Definition

Content Strategy is a process of creating content that drives key business objectives. It is a plan in which you use different forms of content to include audio, visual, and/or written to increase customer engagement.

Description

Defining marketing goals is of high importance especially when you are set for online marketing. With a content strategy, you can have better planning for your work that is directed towards marketing goals.

Content strategy is a blueprint that helps the marketers know his or her objectives. The strategy revolves around answering things like:

• Purpose of the content.
• What audience to address?
• How do we plan to promote the content?
• When and where to publish the content?
• How to resonate the content with the brand tone.

Building content strategy is about planning, creation, delivery and monitoring of content. The content would not only include words but will surround multimedia and images. A well defined content that caters the needs of the readers will improve the user’s experience.

Example

Canva used a marvel content strategy that took its revenue to $6B. The platform started with two key landing pages for most of their use cases. One was the page for discovery and the other was for creation.

The two landing pages have their relevance. On the left, the landing page ranked for the keywords “design certificates” and “create certificates” and got 16000 visits per month. On the right, the landing page ranked for the keyword “certificate template” which generated a traffic of 33000 per month.

As part of their content strategy, Canva understood the user’s intent. The brand created a landing page that ranked and converted for them. Canva also invested in outreaching backlinks.

In another mind blowing strategy to promote their brand, Canva made people aware of their offering like ”Customizable Zoom Backgrounds”. They launched it during the first time Covid had hit everyone and Zoom calls were a part of daily routine.

Canva wrote about the techniques on their blog that helped them increase their traffic by approximately 226% in less than 65 days (Source: https://foundationinc.co ). They focused on content to market their product and informed the users about “50 best business cards”, varied content like lists, feature articles, interviews, etc.

How Content Strategy Helps the Brands or marketers?

This is how a content strategy can help the brands and the marketers:

1. Content strategy helps the marketers in achieving their goals:

Creating content for the audience that does not fall under your target audience will be a waste of time. The results may then not appear as it seems to be. A content strategy in place helps to define goals and set priorities that even the content efforts are focused on achieving marketing objectives.

2. The strategy in place helps you trace progress:

A short-term and long-term content strategy helps you measure your success in all yardsticks. An effective content can influence more customers taking you close towards the goals.

3. Content strategy helps you identify new opportunities:

Content is to connect with the readers and help them with the new content always. When you have a strategy, you know exactly about the newer places where you can post the content and get new prospects.

4. Content strategy helps marketers cut costs:

Keeping content strategy in place saves you money. You know where and for which platform you have to make investments. Also, with a strategy a brand can concentrate on creating different types of content. It helps the marketers cut the cost.

5. The strategy helps you produce content that converts:

Keeping a perfect content strategy aligned with the marketing goals helps you deliver content consistently across different platforms. You can set standards for medium, decide the tone, and how to leverage the promotional channels. These activities take you close to achieving targets.

6. Content strategy optimises your the marketing team:

Along with setting goals for the company, a strategy defines actionable goals for different team members. It gives them directions to stick to guidelines and proceed in work. Ultimately, the whole team gets more productive.

How to build a content strategy?

Step 1: Define Your Goals:

Define the ultimate purpose for which you need a strategy. It gets easier to determine the strategy and set the timelines which are favourable and take you closer towards your goals.

Step 2: Conduct Persona Research:

You need to identify the buyer’s persona that will help you know what type of content your target audience likes. Knowing that you can produce more relevant content that the readers will consume.

For the existing clients, you need to present a content that is refurbished with what was missing earlier. And for a new target audience, giving comprehensive content shall help the brand grow.

Step 3: Run a Content Audit:

Run a content audit to know the best performing and the worst performing content. Evaluate the results and then take actions to create new content or refurbish what is missing.

Set goals with the changing trends and align it with what your readers expect. The content audit will help you find what your audience wants and what you have been serving. If there is a gap, you need to brainstorm for newer ideas that are trending and can get you a newer audience.

Step 4: Choose a Content Management System

Invest in a CMS to create, monitor, and manage your content across different platforms. The process gets automated and you get to save a lot of time.

Choose from the popular CMS and evaluate how your content performed along with the facts that how you can improve it.

Step 5: Determine the Type of Content

Determine what type of content you want to create to educate your audience. There are different forms that you can use from podcasts to tutorials. Remember, video content is always more engaging than the written content.

Step 6: Get new Content Ideas

Use tools like BuzzSumo, BlogAbout, Feedly, CoSchedule Headline Analyser, etc, to find out the fresh content ideas that you can use for your content.

Step 7: Publish and Manage your Content

Publish and manage the scheduling of the content across social media and other platforms. You can have higher chances of capturing the new audience.

