B2B affiliate marketing managers are always looking to create more high-quality leads. When you use B2B Affiliate Marketing, you will see a difference in the quality of referrals. You’re on the right page if you’re an affiliate marketing manager looking for avenues to generate more leads. By 2022, affiliate marketing spending will have reached 8.2 billion dollars in the US market, which is expected to increase in the following years.
Image Source – Statista
All the approaches might not work for you, so you must discover one that suits your business. Affiliates are usually trusted content creators in the B2B industry when they promote products or services on companies’ sites.
Is affiliate marketing lead generation the critical ingredient? In this article, we will break down the role of affiliates in B2B lead generation and the use of affiliate marketing to drive high-quality business leads.
What is a B2B Affiliate Program?
B2B affiliate programs let your business generate leads and sales through trusted content creators sharing trackable links to your website. For a B2B affiliate program to work, you’ll need high retention rates, reasonably high-profit margins, and knowledge of content creators in your niche.
To promote business through their channels, B2B affiliate marketing helps you collaborate with reputable content creators, such as influential industry analysts and social media influencers. Successful affiliate marketing examples cover both standard and unconventional places where you can place your affiliate links for software promotion.
You provide a commission to the affiliate partner responsible for the conversion when someone clicks on an affiliate’s link and converts either by becoming a qualified lead or making a purchase. The company motivates affiliates to contribute to your brand’s growth and expansion by paying affiliates for each sale.
How do you know if a B2B affiliate program is right for you?
B2B affiliate marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that should meet several standards to be successful and sustainable. So before jumping right into an affiliate program, ensure the following points,
- High customer retention rates: It’s more sustainable if these sales become long-term customer relationships and continued profits for your business.
- Affiliate programs work best for businesses with high-profit margins, such as software and subscription-based businesses.
- Identify your prime target audience and have an idea of the niche content creators they trust most. Identifying the target audience may also help if you have a relationship with some of these content creators, so it’s easier to form an affiliate partnership.
- By promoting your product/service within their content, these affiliate marketers can reach people they don’t know personally in an indirect manner.
- Whenever an affiliate helps you make a sale, you are willing to pay competitive affiliate commissions in cash.
- Need to know where and how your affiliate program will fit into your B2B sales cycle, including how long an affiliate can earn a commission after someone clicks on their affiliate link.
How Affiliate Marketing Can Contribute to B2B Lead Generation
Set Affiliate Marketing Goals and KPIs
You have clear objectives and KPIs that will allow you to track your performance. These are vital for affiliate marketing lead generation.
Planing essential details such as:
- What are the demographics of your target audience?
- How will you score leads?
- What constitutes success?
- How many affiliates do you desire in your program?
Affiliate programs must fit seamlessly into your sales funnel, so ensure you’ve set your goals and linked them to your sales processes.
The top affiliate marketing KPIs for sales that you must consider are as follows,
- Conversion rate
- Sales per affiliate
- Percentage of active affiliates
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Average order value
- Cost per affiliate sale / Cost per lead
- Overall engagement
- Rate of return/rate of cancellation
- Revenue
- Growth year-on-year
Some other things affiliate marketing programs can be determined by these KPIs, including:
- How well are the affiliate program and affiliate performance doing?
- Whether the affiliate program contributes to achieving the business’s sales targets.
- How affiliate programs contribute to growth opportunities for scaling the business.
Choosing the right KPIs for affiliate marketing metrics is essential to ensure qualitative results, so analyze these common KPIs with your sales operation team and discuss how these key metrics can help you reach your sales goals quickly.
Link Tracking Set Up
How do you track affiliate links? Tracking is vital for affiliate marketing, and there are two common ways to track, which allow you to assess the success of your affiliate campaigns.
Client-Based Tracking
Client-based link tracking for affiliates implies that when a website visitor clicks on a link, it leads them to a landing page. The ID is stored on their browser within a text file known as a cookie, and its lifetime period depends on the brand. Some cookies can be deleted automatically when a user closes the browser or after a period of inactivity; others expire in 30 or 60 days, for instance.
