's required to grow a successful affiliate program. Now, if you're running a program internally or you're using an affiliate network, what I'm going to share with you today actually still stands true. And it doesn't really matter whether you're in-house or whether you're agency, the phases of growing an affiliate program are all the same. So let's talk a little bit about affiliate life cycles and how an affiliate program stops. The key thing to realize about affiliate programs is that it never stops and it always changes. And the reason for this is because digital is changing around us every single day, the phases of independence program growth can be really segmented into five key areas. The first phase is your launch phase. This is from the time that you start thinking about opening an affiliate program to the time that you actually integrate the tracking solutions that you choose to house and manage your partners in phase one, you consistently looking for new affiliates. So it's incredibly time consuming and labor intensive to make sure that you're recruiting new affiliates month on month and growing that partnership program with partners that can deliver the right traffic sources to your business. The second part of growing an affiliate program is when you move into the scale period, usually those period takes about six to nine months from the date that you launched. And those periods is really all about growing those existing affiliate relationships, onboarding new ones and ensuring that your program is growing in terms of revenue month on month off the phase one and two have been completed. The third phase that we move into is the growth phase. And this is really where your profit margins become more and more important. It's important that you understand how to grow those relationships that you've onboarded in the previous, you know, North to nine months, and that you're looking at how your campaigns are performing with multiple different traffic sources and different partnerships. And that you're looking at how you can optimize your affiliate program and the monthly spend that you're engaging through your partnerships. The fourth phase of growing an affiliate program usually takes place after about 12 months. This is when marketers will revise their strategies. We'll look over the partners that have brought in the high value deals, and they'll be looking at reinvention in terms of how they can compete with competitors in the marketplace and how they can consistently grow the sales that are coming into their program. And the last phase, which really happens anywhere between 12 months and going forward into the future is where you start repeating these cycles over and over again. You'll need a launch new products. You're launching new campaigns, your scale, some of the relationships that you have, and you'll start looking further afield from new sources of traffic that aren't immediately obvious at the beginning, end of your going through these five phases, incredibly difficult. Each phase is independent and each phase has its own set of problems and its own set of solutions. So understanding how to move your program through these phases is incredibly important and it does take time and it is a skill. One of the things that I've learnt over growing million dollar programs is that the problems that you experienced in phase one aren't necessarily the same problems that you're going to experience in phase three, which is the growth phase. So really understanding how your failure program fits in with your digital marketing strategy is incredibly important throughout this journey. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, hopefully you would have seen the slides that go along with it, which will be in the blog below on affiliate insider.com. But if you've got any questions about the different phases of an affiliate programs lifecycle, please do get in touch with me because I'd love to be able to talk you through some of the challenges that you might be facing and how we can help you to actually find solutions for these problems moving on. Okay. Why don't you talk a little bit more about why affiliate insider is a great agency and what we do for our clients to help them grow? One of the things that strings to mind from all the programs that I've managed in the last two decades is that strategy always beats talent. So you could have an amazing team. You could have an amazing marketing strategy, but without both of these things working cohesively together, it's almost impossible to make the program before. So let me explain this and break it down for you a little bit. When a client comes to open up an affiliate program, the first stage is always understanding the brief. So clients tell us what they need and what they want and timelines, and are set against that strategy in order to deliver a program that sells during the second phase of this process, we're looking to the research, we researched the competitive landscape. We're looking at creating a marketing strategy that supports your revenue growth, meets your resource objectives and delivers to targets that you're setting on a wider global business scale. So affiliate marketing, once again, always has to sit in, as part of your business strategy has to fit as part of the entire digital marketing mix. And you need to make sure that you're leveraging the partners that are in your affiliate program to grow and support the other digital channels that you're using during this research phase will dictate exactly how your recruitment strategy should be laid out and where you should be apportioning, the budget that you have available for growing your affiliate program. Effectively. The third phase that we move into is the idea ideation stage. This is where we will brainstorm with your team and come together to find the exact USP's marketing partners that you need in order to sell your program. Effectively, affiliate marketing is incredibly complex and it's also incredibly competitive. So having a clear strategy in place on how you're going to grow and scale your affiliate program helps you through the first three stages of that launch scale and growth phase. The fourth thing that we'll add into the mix as part of our strategy and support metric is to look at the production. It's incredibly important that your tools are working effectively together to make sure that affiliates are getting the service that they need and delivering the sales that you want. So making sure that your technology is prime and ready for launch and scale. So looking a little bit further ahead into the future and not just getting you out of the door at the start is incredibly important. Understanding