Affiliate Marketing Still The Way To Go

The number of smartphones in use is expected to surpass 2.5 billion in 2019. 20% of US adults now consider themselves “smartphone only” users, meaning they do not have a home based internet provider and only use their phones to get online (Pew Research). More than 46% of Americans will check their smartphone before getting out of bed in the morning. (Tech Times, 2017, Hubspot)

As far as e-commerce, over 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product while conducting a search on their smartphone. (Google, 2018, Hubspot).  90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before starting their search. (Status Labs, 2018, Hubspot).  48% of customers started searching for the product they bought on mobile first. (Google, 2018, Hubspot).

You get the idea.

When it comes to lead generation, more and more advertisers are looking to mobile, for good reason.

So where and how should you focus on mobile marketing?

With display and banner ads generating lower Return on Investment (ROI), more businesses are focusing on affiliate marketing – specifically using Pay per Call or Pay per Click (PPC).

Pay per click marketing simply means the host company receives a specific amount of money when a user clicks on an advertisement of another company which has placed an ad on the host website.  This is often a cost effective marketing strategy as the advertiser is able to acquire internet users that have at least indicated an interest in their product or service.  However, the publisher is paid regardless of how long the user stays on the site or whether a sale occurs.

Pay per call allows for more stringent criteria for lead generation, including pre-qualifying the lead through keypress options and buffers.  This is often the preferred tool for affiliate marketers, who are compensated based on whether their users or leads purchase a product or service.

They also strengthen your brand’s presence on the major search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo.  PPC affiliate partners play a significant role in monetizing your trademarked keywords and bidding on them so that webpage can be at the top of the search engine results page about one’s vertical, product or brand.

Without affiliate partners, you will be occupying the same space as your competitors.

Some competitors can tend to bid on your trademark keywords since its legal so long as they don’t incorporate your trademark in the title, copy or URL slug.

The good news is that PPC affiliate marketers aid in eliminating competitors’ sites away from yours and curb negative reviews down the search engine results page out of the search space. With this, they promote your brand to see to it that your message is constant even in different properties and channels.

Affiliate networks allow you to monitor your campaign in real time.  This means you can make adjustments in budget, content or advertising to fully optimize your campaign.  You may also determine what ads to display in the search engine and split test the ads to perfection reducing the guesswork often experienced in search engine optimization.

If your PPC campaign is cash positive, it is incredibly easy to scale and increase your budget within minutes, reaping the rewards immediately.  This allows you to quickly increase your profits and fully maximize the potential of a strong campaign.   If it’s not working, you can draw down the campaign to test different ads and strategies or stop altogether – stopping losses immediately, rather than wait weeks or months to see results and accumulate further losses if the campaign under-performs.