Server-To-Server Tracking
Server-to-sever tracking is also called cookieless tracking, as it is entirely independent of cookies. Nothing needs to be placed on the user’s computer to store information; the data associated with the user and the partner is stored on the brand’s server.
Set Your Affiliate Program’s Parameters
Now, let’s discuss the affiliate program parameters you should consider. A publisher is interested in evaluating the potential of an affiliate program before joining it. For this purpose, you are immediately provided with a range of information before joining the program.
Image Source – Affiliatewp
Key parameters: you can predict your earnings and decide how much you can allocate to buy traffic. Suppose you already have target traffic on the website and monetize it in another way. In that case, you can see whether it will be of higher profit for you to monetize it via the affiliate programs in Admitad or not.
Optimize Your Lead Capture Process
People don’t just fill out a form for no good reason. It is essential to give them a good reason to hand out their precious contact details. Ensure you have all your assets before launching your affiliate marketing lead generation program.
These are going to be:
- Upgraded content
- Free trials
- Webinars
- Quizzes
Focusing on quality here is essential because this is like your bait, and if it doesn’t offer value, then people won’t bite. To optimize conversions and commissions, you should target the right audience for your niche and provide valuable content that meets their needs. Build trust with your audience by being honest and helpful; create compelling calls to action and design attractive landing pages that match your offer. Moreover, follow up with your audience through email or social media to nurture them.
Sign-Up Affiliates
Most affiliates love a lead-generation affiliate marketing program because they don’t have to worry about sales; they’ve simply got to get people to fill out a form.
When signing up for affiliates, you have to treat it as an extension of your digital marketing and pay a lot of attention to your affiliate program landing page. It will be challenging to stand out if you are not using all your marketing and sales knowledge to sell your affiliate program.
Have a clear picture of the type of affiliates you want, such as Social media influencers, bloggers, etc, to tailor your pitch to them. Affiliates have many choices about the program they join and look at the vast affiliate networks. By running your affiliate program, you can offer more personalized affiliate landing pages, vanity coupon codes, and custom URLs.
Hand Over to Your Sales Team
Handing over to the sales team is essential because you don’t want any leads to slip through the cracks. Ensure everybody is aware of the process, as the B2B sales funnel should highlight exactly what steps your team needs to take once a lead is generated.
You can optimize your performance and ensure you’re creating an ROI on your affiliate marketing lead generation. Everything is in your control now, and affiliates can give you all the leads you want, but if you can’t convert. If your lead gen is on point, you should have high-quality, engaged leads; now, turn them into new customers.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing lead generation is a perfect fit for B2Bs, and getting a B2B affiliate marketing plan together isn’t always easy, but it’s often worth the time investment. Set aside time to examine your business and whether a B2B affiliate marketing plan would suit you. With AffiliateWP, setting up referral tracking for your lead generation program couldn’t be easy, and it’s up to you to streamline your processes and attract the best affiliates.
FAQs:
What is affiliate lead generation?
Lead generation is a popular method for affiliate marketers, as it helps businesses reach the people most interested in their products or services and provides potential customers with more information about what they offer.
How do I get affiliate marketing leads?
Getting affiliate marketing leads is about building relationships with affiliates, implementing the right processes, and incentivizing lead generation. If your affiliate management is organized and you clearly understand how your affiliate lead generation fits your sales funnel, it can ensure a steady flow of leads.
How do you generate organic leads for affiliate marketing?
If you don’t have a strong presence in the search engines, you can still create organic leads by leveraging affiliate marketing. If your affiliates have a strong presence in search engines and on social media, then you can create leads in a more organic way than with paid advertising.
What is the difference between lead generation and affiliate lead generation?
The difference between lead generation and affiliate lead generation is the source of your leads. In regular lead generation, you’re creating the leads yourself, but in affiliate marketing, you’re leveraging affiliates to send leads to you in return for a commission.
divya
Divya is a marketer, nature lover & startup enthusiast. Founder of Unifiedist. She has an immaculate experience in SaaS SEO & GTM strategy. She always follows her instinct and travels with her Ikigai.