Imagine spending less money on influencer partnerships and getting 10X more conversions. The only way to do that is through influencer affiliate marketing.
When you watch influencer videos, they often recommend products and provide a code or link to use when buying them. That’s how it works.
Influencer affiliate marketing combines two effective marketing strategies to drive sales and increase brand awareness:
- The reach of influencers
- The performance-driven nature of affiliate marketing
In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about influencer affiliate marketing and how to leverage it to grow your brand. Let’s start!
What is Influencer Affiliate Marketing?
Influencer affiliate marketing is a strategy where influencers promote a product or service and earn a commission on sales. It combines influencer and affiliate marketing and compared to influencer marketing it provides a better way to track conversions.
With influencer marketing, brands pay influencers a fixed amount upfront for promoting a product or service.
Influencer affiliate marketing is performance-based collaboration where influencers earn a commission for each sale generated from their referral.
To track the conversion, brands give influencers a unique affiliate link or code which they share on their social media profiles. Each time someone makes a purchase using their code or link, influencers earn a commission.
Benefits of Working With Influencer Affiliates
One of the biggest concerns for brands that do affiliate marketing campaigns is finding affiliates who can influence purchasing decisions.
Generally, all smaller influencers accept affiliate deals, but not all of them lead to an increase in sales. So, it’s important to find influencers with affiliate marketing experience who have provided results for companies they’ve worked with.
Here are some top benefits of working with influencer affiliates:
1. Increased brand awareness
With influencer affiliate marketing you can target specific audiences directly. When an influencer posts about your brand on social media they increase visibility. The more followers they have, the more increased brand awareness for your brand.
A good example is the ASOS #AYSauceChallenge, which required participants to showcase their unique style and creativity using ASOS items.
ASOS worked with 25 popular TikTok creators with a combined following of 219 million, resulting in a 25% increase in brand awareness, over 2 billion views, and 349.5K videos. The campaign also had a 50% increase in ad recall.
2. Higher credibility and trust
People buy from people they trust. If they enjoy an influencer’s content, they are more likely to trust their product recommendations and make a purchase.
Also, it’s proved that Gen Zs generally trust influencers more than celebrities, so the message they share comes across as an honest recommendation from a friend instead of a paid promotion.
3. Easier to measure compared to influencer marketing
Measuring conversions from influencer marketing can be challenging. You can easily track the number of new followers you have, your content reach, and post engagement but it’s often difficult to know the number of sales made.
Influencer affiliate marketing simplifies this. You can directly measure sales and revenue generated from an influencer’s posts using trackable links or codes. These tools also let you see clicks and conversions, providing valuable insights for future influencer partnerships.
How to Find The Best Influencer Affiliates
The best influencer affiliates fit like a glove with your brand. Their audience aligns with your target audience and can easily influence people to purchase. This is how you can find them.
1. Use an influencer discovery platform
There are lots of platforms that make it easy to find influencers to work with. You can search for influencers in your niche or location and easily find the perfect match.
But, finding the ideal influencers for your brand goes beyond niche and location. One of the biggest challenges in influencer affiliate marketing is finding influencers who can actually sell your products to their audience.
That’s why, finding influencers that already have experience promoting affiliate links is crucial!
Using our dashboard you can search through 100M+ influencers (with verified emails). In just a few seconds you can create a custom list of influencers who are:
- Promoting affiliate links
- From a specific niche or location
- Present on multiple social media platforms (TT, IG, YT)
And 40+ parameters so you can go as niche as you want.
Here’s a step-by-step process on how to use the dashboard:
- Go to our creator discovery dashboard and register for free.
- Use 40+ data points like niche, keywords in bio, number of followers, engagement rate, location, etc. to search.
- Select the option of “Promotes affiliate links” to get info on only those creators who work as affiliates for brands.
4. Click on “Show Results” and get your list.
5. You can now export this list, access every creator’s email in the list, create a mailing list, and start with your outreach.
