With the advent of the internet, E-commerce has acquired a strategic role in deciding the success of ‘Click Model’ of (all) business houses across the globe. Allocation of costs for expanding one’s customer base can be extremely difficult in the digital medium, even though the costs in the digital medium are nothing when compared to the traditional offline markets. Your investment and marketing efforts in the online world should be worthy of your time, energy and most importantly resources that you invest in them
The ubiquitous nature of the internet has allowed merchants (provider of goods and services) to advertise on several spaces on the web. The advertisement can be in the form of a banner on various websites or email messages. The scope of advertising on the internet also includes buying spaces at the top of search inquiries for popular search engines like Google or Yahoo.
Affiliate marketing depends on performance and you, as a merchant, pay only when your commercial performs well. It is a referral-based advertising system, and any growth in traffic implies more cash for the associate (the entity which is advertising for you).
Along these lines, the dealer doesn’t need to pay the partner/affiliate upfront or pay a flat expense with no assurance of results. At the same time, promoting merchant’s good or service make much sense to the affiliate as he receives incentive every time the result increases.
Maximum exposure or increased digital presence is the most imperative segment of any online marketing strategy. By having subsidiaries or distributors you can have your product/service held out for display. Your digital presence can develop exponentially by giving strong emphasis on demographics.
With digital expenses on the rise and the need for conversions becoming more important than ever before, Digital marketers are intensifying their research to target a demography which is best for them. A deep understanding of customer demographics is vital because no single product/service can possibly appeal to everyone. If you know the taste and preferences of the person that you are targeting, you can always change your pitch accordingly.
As opposed to what you would expect, the demographic study of the targeted audience is often ignored. The argument here is that there is less need to analyze traffic from this segment as it’s purely a performance based expense. But that shouldn’t be the case
The majority of affiliates often associate the expense only with the increase in the number of transactions. Whereas, understanding your publishers’ audiences can do wonders to your affiliate program.
There are several high traffic, low conversion publishers in the market, who just drive traffic without understanding the brand image and what prompts people to purchase, leading to a mass of traffic statistic with very little conversion to boast about.
In other cases, when a campaign under-performs, the tendency is to suggest that the advertisement wasn’t comprehensive enough. However, in the majority of cases, campaigns fail because of targeting the wrong demographics.
What’s often overlooked are factual metrics such as age, gender and average income of the users/targeted audience. Publishers are enthusiastic to work with almost every brand however it’s up to the brand to ensure that the audience meets the criteria, otherwise there’s a potential to draw in unwanted, inappropriate guests to the site, which may lead to negative effects on the site itself, for example, a higher bounce rate and shorter visitor duration.
In some cases, affiliates rely heavily on paid search to deliver site visits, which can often dilute merchant’s true audience, leading to negligible impact on the bottom line.
Working closely with affiliates and strategizing campaigns to target specific audiences after taking into consideration the factual matrix/demographic elements can promise an astounding ROI to merchants.