how the hierarchy of your platform fits in with the reporting structure that you need in order to make informed decisions about your marketing is also very, very important. It's during this production phase of your affiliate program launch that thoughts and plans are actively looked at and considered not only for the launch phase, but for the growth and scale phase too often, what we find is clients will come to us with an affiliate program that's incorrectly configured, or is using technology that's maybe too expensive or possibly too cheap. And doesn't provide all of the insight and reporting that's required to manage a global or scaled up affiliate program. The first and final stage of understanding how to put a strategy and a marketing plan together is to look at the delivery. This is a very strategic part of affiliate program management. And that's something that I find most people forget about your delivery needs to show that your strategy is aligned to the rest of your business and understanding how to take the execution and the production stage of growing your affiliate program and pushing it into actual numbers is probably where the talent and the skill really sits behind affiliate program management. Once you've got all of these five steps in sync together, it's incredibly important to make sure that your marketing strategy is joined up and following the same process. Like you would plan a media campaign and like you would market your product to customers. You need to be marketing your affiliate program to affiliate in the same way. You need to be making sure that you're consistently showing them where your program is positioned, where and how they can benefit from it and what your key USP's are. So they can actively report on your product or service, whatever it is that you're selling and affiliating to the customers that need to buy or want to have that product or service. This is where sometimes strategies fall over. So you have the best tech in the, in the industry and maybe have a great team that's supporting it, but without that strategy, and without that, um, understanding of how affiliates can actually support and promote your product effectively and efficiently in terms of the margins that you can afford, this is where sometimes the biggest mistakes happen. So there's four simple steps to keep grinding on for their program. The key thing is to simplify your statistics, sometimes we can get lost in the data and this can lead to bad. Decision-making, I'm a big believer in the years that I've been managing affiliate programs, that there are no bad affiliates. There's just bad decision-making. So when you're running your affiliate programs, and you're looking at your commercial strategies, having clear, simple, and transparent stats can help you to decide which affiliates to work with. And when these things can help you scale your program a lot quicker and can help you reduce your profit and cost margins a lot sooner in the life cycle of your program, you need to be easy to understand. Affiliates are working with multiple programs across multiple different verticals. So how do you keep front of mind with them and how do you make the selling of your program or your platform or your products as simple as possible breaking through that noise and making sure that affiliates really understand how to promote you as you promote yourself, is an incredibly important part of account management. The last thing that I want you to think about is focused on your credibility, launching an affiliate program in this day and age, isn't enough. You need to be able to be consistent about what your message is and who you want to be working with. Your reputation is the only thing that you can control and managing that within the affiliate community is incredibly important. Affiliates now need to be considered as an extension of your own marketing team. If you're not using affiliates this way, then you're missing out on a massive opportunity to grow your business. So make sure that your affiliate team is experienced and that they know how to sell authentically, and that they're doing this effectively month on month. The last thing that I want you to consider is building consistent impact, making sure that your program is being seen and standing out of the crowd. It's not enough to just have a web page sitting there saying welcome Mr. Affiliate or Mrs. Affiliate. You need to be out there actively promoting your program. I talk a lot about this in social selling. I help affiliate managers in our training to understand that they're also ambassadors for their program and learning how to sell as an ambassador instead of how to do cold calling, which no longer really works is an incredibly important part of the video management process. And it's something that I've learned to hone as a skill over the last two decades, managing multiple teams, compare grounds across the world. The other thing that is incredibly important is to keep learning. So if you want to learn how to grow your affiliate program, please get in touch with us and talk to us about booking a free tree article to get over some of the hurdles and jump and stagnant points that might be stopping your program from growing. The other thing that I wanted to say is that our podcast this year is going to have some amazing people coming on board from Matt Ferrari. Who's the chief of chaos and has been in affiliate marketing as long as I have to some of the biggest names in our industry like lab, Bible. I really want to encourage you to sign up to our newsletter and to sign up to the podcast, subscribe and give us a five-star rating. If you like, what you're hearing and join the community to learn how to improve your affiliate program marketing. As we keep sharing the knowledge that we're learning day to day in affiliate insider my ultimate aim for this podcast and for all of the content that we put out on affiliate insider.com is to help you make affiliate marketing, simple, to help you build new relationships and to help keep up immunity growing year on year and month on month. I want to thank you for listening to this short podcast that I've put together this week to share some of these insights, the slides are going to be available on affiliate insider.com. So do you go over there and download the slides and maybe share this message with some other, for some of your team as well. Thanks very much for listening and I'm looking forward to releasing some of the next podcast season episodes with some amazing digital masterminds to help you learn, to grow your digital and affiliate marketing strategy, too. I look forward to seeing you next week.
Speaker 1:[inaudible].