Ecom Access

With Twitter having exploded into the mainstream, just about everyone is discussing how to use it toward their marketing goals. But where brands are focused on simply building awareness or managing their PR, affiliates need to focus on actual conversions. Well, in this latest episode of Coffee with Nicky, I decided to discuss exactly what the potential of Twitter is for affiliate marketers, and how they should consider using it toward their affiliate marketing goals.

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The more that I use my Twitter account, the more uses I see for the medium. As a social medium, Twitter can be used toward a variety of objectives. And this is no exception for brands. Twitter allows brands to reach out to a targeted market, connect and build relationships with it, and get out their message. In fact, it reminds me a lot of having a client- or journalist-list like so many of us did before the internet exploded into the world of marketing-communications.

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I’ve been traveling quite a bit over the last month, so it’s been a while since the last episode of Coffee with Nicky. In this episode, I discuss my experience with social media, as well as my observations of how it pertains to my relationship with both friends and family. For instance, I recently signed up for a Twitter account, so I touch upon how that’s working for me. I also discuss my experience with Facebook, and how it affect my comfort level with the public/private/professional divide in my life. I hope you enjoy…

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So this is a new video blogging format that I’m trying out. We will get into actual issues in future episodes, but this introductory episode simply explains the format, and my own coffee and tea preferences. Here we discuss coffee, tea, and of course, social media.

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When the economy slows down, marketing becomes an even more important investment. After all, with consumer dollars in circulation, capturing every dollar you can not only adds to your profitability, but to your competitive edge. Of course, with fewer consumer dollars in circulation, controlling your marketing expenditures and maximizing ROI is also more important than ever.

The performance-based model of affiliate marketing, then, makes it a particularly opportune online acquisition strategy. Because you pay only for results, you remain in complete control of your online marketing spend.

Well, recently, I attended the Bet Markets conference in Vienna where I delivered a session on leveraging affiliate marketing to gain both control over your online marketing spend and added intelligence into what strategies are working best. Although the presentation is geared specifically toward online sportsbook operators, the message is something that I would share with all kinds of ecommerce merchants.

In my presentation, I explained not only how an affiliate program can be particularly valuable during a recession, but what merchants should know about the affiliate marketplace if they want to get the most out of this acquisition channel. Specifically, I went over:

1. understanding and managing the merchant-affiliate relationship,
2. determining where affiliate marketing fits into your overall acquisition strategy,
3. and how to choose and affiliate software that can help you best manage your program according to you business model.

This is the Powerpoint from my presentation. It’s also available for download here; simply click through and you’ll find a download button on the landing page.

A couple weeks ago, I attended  Podcamp Toronto and delivered a session titled Monetizing Communities: Ethics and Strategies. In fact, my experience at Podcamp was the inspiration behidn my last blog post. Well, the footage of that session has finally been posted, so I wanted to share it with everyone who could be there in the flesh. The organizers of Podcamp have also posted a media archive of all the sessions. With other presenters including the likes of Chris Brogan, Dave Fleet, Mark Blevis, Terry Fallis and Michelle Sullivan, it’s an archive that’s well worth checking out for anyone who’s interested in new media and online communitiy.

I recently wrote about the difference between markets and communities on OneDegree.ca, and explored how brands should approach online communities, but it’s also occured to me that there is little said about how community hosts (such as bloggers, forum moderators, and podcasters) could effectively monetize. In other words, how do these individuals generate a return all the passion and hard work they’ve poured into a hobby, and turn it into a business. Brands that can answer these questions for community hosts will be in a great position to build lasting and profitable relationships with some of the most influential consumer on the web.

Essentially, these community hosts have built content communities. They’ve (1) generated content, (2) put that content its context by building community around it, and (3) generated conversation around that content. Well, if these community hosts do decide to monetize, they face many of the same ethical constraints that brands who want to engage their communities do. The only difference is that these community hosts are all too well aware of what those ethics are. Their challenge, rather, is in finding revenue model that can offer them the control and flexibility to monetize their communities without compromising them. After all, if the community dissolves, they have no source of revenue left.

Well, I believe that affiliate marketing can offer both that control and flexibility.

1. It’s performance-based model means that community hosts are in complete control of how much they want to push monetization — i.e. there is no pressure from sponsors push certain kinds of content.
2. By finding an affiliate program whose products are relevant to community interests, affiliate promotions can actually add value to the community experience.
3. Affiliate marketing offers more flexibility because community hosts can choose from a variety of channels to feature promotions — i.e. email, banners, sponsorships, text links, coupon codes, etc.
4. Community hosts retain complete control over what their members are exposed to — i.e. they don’t have to promote all of a brand’s products, just those they endorse or are comfortable with.
5. Affiliate tracking codes mean that community hosts can even integrate promotions with multi-media content (such as podcasts) by offering a coupon code.
6. And more custom support means that community hosts can get creatives that complement their community’s spirit, rather than just pushing the brand and its promotions.