The Future of Content Strategy

The need of creating a strategy will not cease due to the changing marketing styles and the ever increasing demand for the content. Some of the factors that will govern the future of the content strategy include:

Search Engines are Changing:

Updates in the search engine are changing the processes of how it shows the results. A search engine will show different results depending on the place you are searching at.

For example if you search “Salon near me”, Google will show completely different results if you are in California or if you are in India.

Apart from that search engines have also found to rank the content that comes with rich snippets and structure form of content.

Excessive use of mobile search:

As the number of mobile users have increased over the past few years. According to a report published in https://www.newzoo.com , the number of smartphone penetration in India has reached to more than 45% of the population.

This led to an increase in voice search. So the companies had to create and post content that was contextual and could yield results for the term closer to the keywords.

Deeper coverage around the cluster topic:

In order to create content consistently and give maximum information to the readers, brands now have to provide deeper coverage around the cluster topic.

They can post the content on any platform and link each type with another form with hyperlinks.

It gives detailed insights to the readers and helps in different keyword rankings.

Content is for the readers and not for the search engines:

Unlike the previous times when the content was produced for the search engines, the focus of the content has shifted to creating more meaningful content that the readers may like. It increases their engagement and gives high chances of business conversion.

Also Read – Why SEO Content Is Important?

FAQs

What are the essentials of a content strategy?

These are the essentials of a content strategy:

• Reflect organizational’s goals
• Offer people what they want to read.
• It should be useful
• Include facts
• Be consistent
• Be accessible
• Easy to navigate

What are the three components of a content strategy?

These are the 3 components of a content strategy:

• User-experience
• Brand focus
• Content distribution

How is a content plan different from content strategy?

A content plan is the type of content that and the topics you will produce to fulfil an effective strategy. On the other hand, a content strategy defines why you are using the content for like is it for lead generation or to upsell to the customers.

What are the tools you can use for content strategy?

The tools you can use to create an impressive content strategy are:

• SEMrush
• HubSpot
• MarketMuse
• SurveyMonkey
• Hotjar

Definition

Consumer sentiment refers to consumer opinion on their financial health. It indicates how willing the consumers are to spend money.

Description

In a survey report by University of Michigan, it was shown that the consumer sentiment fell throughout the month of January 2022.

Consumers form an essential part of the market, and their attitude, feelings, and behaviour within a market determine how the market will roll. The sentiments define how optimistic the consumers feel in a state of economy.

Consumer sentiments are based on their financial situation and how they feel about spending money. Therefore, the study about the behaviour of consumers helps brands predict the market’s future.

Consumer sentiments are the key indicators of the overall health of the economy. When consumers feel confident about the nation’s overall economy, they are more interested in spending.

Example

After Covid-19, many nuclear families saw the economy slow down during the shutdown era. India’s $2.9 trillion economy remained shuttered during the lockdown period.

Though many companies worked on a half-pay scale basis, a large part of the population had to leave jobs. As a result, the spending power reduced considerably during that time which disrupted the economy and affected the consumer’s sentiments.

Also Read – Why You Need a Professional SEO Consultant?

How Consumer Sentiments Help the Brands or marketers?

Consumer sentiments help the marketers or the brands to understand in which context should the marketing efforts flow to help engage the consumers that allow the brand to grow.

Observing consumer sentiments is essential for investors because it indicates how much demand there will be for the goods and services produced by the companies.

Marketers know how and when they should divert their marketing efforts to convert the audience into loyal customers. The consumer sentiment data makes the brands aware of what kind of advertising will appeal to the consumers.

When consumers’ sentiments are observed closely, the companies can direct their efforts to reduce the gap between the client’s expectations and the delivery.

How to evaluate consumer sentiments?

Consumer sentiment for brands is the best way to gauge how the consumers will react to a product, event, or a campaign.

Sentiments define how consumers will engage with a particular product. This is how you can measure consumer sentiments:

1. Ready for word-of-mouth recommendations:

See how willing your consumers are to recommend your product to anyone. You can find their true opinion about your product using a questionnaire. You can ask questions from the consumers that will help you evaluate whether your consumers are passives, promoters, and detractors.

2. App ratings:

If you run an app and see that your consumers have given feedback on your app, it is a great sign. For a positive rating you can understand what the consumers were looking for. And for negative feedback, you can find out the areas of improvement in the product.

3. Direct feedback:

Use customer feedback form or chats to find out in direct how the consumers feel about the product you sold them. The feedback from the consumers can be translated into data for use.

4. Social media shares:

If your consumers like your product or service, it is most likely that they share about it on social media. Any feedback given there can also be taken as a metric to evaluate the consumer’s sentiments. Shares and mentions help you to use the inputs for further publicity.

Consumer Sentiments-Why is there a need?

