As time progresses, the way in which businesses market themselves equally changes. The way we once approached marketing no longer works as it once did — traditional marketing doesn’t work nowadays, especially on Gen-Z. But for marketers entrenched in the way things were once done, how is it possible to move on? What approach is required to garner the attention of people, particularly the younger generations?
A Look Inside Social Media
Social media is the avenue that every business worth their salt should be exploring and creating marketing strategies for. Hundreds of millions of people use numerous social media accounts each and every day, and among them are people ripe to engage with your business.
For anyone involved in your niche of the market, they can be effectively targeted to introduce them to your brand, products, and services and ingratiate them into your business model. It’s even made the communication model easier, with people from around the globe being able to easily reach out to a business at any time, whether with positive feedback, a complaint, or a question, all of which you can respond to in near-immediate time, allowing for regular customer-to-business engagement.
But you don’t have to be the only person supporting your business through social media. Truthfully, you can employ the help of notable social media influencers to promote your brand — people who can speak about your brand, products, and services directly to their own audience. With their help, you can spread your company’s reach across the wide-reaching arena of social media, allowing for more people to learn about your brand, engage with your company, and hopefully convert into long-term customers.
With so many social media apps available for use nowadays, how do you know which is the right one for your company’s affiliate marketing strategy? Furthermore, how do you begin crafting your social media strategy, and where do you start when implementing it? Let’s take a deep dive to better understand all of the facets of pairing affiliate marketing and social media.
Establishing Your Own Affiliate Network
Before you begin crafting an affiliate marketing strategy, you might be wondering how to go about starting your own — e.g. Where do you begin when creating an affiliate marketing program? While you can go about creating your own internal affiliate network, it might not be the best place to start. Creating your own affiliate program requires a lot of time and patience, particularly while moving through the development of such software. It’s not an easy process, and any issue can cause the entire program to go awry.
Among most businesses, it’s recommended that you join a well-established affiliate network to get your feet on the ground and begin running with ease. Rather than concerning yourself with backend details, you should be focusing on high-end characteristics, understanding what decisions need to be made to get your program moving in the right direction, from choosing the best-fitting affiliates to crafting content that your affiliates can implement in their own brand representation work.
At Refersion, our affiliate marketing software is designed to make tracking your affiliates and their conversions easier than ever. With high-end tracking software and a personalized hub for both you and your affiliates, you can effectively communicate with others about the process, all while keeping a close on analytics to better understand just how well your strategy is working for your business.
Rather than pulling your hair out while concerned with software bugs, you can jump into the deep end and begin establishing all of the necessary materials and planning for your affiliate marketing strategy. If problems ever crop up while using our affiliate network, we have the expert staff available to answer and solve your problems, ensuring that you can continue to work unhindered.
Time to Learn Affiliate Marketing
So, you’re interested in joining the Refersion affiliate network and implementing your own affiliate program but don’t know where to start. It’s time to learn affiliate marketing and just how it works. At Refersion, we work to completely onboard you with using our affiliate program, helping you learn affiliate marketing in no time. When working with us, you’re never left alone; we’re committed to ensuring you have the proper knowledge to create a successful affiliate marketing program at all times.
Our training videos and informative guides are designed to make it easier for you to understand how the Refersion platform works. Rather than belaboring yourself with worries of software usage, we make it so you have the mental capacity to consider the fine details of your affiliate marketing strategy instead.
The Right Social Media Platform for You
You understand how the Refersion platform works, you have worked to learn affiliate marketing, and you’re beginning to craft your strategy. Now that it’s come time for the higher-level details, you’re wondering what social media platform is right for you. There are many to choose from, so determining the exact platform for your company may feel difficult.
Consider that you can implement numerous strategies at once, utilizing the strengths of influencers from different platforms to push your company’s approach to its capacity. And yet, with so many available, it can still feel difficult to parse out which is right for you. Here are some of the most popular in the world and reasons why they might make the best fit for your business model.
1. TikTok
TikTok has made serious waves across the world in recent years, with millions upon millions of people creating accounts to view, create, upload, and share videos across the app. Similar to the now-defunct Vine, TikTok has become an interesting app filled with meta humor, political discourse, and Gen-Z trends. Best of all, the user base is vast, with users both young and old and downloads coming from all over the world.
The best thing about TikTok is how popular it is at this time. This is great for any affiliate marketing strategy, as it will be easier than ever to get eyes on your brand and the way it is being represented, whether in a wholesome or humorous way. With many users now becoming famous influencers, it’s best to jump on the bandwagon and make the most of the popularity while it is still fresh.