2. Search on social media
Begin your social media search by using hashtags related to your industry. For example, the hashtag #fitness will show you various fitness and nutrition industry creators.
You can also use other product-specific hashtags like #sneakers, #dinnergown, etc., location hashtags like #australia to target a specific region, or industry-specific keywords like fitness, fashion, photography, etc. to see the top creators in this niche.
3. Recruit your customers
Customers are the best advocates for your brand, especially if they love your product or service. They’ll engage in word-of-mouth marketing by sharing their positive experiences with others, which will help drive sales.
To find loyal customers, manually search through your social media follower list, online communities, forums, and review websites. But, while this works for small businesses, it can be time-consuming for large organizations. Hence, you’ll need a creator discovery tool that provides details of creators who have interacted with your brand.
You can sign up for free to our creator discovery dashboard to easily find creators who are also customers.
Here’s how it works:
- Import your customer list (emails, Instagram or TikTok followers, etc.)
- We will match your list with our 100M+ creator database
- We’ll find every creator on the list, plus verified emails and 40+ parameters for each creator.
4. Build an affiliate program
Build an application form for your website and promote it on social media. Remember to ask the applicants to provide links to their public profiles so you can check out their posts’ reach, engagement, and style.
Here are some tips and examples to guide you:
- Have a clear framework for collaboration, your guidelines, and commission rates to help influencers understand how they can benefit from your program. Sephora highlights the benefits for affiliates.
- Clearly state the type of influencers you’re looking to work with. This ensures you only get the most relevant applicants. Amazon associates perfectly describe this.
- Include FAQs to address your affiliates’ concerns. Here’s how Typeform shows FAQs for its affiliate program and provides clear answers.
Pro-tip: If you’re not ready for an influencer affiliate program, consider social media brand ambassadors. You’ll be able to reward ambassadors with different incentives – not just cash – while still enjoying the rapid reach of social media and the easy ROI tracking.
5. Hire an influencer outreach agency
If you want experts to find and reach out to influencer affiliates, it’s best to outsource the whole process. You can hire influencer outreach agency to handle the entire process, while you’ll still have time to do what’s your best at – running your business.
At influencers.club we have a team of 40+ creator outreach experts who will find your perfect influencers, reach out to them, handle the replies, and negotiate until they accept the partnership.
Check out how Pearpop connected with 100K+ creators.
You’ll receive weekly reports detailing the number of influencers we’ve contacted, open rates, reply rates, (we can send up to 800K emails per month with a 36% reply rate), and the current pipeline.
Get your ideal influencers to be part of your affiliate program
Let’s talk so you can share your requirements and goals and we can explain to you how we can achieve that.
6 Tips to Effectively Work With Influencer Affiliates
Working with influencer affiliates is a great way to get a high ROI on influencer partnerships. But if you have more affiliates in your campaign, it’s a lot of work to manage and track everything.
Here are some tips to help you through the process, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks:
1. Create a proper commission structure
Designing an attractive and fair commission structure is essential for motivating influencer affiliates. You should offer competitive rates that reflect the value influencers bring to your brand, considering both fixed and performance-based payouts.
For fixed payouts, you pay a certain amount or a percentage fee on every sales activity. However, the prices may vary for performance-based payouts.
This is because commissions are paid out at a predetermined rate per action (such as a click, view, download, or lead generated) and vary by the affiliate. The advantage is that you can pay out your affiliates based on their performance rather than the price of what they sell.
For influencer affiliates, consider their influencer fees during payments. The most common models are:
- No upfront fee, and you pay for results only, making it a low-risk investment
- Pay a small fee and give them your usual commission rate
- You pay a higher fee and give them a lower commission rate
Depending on the influencer, it can also be a hybrid version. Meaning, you can pay an upfront higher influencer fee and a lower commission rate per result depending on your structure.
Still, set a competitive commission structure that your brand can continuously pay regardless of the number of affiliates you have.
2. Set clear expectations
Have an influencer brief to help you set clear expectations. This brief contains all the content guidelines, specific deliverables, and performance metrics to help them do the job.