There are a few reasons why evaluating consumer sentiments are important:

• Deep insights: It gives deep insights into what the audience is thinking about the brand and what it is that they look for in future.
• Real-time status: Consumer sentiments may change according to the changing lifestyles and external factors like a pandemic or political crisis. Hence it is important for the brands to market their products accordingly.
• Helps improve customer service: When you evaluate consumer sentiments, it helps you improve the customer service also. Like a delay in delivery can spoil the experience for a long time and the consumer may not order anything from you anytime soon.
• Prevents poor publicity of the brand: It prevents your brand from getting tarnished with the poor publicity. You can quickly take corrective actions to fix the damage and make your customers happy.

FAQs

How does consumer sentiment affect the market?

Consumer sentiments are primarily positive when there is an increase in consumer spending power. When the consumers have stable spending power, the economy looks for expansion. On the contrary, if, for a reason, the consumers feel less confident about spending money, it affects the business expansion. The sales decrease, and the market slows down.

Why is it important to gauge consumer sentiments?

The consumer sentiment index adds clarity and provides insights into the information:

• About their own financial situation
• Long-term general economy
• Short-term general economy

What does consumer sentiment tell you?

Consumer sentiments can tell a lot about the economy of a country. It means you about:

• Consumer confidence: Consumer sentiment is mainly dependent on consumer confidence. The two are strongly correlated because only when the consumer is confident it spends further, leading to market expansion.
• Consumer spending: It tells how willing consumers are to spend on a product that depends on their money in the bank.
• Consumer attitudes: Consumer sentiments will also define consumer attitudes, indicating where consumers are willing to spend.

Who uses consumer sentiment evaluation?

Evaluating consumer’s sentiments are primarily important :

• Manufacturers: Manufacturing units need to keep an eye on consumer sentiments because it affects their investment and production.
• Retailers: Retailers analyse consumer sentiment to increase revenues and guide plans and initiatives. As was the case at the beginning of 2020, consumer sentiments shift swiftly, so do the things people want to buy.
• Finance: Consumer sentiments rule the flow of cash into and out of the financial institution. The sentiments can affect the rate of interest and loan volumes. When the demand for a loan is high, the interest rates on the bank are also high and vice versa.

How do you analyse consumer sentiments?

You can analyse consumer sentiments by:

1. Gathering feedback from the customers.
2. Deploying live chat bots to collect customer data.
3. Watch social media to know about consumer’s sentiments.
4. Find the product reviews and feedback across different platforms.
5. Online surveys can help evaluate consumer’s sentiments.

Definition

Closed-loop marketing is a form of marketing analysis to improve ROI. It is a closed loop to describe how sales and marketing work together.

Description

Marketing analysis is always backed by data that provides sufficient insights to make decisions. Working in a closed-loop gives the team a deeper understanding of how marketing activities impact sales.

Closed-loop marketing can be summarised in four steps which helps both the sales and the marketing team to understand the customer’s journey. It will answer questions like when was the first time when customers interacted with your brand. And, it also tells which part motivated them to make the final purchase from the website.

To drive a company’s results successfully, it is important that the two departments work collaboratively without a division. It helps the two departments to share data and create wealth for benefit.

It helps to optimise marketing performance, taking business goals close to revenue generation. It makes the conversion rate better, further adding to revenues.

Example

Sharp Minds Publication deals into selling books (of all kinds) online. The company used multiple channels to make the sales online. They captured the information about the client’s purchase and browsing data.

The company used the data to optimise the marketing initiatives. Using the information, the customers who showed interest in downloading e-books, were given a special discount for buying. The data driven approach helped the marketing team to make better sales.

Essential steps of closed loop marketing

These are the important steps of closed-loop marketing:

• Their aim is to attract website traffic.
• Track website traffic origins.
• Monitor online consumer behaviour and note their areas of interest.
• Trigger automated content delivery for specific targets.
• Analyse results supported by data.
• Continuously evaluate the sales funnels to drive more profit.
• Calculate return on the leads.

Who uses closed loop marketing?

These are the people who require CLM:

• Companies with multiple sales platforms need closed loop marketing. They require highly skilled employees to deliver the required strategic output.
• Retailers, manufacturers, and service providers may require closed loop professionals. They will have to expand the sales through multiple channels to drive business profitability.

Also Read – How to Create a Digital Media Strategy That Gets Results?

Four Steps of Closed Loop Marketing

These are the four steps of CLM:

Step1: A customer arrives on your website. A cookie is set on the referral source.

When a customer comes to your website for a visit, it can be from email, another link or another website. Once they click a cookie sets on to their referral source enabling you to trace the origin of the traffic. This way the data is compiled to find out what makes the traffic on your website.

Important is that you create your website as the hub of all marketing activities like email marketing, reference links, social media marketing, etc. You need to assign a tracking URL at the end of the website link. It enables you to track the origin of the traffic.

