Affiliate Marketing Vs Lead Generation

Businesses exist to earn profits, and more consumers mean more profit. This is a straightforward equation that requires no stressing.

I don't even need to stress on the fact that lead generation is essential to have some prospective consumers, you will convert 'em only if you have 'em, right? Right. However, there is one thing that I need to stress on, and stress shall I – reasons why you should use affiliate marketing for lead generation.

This article is all about me stressing that fact six times, and by the end of the article, I hope you will be stressed enough to consider affiliate marketing to grow your business. However, before we relate Affiliate Marketing and Lead Generation together, let's do a quick recap of these terms.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

6 Reasons Why You Should Use Affiliate Marketing For Lead Generation

Affiliate Marketing, in layman terms, is a process of earning income in the form of commission, by promoting products of other people. It involves two parties – a publisher or an affiliate and a retailer or an advertiser. Theadvertisers want to send traffic to their websites in return of which affiliates earn a commission. However, the affiliate earns a commission only when the lead is converted into a customer. Sounds familiar? Cool.

From a business perspective though, it is just another marketing strategy that enables sales. However, that's where businesses go wrong, it is not 'just another' marketing strategy, it is more than that and you will know by the end of this blog, exactly what.

6 Reasons Why You Should Use Affiliate Marketing For Lead Generation

Affiliate VS Performance marketing

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Lead Generation is a process of attracting and eventually converting the target audience who are interested in the products and services offered by the company. This process falls under the second stage of the inbound marketing process and occurs after you have been able to attract an audience towards your products.

Some common techniques that businesses use to generate leads:

Search Engine Optimisation
Pay Per Click Advertising
Lead Generating Websites
Online Networking
Webinars
Industry Research Reports
White Papers or e-books

Now when there are so many ways to generate leads then why should you use Affiliate Marketing for that? Well, read on to find out why!

Why should you use Affiliate Marketing for Lead Generation?

1 Greater Incentive for Transparency

Performance Marketers these days are being transparent in lead-generation marketing, for a simple reason that it generates incentives. Retail-focused offers pay you based on the purchases you make; however, lead generation pays based on contact information of the lead. However, since the probability of lead conversion is low, therefore, advertisers look for information that is authentic and has the likelihood of conversion. This is the reason why the affiliates are required to be transparent about the traffic coming to them and in exchange, gain more incentive.

2 Better insight into lead geo and traffic channel preferences

Lead generation through affiliate marketing means that the advertisers can get a better insight into the location of their leads. This part is essential because this way, the advertisers know that they are investing in the leads where their target audience is located. Lesser or no visibility into the locations of your leads means that the quality of your lead generation is slowly deteriorating. Additionally, using affiliate marketing for lead generation provides advertisers insights into the channels that bring the leads of the highest quality.

3 More granular analytics for better decision-making

A limitation of other marketing channels is the fact that the leads don't give their explicit consent to share their data. This limitation is overcome by affiliate marketing, the leads, in this case, always know what they are signing up for and they consent to let their data be used. Since the GDPR has come into play, capturing a lead's information without their explicit information is a big no. And when the leads explicitly permit you to use their data, the data is more granular as compared to the other marketing channels.

4 Low risk

Affiliate marketing involves very low risk, no doubt the marketers these days use affiliate marketing for lead generation. Affiliate marketing allows you to build long-lasting relationships with your leads, instead of using your marketing budget to create leads that need to be nurtured.

5 Limited start-up costs

One another reason why you should be using affiliate marketing to generate leads is the fact that the costs involved in it are pretty less as compared to other strategies. You don't need to invest in employing a team at all; instead, all you need to invest is your dedicated time.

6 Boost your SEO strategy

SEO continues to remain the heart and soul of internet marketing strategies and rightly so. Affiliate marketing aids in this SEO strategy of your organization. The number of backlinks that you end up creating via your affiliate blogs and websites and social pages goes a long way to aid your SEO. This becomes particularly effective if your leads then share the details of your product and brand with their personal and professional network.

Bottom Line

There are a handful of affiliate marketing strategies that you can leverage to generate leads for your organization. Some of them are:

Choosing the right affiliates
Attracting the sales with coupons, deals, and promotions
Leveraging the power of niche influencers
Building a robust affiliate network
Leveraging affiliate promotions from multiple sources
Optimizing product pages for conversions

Affiliate Marketing Strategies have proven to be sure shot of way attracting more leads and then converting them. In fact, more than 38% of marketers consider Affiliate Marketing as one of the best methods of customer acquisition.

However, there is one thing that you need to realize – these efforts do not bear fruit overnight. Choosing the right channels, affiliates and strategies are crucial for the success of your Affiliate Marketing efforts and to boost conversions.

This post was brought to you by a guest author, Jitendra Vaswani.

6 Reasons Why You Should Use Affiliate Marketing For Lead Generation

Jitendra Vaswani is a Digital Marketing Practitioner & international keynote speaker currently living a digital nomad lifestyle. He is the founder of kickass Internet Marketing blog www.bloggersIdeas.com where he interviewed marketing legends like Neil Patel & Rand Fishkin. During his more than 6+yrs long of expertise in Digital Marketing, Jitendra has been a marketing consultant, trainer, speaker and author of "Inside A Hustler's Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom" which has sold over 20,000 copies, worldwide. He has trained 3000+ digital marketing professionals to date and has been conducting Digital marketing workshops across the globe from 5+ yrs. His ultimate goal is to help people build businesses through digitization make them realize that dreams do come true if you stay driven.

For guest post inquiries, please send your request via email to az@affise.com.

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Head of PR and Marketing Communications

Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.

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