2. Byte
Developed by one of the co-founders of Vine, Byte has quickly become TikTok’s primary competition. Sticking to the Vine-like model of six-second videos, users now have a hub to create and share videos with ease, allowing for people to post quick thoughts, jokes, and more directly to their feeds. Businesses can benefit from jumping on Byte’s hype by getting notable Byte influencers to either create videos around your brand or to share (reByte) brand-made videos posted to an official business account.
3. Facebook
While public perception of Facebook has ebbed and flowed over time, it still remains the most popular social media app in the world. While users have personal profiles where they share thoughts, life updates, news, and more, businesses can utilize the app to interact with customers, share brand events, and promote upcoming products.
Affiliate marketing strategies are easily handled across the site, especially when crafting partnerships with other businesses and users. One of the foremost ways people tend to achieve this is through creating content for your brand, posting directly to your business page, and then having fellow influencers and brands share it with their audiences. It’s the creation of a mutual relationship to help promote your business to other viable audiences. Best of all, shared advertisements can be effectively targeted to find niche audiences whose interests align directly with your own, increasing the possibility for engagement.
4. Instagram
A photo and video sharing app, Instagram has quickly become a well-curated photo album for many people. For basic users, it’s a way to show off your life — travels, meals, friends, loved ones — to the people closest to you. For influencers, personalities, and brands, it’s been a notable way to show off an aesthetic, an ideal slice of life meant to be impressed upon others.
If you’re a master baker, it’s clean, well-lit photos of incredibly plated baked goods meant to leave anyone’s mouth-watering; if you’re an athlete, it’s showing off your physique, meals, and training regimen, showing the commitment required to achieve such physical success in life. Brands can greatly benefit from Instagram, as the app makes it incredibly easy to conduct affiliate-related posts. Whether it’s a sponsored post or a simple photo with one of your products pictured in the background, your business can work with influencers to easily increase conversion rates.
5. YouTube
With users watching over one billion hours of content every day, YouTube is the internet’s premier video-hosting site. With so many content creators across the site, sharing your brand with other audiences is incredibly easy. Whether you decide to create your own videos and share them across other social media channels or ask popular YouTubers to talk about your brand with their audience, it’s easy to create an affiliate marketing strategy with YouTube.
6. Twitter
Twitter has had a notable presence for a long time now, and it still sits as a massively popular social media app, with people flocking to the app each day to talk politics, art, comedy, entertainment, and more. Brands have recently jumped in on the app, too, updating their approach to become more user-like. With brands acting more and more like personalities, some users are becoming sick of it. So, how do you remain fresh on Twitter?
The use of popular accounts, especially those that sit within your niche, is a great way to bring attention to your brand and its products and services. By utilizing popular accounts with thousands to millions of followers, you can attract a particular type of user, working to get people engaging with your brand with ease.
7. LinkedIn
Originally conceived as a resume and job search site, LinkedIn has evolved into what could be considered the professional version of Facebook — the social networking site. Professionals can now flock to the website to share content, blog posts, job updates, and more to their feed, all for fellow connections to see.
They can personally construct their own brand identity as an employee and even work toward becoming a professional influencer. Moreover, people can still connect with other professionals, creating long-lasting relationships that can transcend from the digital space to real life, allowing the curation of notable job opportunities to come.
Businesses can gain a great deal of traction through LinkedIn, particularly through enticing other professionals to look into their brand. This is especially true for any company offering professional consulting services, as LinkedIn provides a premier space to sell the idea of just that. While the types of approach can be numerous, one of the best ways to achieve success through LinkedIn is to craft your own personalized blogs and posts and have fellow professionals and businesses share them with their own network, working to increase engagement across the site.
8. Medium
One of the most popular modern-day blogging platforms, Medium makes it easy to share ideas, journalism, and brand updates with others. For individuals looking to increase their own brand awareness, Medium provides the ideal platform to do so, allowing users to create personalized profiles and sites where short- or long-form posts can be shared.
For companies, Medium makes it easy to create blog-style feeds where brand updates, information, and expertise can be shared in a second. Once posted, you can attract the help of fellow affiliates to share your Medium articles either through Medium itself or across other platforms, whether that is LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, all to increase brand engagement across the spectrum.
The Bottom Line
No one social media app is perfect, but your business can utilize each as different methods of a multi-channel approach to increase brand engagement and awareness. Consider exploring each to increase your company’s outreach, all while improving the efficiency of your affiliate marketing strategy.