For example www.thrivehive.com/blog is a normal link. And attaching a tracking url to it makes it www.thrivehive.com/blog/xyz123.

Step 2: Visitors browse your website and cookies track the visitor’s action

After the visitor visits your website, you will then have to monitor their behaviour like which pages they visit and what is the trajectory of their actions. It will help you optimise the path of visitor-to-customer conversion.

You can use softwares for this or get serious with the backend programming.

Step 3: Visitors convert into leads by submitting the lead-capture form

To monetize the traffic, you need to convert visitors into leads. And for that you would require customer’s information in detail. The best way to get intel from the customers is to redirect the incoming traffic to the landing pages with a submission form. It is called the lead-capture form.

More than telling about the behaviour of the customer, it tells about who the customer is. And this information prepares the lead database for the marketing and the sales team in the company.

Step 4: Lead ultimately becomes a Customer

Establish a customer relationship management system to take care of the customers you have converted from the leads. You can further track down the source of origin of the lead and how you converted it.

Tools required for Closed-Loop Marketing

To set up your CLM, it is necessary that you map all the marketing activities to drive profit after sales.

These are the tools that will be required for Closed Loop Marketing:

• Marketing Software: Softwares that help you to optimise your marketing activities like campaigns, lead conversion, and monitoring results. Some of the best marketing softwares include Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zoho CRM.
• Customer Relationship Management Software: Customer Relationship Management keeps all the activities like sales, marketing, and support teams in synchronisation.

FAQs

Which are the top tools that will help in data tracking in CLM?

Some of the tools that can help in closed loop marketing include:

• Google Analytics
• Nutshell
• Marketing Cloud FX

What is closed loop reporting in marketing?

Closed loop reporting in marketing is a system in which data and information collected through closed loop marketing is shared by marketing and sales professionals. It helps both the teams to use the data for their deliverables.

Definition

Click-through Rate(CTR) is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times the ad is shown.

Not everyone will click the ads while they are browsing online. Hence, the relevance of ads is said to vary.

Description

You went out shopping at a sweet shop which also had a chat counter. In one hour, about 50 people came to buy sweets as it was a festival. But only 20 of them stopped to eat the chart. This is exactly the same as the click-through rate.

People click on online advertisements only when they have interest in it. The rate defines the number of users who click in a specific link to the total number of users who view the ads.

CTR helps to measure the success of the advertisement or the campaign that helps the brands generate revenue.

A high click-through rate is favourable as it informs that a high number of users are clicking on the website. A good click-through rate for an email campaign ranges from 1% to 5%.

Example

Pramod owned an apparel brand in the name of Pramod Fashions. He wanted to expand his market in new territories.

The business was completely online which motivated Pramod to run an ad campaign. In a few days of running the campaign, Pramod observed that out of total 1000 impressions, 500 people clicked on the ad.

The figures indicated that the CTR was 5% =(50*100)/1000. The CTR was good hence Pramod decided to run the campaign for some more time.

Also Read – How to Reduce Cost per Lead on Facebook?

Importance of CTR

CTR is important because it helps you to understand your customers. CTR helps you identify what actually worked when you were trying to reach your target audience.

• If you probably have a low CTR, it signifies that you are targeting the wrong audience.
• It also means that your content does not pursue the clients and convince them.
• CTR also tells Ad Rank in the search engine which determines the position of your ad on the search results page.

Remember that it could be possible, if you have a low CTR for multiple ads, Google might think that any new ad will also have a low CTR. A poor CTR can lead to low ad positions, even if you bid high.

A high clickthrough rate implies that the quality score is high. And a high quality score allows you to improve and maintain ad positions for lower costs.

Instance when higher click-through rate is bad for business

In these instances, high click-through rate can be bad for business:
When you are paying for every click.

• When the ad spends increase due to lots of clicks.
• If the click is on the keywords that are highly priced. These keywords will not drive profit for the business.
• If there is a high usage of irrelevant keywords which means spending money without bringing additional revenue.

Ways to achieve a high click-through rate for your ads

Achieving strong click-through rates for your ads can be improved by:

• Bidding on targeted keywords.
• Making cost-efficient clicks.
• Closely integrating keywords with ad text and landing pages.
• Segment keyword groups for close targeting.

FAQs

What factors affect CTR?

These are the factors that affect the click-through Rate (CTR):

• Imagery
• Call to Action
• Keywords
• Ad Positioning

How to improve the CTR?

You can improve the CTR by working on these:

• Use the best ad extensions like sitelinks, call extensions, promotion extensions, price extension, etc. that improve the reach with the target customers.
• Use smart bidding strategies that allow Google to automatically push your ad in auction when there are higher chances of getting clicks.
• Improve the quality score of the advertisements. The keywords used in the ads define the score of the ads from 0 to 10. It also indicates the relevance and quality of advertisements. Ad with higher quality score helps brands higher rankings and the cost of advertisers is less per click.
• Create different types of ads because the ads with responsive texts are more likely to receive higher click-through rates.