To create a brief, think about the following;
- What goal do you want to achieve with the campaign?
- Are there specific rules on the type of asset or content they share to promote your brand?
- What key performance metrics will be used to measure success?
- What’s the payment structure and timeline
- How many posts will they be required to create for your brand, and is there a specific format?
- Can they promote all your products, or is there a specific item?
This way, everyone is clear on what is expected and you can focus on tracking conversions from your campaigns.
Read more: How To Connect With Influencers
3. Develop a process for tracking sales
When working with affiliates, you can track sales by setting up unique affiliate tracking links or codes for each affiliate. This allows you to identify which sales come from each affiliate and accurately attribute commissions or payouts.
Additionally, using affiliate tracking software such as Post Affiliate Pro, Tapfiliate, or LeadDyno, can help automate the process and provide detailed reports on sales generated by each affiliate.
These tools simplify the tracking process and offer valuable insights into affiliate performance, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated.
4. Collaborate on content ideation
Engaging with influencers in the content creation process leverages their creative expertise and ensures that the content is authentic and resonates with their audience.
If you are launching a new fitness product, collaborating on content ideation can look like co-creating workout routines or challenges featuring your product. A good example is this Gymshark x Leena Deebb collaboration featuring new sets from the Gymshark women’s collection.
Content collaboration helps blend your brand’s message seamlessly with the influencer’s style and voice, leading to more genuine and impactful promotions.
5. Focus on finding the right influencer affiliates
The right influencer affiliate can help you reach your target audience more effectively, create engaging content, and drive more sales. A good example is the Joybird x Chrissa Sparkles collaboration to promote the Barbie Dreamhouse furniture collection.
Chrissa Sparkles is a perfect fit for the Joybird collaboration because she embodies some core traits associated with Barbie: a love of pinks and pastels, sparkles and glitter, humor, vibrant home decor, and lots of stylish looks.
Here are a few ways to find the right fit and some key factors to consider to determine whether an influencer affiliate is suitable for your campaign and business:
- Which social media do you plan to run your campaign on?
- What type of content do you want? Images? Videos?
- Does the influencer create content relevant to your campaign?
- Do they have a relevant audience? Do they fit your niche?
- Does their audience trust them? Do they have high engagement?
In general, the right influencer affiliate is more about relevance to your brand than having a large following.
6. Make the process easy for your influencers
Simplifying the collaboration process for influencers can significantly enhance their experience and productivity. This includes providing clear, concise guidelines, offering easy-to-use tracking and reporting tools, and maintaining open, supportive communication channels.
Provide a detailed brief highlighting your expectations. Give them marketing materials and assets in different formats for promotion, and where necessary, allow for creative freedom.
Periodically update influencers on the performance of the products to enable them to restrategize where needed and make more sales. You can also give them free products for more social promotion and UGCs. The more options they have, the more likely they’ll find what works.
To Sum Up
A recent study shows that 54% of consumers will purchase a product if an influencer has positively reviewed it.
That, plus the fact that there are no costs unless there are conversions, makes influencer affiliate marketing one of the most effective ways to promote your brand or products and see fast results.
To find the right influencer affiliates to work with, visit our creator discovery dashboard and search through our database of 100M+ creators using some of the 40 filters. Then, follow the processes outlined in this article to start your influencer affiliate marketing and grow your brand.
If you don’t have the time and resources to test and adapt your influencer affiliate marketing strategy, let’s talk. We can handle your entire strategy from finding to reaching out and partnering with influencers for affiliate marketing.
FAQ
There is no set commission for influencer affiliate marketing, as brands decide which commission structure they want to use, whether fixed payments or performance-based payment structures. However, commission rates are usually between 10% to 40%.
Yes, you can. However, ensure that the influencers you use are trusted by their audience enough to influence purchasing decisions.
By simply promoting their affiliate links or codes in their content and encouraging their followers to buy the product or service, usually at a discounted price.
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