Just over a week ago, I attended  Podcamp Toronto and delivered a session (presentation below) on just this topic. Relationships are becoming an increasingly more important factor in the sales process, but some of best online relationship brokers and brands are still struggling to find viable and sustainable ways of working together.I think that affiliate marketing may just be part of the answer.

For community hosts, finding the right affiliate program that features products that are relevant to the community can be an effective way to both monetize and add value to that community. For brands, setting up an affiliate program that offers dedicated support can offer a stepping stone to establishing long-term relationships with communities and their hosts.

When choosing an acquisition channel, it’s important to consider how well that channel complements your pre-existing business model. You probably already know what your business goals are, so it’s important to consider how any given acquisition channel can help you meet those goals.

Search engine marketing can obviously be a very powerful acquisition tool. After all, Google is pretty much the new front page, so while SEO is integral to both brand placement and public relations, PPC can be an essential media buy for the serious etailer.

Of course, the blend of SEO and PPC are right for you business depends largely on your business objectives. Well, a post in today’s Search Engine Journal offers some ways to determine how appropriate PPC is for your business model. The author goes into much more detail, but here’s his breakdown of when PPC may or may not be right for your:

Pay Per Click Is An Outstanding Strategy When…

1. You need traffic immediately.
2. You have a crystal clear conversion goal.
3. You have a product or service people are already looking for online.
4. You want the opportunity to warm up prospects.

Pay Per Click Is Not So Great When…

1. You have very small profit margins.
2. You’re trying to sell something so new that no one is searching for it.
3. You’re in a super competitive niche with little or not competitive advantage.
4. Your target market isn’t internet savvy or does most of their business offline.

Whether you’re considering SEM, affiliate marketing, or conventional media buys (such as print ads and billboards), you should always reflect on how any channel relates back to your business. Some questions you should first ask yourself before settling on any channel:

• Will it effectively target your customers?
• Is it likely to convert given what you know about them?
• Are the costs of leveraging this acquisition channel reasonably within your means?
• If so, are the returns on your investment in that channel going to be constant or will they decrease after a certain point?
• If so, where is that point?
• How will it complement/affect other channels that you’re already leveraging?

Not all acquisitions are created equally, and a large part of what determines the potential of an acquisition channel is your own business model. By have a clear understanding of what your business goals are and then considering how different strategies help you reach those goals, you can help ensure that the strategies you choose, and the extent to which you rely on them, are right for your business.

If an affiliate program is part of your online marketing strategy, then it’s important to approach your affiliates similar to how you would any other business partner. Since an affiliate program is about building partnerships, then, the key to a productive affiliate program is establishing strong relationships with your affiliates. So it makes sense  to give your affiliates the same attention you would give other business and personal relationships. You can do this through effective communication and identifying their needs.

By keeping communication channels open with your affiliates, you can both keep them informed of your latest promotions and reassure them that your affiliate program is a priority for your business. Draw on your experience from other marketing channels and consider all communication channels available to you, such as email newsletter, telephone, instant messaging, forums, blogs, conferences, etc.

To better understand what your affiliates needs, get to know them as you would your target market demographic. Research and analyze who they are, how long they’ve been an affiliate, what they market, and what their conversions rates are. This will help you determine what resources you can offer to enhance their experience and improve your shared results.

You may also consider participating in the affiliate community. By joining forums and monitoring blogs, you can get an understanding of the more holistic issues and identify community leaders who are often super-affiliates themselves.

Although affiliate marketing may be just one of many acquisition channels that your business leverages, it’s important to consider that affiliate marketing is also an industry unto itself. And like any other industy, who you know can often open many doors. Paying close attention to your affiliate relationships and investing in them, then, can help increase the ROI of your affiliate program by raising its good reputation and generating greater interest in it.

There is so much discussion in the world of marketing, these days, about the power of online communities. Well, I think that communities have always been this important. It just so happens that now that we have the internet, many of the communities have moved online or have an online component to them. Something that I once brought up in an article on Markets vs. Communities:

when members of any demographic (market or otherwise) are able to interact, they become a community, and when anyone interacts with that community (brand or otherwise), they become a member of it.

Well, here is the final installment of the five video series that the communications team Shanghaied me into doing, and it’s all about the importance of business communities. For me, business communities have been playing an important role for much longer than Web 2.0 has been around. It’s just that having community interaction archived online really adds value to community experience.

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