Also Read – 12 Ways to Improve Your Click-Through Rate in Google Ads

Definition

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which affiliates earn commission for generating more sales and higher traffic for another company’s products.

Description

Companies look for higher sales and conversions than they made last time. And for that, one alternative the companies may use is that of affiliate marketers.

Affiliate marketing is promoting other companies products and services in exchange for money. In simple words, it is the online sales technique that helps affiliates to earn commission and motivates the product owner to increase the sales.

The sales can be generated by sharing about the product in a blog or a video on a social media platform or website. It is a performance-based marketing opportunity that helps affiliates generate extra income.

The brands incentivise the affiliates who promote their product/services by offering them commission. So you can say that with affiliate marketing, companies can have increased sales while affiliates have better earnings.

Example

Airbnb, a rental brand, allowed individuals to earn by renting their place and acting as a host. The company started with their affiliate program and soon they had Airbnb in 191 countries with more than 4 million Airbnb properties.

Importance of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the future of marketing and advertising. Starting business online is equally challenging as is offline marketing. Let us see the reasons why affiliate marketing is important.

• Generate source of traffic: Affiliate marketing helps generate sources of traffic for different affiliates within their network. It helps to promote business with the affiliate audiences making it an effective way to register presence in the online media.
• Cost effective: The way of marketing is cost-effective. Affiliates promote a third party’s business online on social media platforms. Because the medium is the internet, the promotion is cost effective as it is reaching a mass audience using the internet.
• Improves competitiveness: Affiliates leverage social media presence to spread the word for a third company’s products and services. Capitalising the power of blogging, search engine marketing, email marketing, and professional networks, a brand can drive more revenues which improves the competitiveness of a brand.
• Gained reputation: Affiliate marketing is not going to fade soon, rather it is going to stay for long. By connecting with an affiliate you can conveniently broaden the audience. The brand promotion leads to building trust with the new as well as existing audience.
• Get inbound links: Inbound links are crucial to get higher ranking on search engines. This pushes the revenue upwards for the company.

Future of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has led to an increase in the massive sales for a brand. Studies have shown that affiliate marketing business in India is expected to exceed up to Rs.66168 millions approximately by 2025.

Affiliate marketing seems to have a great future as:

• India is the country with the largest start-up ecosystem as mentioned in the research by NASSCOM in 2019.
• The Internet is a strong medium for businesses to sell their products online.
• Customers are interested more in buying the products online. The sales online accounts for 6.5% of the $836 billion retail sector in India. About 24 percent of respondents choose to shop online many times in one week. This entails the truth that affiliate marketing has high prospects.

How does Affiliate Marketing work?

This is how an affiliate marketing works:

• You will have to find and join an affiliate program.
• Then make a choice of offers which you want to promote.
• In the next stage, obtain a unique affiliate link code.
• Share these links code on different social media platforms or channels.
• After every sale, you can collect your commission earned.

FAQs

What will you have to do if you want to join an affiliate program?

If you want to join an affiliate program, you will have to:

• Find and explore the affiliate programs.
• Choose the ones you are interested in.
• You will then obtain a unique link or code for it. The code will be used for the customers to motivate them to make purchases.
• You will have to share these links on your social media, blogs, etc.

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is free from the burden of planning, developing, and supporting. These are the benefits of the affiliate marketing:

• It is a low risk activity.
• There is no initial cost or investment if you want to start as an affiliate marketer.
• Affiliate marketing can help generate passive income.
• You can gradually scale the income after evaluating the ways to drive traffic towards the brand products/services.

How much percentage of commission affiliate marketing pays?

The affiliate marketing can pay 1% to 20% or at times more commission to the affiliate marketers.

Can beginners start with affiliate marketing?

Yes, beginners can start with affiliate marketing. They just have to grab a code and then post it across social media to earn commission.

Is affiliate marketing the same as influencer marketing?

No it is not the same. Affiliate marketing is called a promotional program to drive traffic for business. Under affiliate marketing the affiliates have unique digital IDs enabling them to get unique clients. After each sale, an affiliate earns a commission.

In influencer marketing, an influencer has a large audience whom they can influence to make a purchase decision. They can use social media platforms to promote products with their audience.

Definition

An affiliate manager is an individual who takes care of managing online affiliate publishers for advertising of products and services.

Description

Stats show that affiliate marketing growth has an annual growth rate of 10%. And 15% of the digital media industry’s revenue is generated from affiliate marketing.

Advertisers have realised the relevance of affiliate marketing, and more than 80% of advertisers allocate more than 10% of their budget towards it.

The role of the affiliate manager is to:

• Reach out to affiliates and manage their accounts.
• Target the problem long before it occurs.
• Optimise the ad campaigns.
• Build strategies and align them with the company’s goals.
• Keep an eye on the program so that there is no breach in part of the job.

The job of an affiliate manager is to manage an end-to-end affiliate program for an online advertiser. They have to push the performance of affiliate programs by creating promotional content that influences the target audience.

In addition, they have to create banners or engage with email marketing to ensure the campaign runs smoothly.

Example

One of the popular affiliate marketing programs for affiliate managers is the Amazon affiliate program. The Amazon Associate’s Program helps the content creators and bloggers earn money by driving traffic to their site.

The affiliates can choose from the millions of products that fit their niche. The affiliates can use easy link-building tools to direct their audience to their recommendations. In return, the brand gets to see higher sales conversion and affiliates earning some percentage of commission which is their earning.

Importance of an Affiliate Manager

Affiliate managers have vast affiliate marketing experience. The managers have their importance because:

• The professionals are expert in affiliate marketing experience. They are aware of affiliate networks to target and know how to profile your ideal affiliates.
• Affiliate manager helps to monitor the cost. They help you track how much you spend against how much revenue you make. The managers know how to deploy resources, marketing materials, and engage to maximise earnings.
• Affiliate managers help to streamline affiliate management efforts. They make the communication efficient and strategise well to retain the affiliates.
• Affiliate managers run the affiliate relationships deeper. They turn the affiliates to brand advocates. The affiliate managers know with experience how best they can keep affiliates connected.
• Affiliate managers bring in new ideas in the business to promote growth and revenue.

Affiliate Managers Role in 2023

Affiliate promotion is a great way to boost traffic on your website. It helps the crowd gain awareness and authority for the brand.

Affiliate marketers have options to choose and move ahead when metaverses have captured their attention. And the affiliate managers can help to monitor the work. Affiliate managers can:

1. Promote virtual products by becoming an avatar.
2. They can manage creating a virtual world of the brand and help utilise several metaverse platforms to increase user engagement like in games.
3. Moving towards a cookie-less future, affiliate marketing will witness a digital revolution on social media platforms, search engines, etc. The affiliate managers will have to use on-page analytics, social listening, and conversational marketing.

Mistakes that Affiliate Managers Should Avoid

These are the mistakes that affiliate managers should avoid:

• Competing with other affiliates
• Not concentrating on affiliate marketers
• Not supporting affiliate marketers
• Not paying affiliates properly

How to become an Affiliate Manager?

Without a goal there will be no results. If you want to be an affiliate manager, you will have to understand internet marketing, social media, and affiliate programs. To become an affiliate manager one can take up courses or can take on-job training also.

An affiliate manager will have to recruit website owners who want to participate in the company’s affiliate marketing programs. Interested candidates who want to pursue affiliate management.

FAQs

What are the jobs and roles of an affiliate manager?

These are the jobs of affiliate managers:

• Recruit new affiliates for the programs and screen their applications.
• Ensure to receive referral traffic from affiliate marketing.
• Provide proper tools for affiliate marketing.
• Monitor day-to-day operations of affiliate campaigns so that the returns on investment are maximised.
• Develop brand-specific strategies to drive the volume of sales in a definite period.
• Maximise performance with the improvement of marketing practices.

How can affiliate managers maximise the performance of affiliate programs?

An affiliate manager can maximise the performance of the affiliate program by following these steps:

• Share content that educates the affiliate marketers.
• The content should be created after a complete SEO analysis.
• Explore new opportunities for conversion through YouTube, Instagram, and PPC.
• Collaborate with influencers, bloggers, YouTubers, etc., to divert the organic traffic to the company’s main products.
• Resolve issues for the team and help them work better.

How do affiliate managers find affiliates for their program?

Affiliate managers have an extensive directory of affiliates to whom they can reach out when they start with a program. The affiliate managers can also find affiliates using affiliate recruitment tools like Publisher Discovery. These tools can help in finding affiliates of their own vertical or domain.

Also Read – Roadmap to High Ticket Affiliate Marketing 2024

Definition

AdSense is a free-of-charge service from Google for website publishers who want to earn money by displaying ads next to the online content.

Description

Website publishers look for ways to earn money online. They use AdSense to show relevant and engaging ads to the site visitors. Publishers can also customise the looks and feel of ads to match their site. It will leave the user experience unimpacted.

The advertising program was launched by Google in mid 2003. It is a popular advertising program that provides website owners an opportunity to monetise their traffic. Using AdSense, website owners can offer more relatable brand information to visitors and encouraging them to make purchase.

In AdSense, advertisers can run ads in different formats to include text, images, HTML ads, video ads, and much more. Testing different ad formats can help figure out which drives the maximum revenue.

AdSense is a simple way to earn money by displaying ads. It is a free-of-charge activity for the publishers. Google AdSense is made available on desktop, laptop and mobile devices.

Example

Brandloom.com is the best technical blog in India. The website is popular and has thousands of visitors every month. To monetise the website further, the publisher placed the ad by Avinash Chandra. The ad speaks of how users can supercharge the website’s growth. This is an example of how “www.brandloom.com” monetizes the website.

Benefits of AdSense

These are the benefits of AdSense:

• Any website that has relevant information can use Google AdSense. There is no pressure to sell a product.
• The tool is all about getting clicks on the advertisement.
• One AdSense account can manage ads on multiple websites.
• There is no need for the website publisher to know the complicated technical process.
• It makes the users go beyond web browsing by placing ads on search results and RSS feed.
• The AdSense is convenient to manage and it does not require time investment at all.
• The most important benefit of AdSense is that it is free of cost. The account creation and registration process is not complicated at all.

How does it Work?

A website publisher who wants to use AdSense must first create an AdSense account. Then the publishers will have to insert a small code in the website pages and that’s it.

Google will then display the targeted ads on your page that are relevant to the content of your website or based on the search that users conduct.

The website visitors will gradually start clicking those ads and you will be paid for it. AdSense works on a cost-per-click basis. The revenue generated is shared with the advertiser.

The caution of work is to:

• avoid artificially increasing the number of clicks.
• Not encourage visitors to click the ad.
• Do not click your own ads.

If Google finds any suspicious activity on your account, it can suspend your account for fraud.

Ways to improve the performance of ads?

This is how you can improve the performance of your AdSense Ads by following these ad implementation tips:

• Optimise the site to improve the revenue from AdSense Ads.
• Follow the ad implementation tips. Try Auto Ads. It is simple. You can concentrate on the content and Auto Ads take care of controlling the number of ads on the pages. You can choose from in-page format, multiplex ads, and try formats which increase the viewability of the ads.
• Make your ads more viewable by reducing the page length, place ad at the right place that is above the fold, create engaging content, increase page speed, use vertical ad sizes.
• Update the ad code and change the fixed -sized ads to responsive ad units.
• Refer to other best practices of ad placement and stick to ad standards.

FAQs

How is AdSense different from Ad Networks?

AdSense programs differ from Ad Networks in the sense that it delivers ads that are served by Google. In this, if a user clicks on the ads, then Google pays the publisher depending on the type of the ad. AdSense gives a huge source of advertiser demand which implies that your Ad Space has huge demand.

With AdSense, do I have to choose which ads show on my site?

No, Google suggests you ads automatically that are targeted to your content and the audience.

Who decides which ads to show on the website?

In AdSense, there is an automatic auction to select the ads that will appear on the pages. Then the ad that pays the highest will show on the site.

Also Read – 

• How to Advertise on Instagram?
• A Publishers’ Guide to Ad Networks

Definition

When an ad is placed in a specific place or for a specific audience for promoting visibility, it is called ad targeting.

Definition

You would like to get served with the food that you ordered, right? If you order pad thai noodles and you receive garlic noodles instead it will be irritating. The restaurant will lose its credibility which in turn will be a loss for the owner.

In the same manner, placing ads at the right place is important for the target audience. Ad targeting is the story of placing the ad in front of the target based on their behaviour and interests.

Placing ads anywhere will not help the purpose of earning revenue until you expand your reach at the right place. Ad targeting provides benefits to both the marketers and consumers. The marketers get the right option to approach their audience and at the same time consumers get exactly what they want.

Taking ad target to another level, marketers now create personalised content to engage the target audience for a longer time. With the right ad and perfect audience, the chances of increasing leads and higher conversions gets better.

Example

Slack started with a fantastic ad targeting the corporate professionals. Pandemic has laid pressure on people to conduct meetings for every small thing. But slack approached people by advertising “25% fewer meetings by making communication better across the company.”

Importance of Targeted Advertising

Targeted advertising is aiming for a specific audience that has shown interest in your product and services. This is why ad targeting is important:

• It shows that your ad spends which you are incurring on promotional messages will give you higher return amongst the target audience.
• Ad targeting saves your time also. You do not have to wait for the results when you have already invested money.
• It minimised wasted advertising.
• The brands had direct communication with the audience.
• Create more effective advertisements for a specific audience.
• Ad targeting helps with lead generation and conversions.
• It helps brands gain customer loyalty.

How to do Ad Targeting?

Advertising is a medium that helps you spread the word for your product or services so that you earn revenue. For ad targeting, this is what you have to do:

• Know where your target audience is from.
• Use audience insights and then post your ads on different channels.
• Evaluate the response for the advertisement and then compare with the investment made.

Best Practices of Ad Targeting

This is what you can try for ad targeting:

• Serve consumers the content that they want.
• Make it interesting.
• Set the frequency at which the ad should be shown.
• Find the right place to show the advertisement.
• Think outside the box when you create an advertisement.
• Don’t be specific about the audience.
• Keep measuring the impact.

FAQs

What are the types of ad targeting?

These are the types of ad targeting:

• Behavioural Targeting: Customer segments can be created using behavioural targeting (also known as interest targeting) based on web surfing activities such as pages visited, queries made, and links clicked.
• Contextual Targeting: Ads are displayed on websites with material that is relevant to them through the concept of contextual targeting, such as when a website about potty training puppies has an advertisement for dog toys.
• Geotargeting: With geotargeting, you can inform people in your local area about a forthcoming event taking place somewhere specific or a product that depends on a specific location. In fact, a lot of advertising systems offer you to limit your marketing campaign by city, state, zip code, etc.
• Demographic Targeting: You can target people based on attributes such as age, gender, job title, and education level that match the demographics of your current or ideal client list by using demographic targeting.

How can you improve ad targeting?

This is how you can work in improving ad targeting:

• Gather information about your target audience.
• Identify what clicks and converts for the audience.
• Personalise the messages for the audience.
• Produce quality content.
• Expand your audience reach by monitoring different channels where your audience exists.

Also Read – How to Create a Digital Media Strategy That Gets Results?

Definition

Ad Space is the place on the website where the ads will be displayed for online advertisements.

Description

Many users from the target audience are using the internet daily, which is why online advertising is gaining popularity. The average time spent on social media per day by Instagrammers is 28 minutes daily. It explains the advertisers’ needs and why they require a website to place an ad.

You have to pay the price for posting or getting the ads published in the newspapers. Similarly, for online ad spaces, there is a price determined by ad format, website traffic, and placement.

Prime ad spaces available on a website are a website footer, header, and sidebar that can accommodate text, animation, video, and graphics. In common, the 125X125 button above the sidebar is the most popular.

Example

Rishita owned a website www.rishitabeauty.com that sells beauty products. The site gained popularity amongst the users, making it a top 10 ranking website on Google.

Because of its popularity, other beauty product dealers wanted to place ads on this website. Rishita offered them the best deal and earned revenue by placing ads.

Ways to sell Ad Space on your website

Selling ad space on the website means you have to monetize it. Therefore, dynamic websites must evolve to offer a personalised experience to the readers when they sell ad spaces. These are the four ways to market an ad space:

• Connect with Ad Networks: Ad Networks help publishers seek guidance to sell their ad space. The network allows the right advertisers to connect with the right publisher based on content type, budget and audience.
• Native Advertising: This type of advertising involves selling ad space that fits with the design of the publisher’s website. It is essential to reach the right audience with personalised content. Advertisers believe native advertising is the most convenient and trustworthy way to monetize the ad space.
• Sell Ad Space Directly: Publishers can sell the ad space directly to advertisers by finding advertisers of the same industry who will be interested in their brand. The success of the advertisers depends on the publisher’s popularity. You can try and source the prospects manually and build sustainable relationships.
• For selling ads directly, the website owner will have to:
  1. Generate leads, convert those leads, and build long term relationships.
  2. Research media in the same content category and seek brands that advertise them.
  3. Publishers can approach the advertisers by showing them page analytics.It should include page views, bounce rate, user reach, segment, and engagement.
• Affiliate Marketing: Affiliates can publish the advertisers’ ads in exchange for a commission. It is one of the most common ways advertisers are using these days. Affiliates are promoters who help you by adding links to your blogs and pages on their social media platforms. They talk about the product in their content and then promote their blogs.

FAQs

What does selling an ad space imply?

Selling ad space is negotiating the blank space available for hosting ads on the website. The places are sold through bidding or directly to the advertisers. Ad spaces can have any kind of ad that include sponsored content, banner ads, and videos.

Are there any basic requirements that an online publisher should meet before selling their space to advertisers?

Yes, the publisher has to meet some requirements before selling the ad space, which includes these:

• Traffic: The publishing website should have a sizable audience that visits the website regularly.
• Quality Content: The website must have high-quality content that attracts visitors and motivates them to return to the page.
• Intuitive Design: The website’s design must be intuitive and easy to navigate with clear instructions.
• Loyal Audience: A dedicated audience is valuable, which gives a spike in traffic. A loyal audience can boost traffic more than expected.

How much can a website owner make by selling the ad spaces on their website?

Depending on the traffic on the website, you can earn up to Rs.2000 to Rs.15,000 per month by selling an ad space on your website.

You can join advertising networks like Google AdSense as it will give you complete control over advertisements that will display on your website. You can also control the ads that can be displayed on the website.

Also Read – 

• Display Ads Vs Search Ads: What’s the best for you?
• How to build an effective marketing strategy