Affiliate Marketing Trends To Monitor

It goes without saying that over the last few years, nearly every product, service, and business has somehow been affected by the pandemic caused by COVID-19. In many cases, the impact hasn’t been entirely negative. Most brick-and-mortar businesses have shifted their services online, which has had its series of benefits.

With a significant shift toward digitization comes a need for quick and applicable alteration to digital marketing. Therefore, we expect a few reinforcements to digital marketing practices across all industries.

New Marketing Trends For Affiliates

With a constant shift in consumer behavior, affiliate marketers must engage in industry news and understand the driving factors behind the purchases or subscriptions from potential customers.

To keep up with the constant marketing evolution, you must evaluate effective marketing practices from the past and assess the changes that customers want to see for the future.

Zero Parallel has done precisely that, and here are the outcomes of our predictive analysis.

First-Party Affiliate Networks Will Replace Third-Party Cookies

Recently, Google announced that the company would get rid of third-party cookies, suggesting that they’ll change the programmatic advertising industry. Likewise, Apple has made tracking by cookies an optional feature in applications within the App Store.

These actions and advertisements from leading tech giants have prompted a cookie-free future for web browsing and targeted advertising. Affiliate publishers and advertisers will witness how cookies are phased out, calling for new tools to replace cookies.

Google’s effort to push for a more private web experience means that affiliate marketers and advertisers will have to adjust to the new rules. That means affiliate networks will need to adapt their strategies accordingly.

What Do These Changes Mean For Affiliate Marketing?

• Since data will not be available for purchase from third-party sources, the consensual data will need to be collected from direct audiences.
• First-party data will focus on lead generation, so we will begin to see more backlinks that direct users to the advertiser’s website.

While affiliate marketing will significantly change once the cookies are gone for good, they will soon replace cookies with applications like Privacy Sandbox and FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), creating a sustainable environment for affiliate marketers.

New Automation Tools

Automating your digital marketing strategies will help your marketing team work more efficiently, allowing them to offload much of their work to an automated process, and as a result, spend less time on tedious tasks.

How Do Automated Tools Fit Into Affiliate Marketing?

With a flooded market comes an increased need for authenticity within brands. Now more than ever, consumers value contributing to brands that are truthful and transparent regarding their marketing practices. Using AI elements in your marketing efforts will help you protect your brand’s online presence and provide the transparency clients often seek.

Tools like interactive voice response (IVR) improve caller experience and streamline a customer’s hold time on a phone call. Other forms of AI, such as chatbots, supplement the same purpose but on the website front to quickly resolve a customer’s queries and issues.

AI methods are also helpful when gathering and analyzing consumer data. This will come in handy for data-driven campaigns and decision-making based on the information you have on prospective clients.

Revival Of Data-Informed Content In Your Marketing Strategy

Analyzing your data is just as important as it is to collect it. So, when it comes to marketing, data and research are inseparable, especially for affiliate networks.

Conducting data analysis helps creators and businesses focus on specific target audiences, creating content that attracts and engages readers. Without it, most content is created to reach the largest possible audience, which is never successful and leads to a waste of time and resources.

Even if you have a business operating in a niche industry, it is advisable to gather data on existing prospects and leads since it can give more insights into what your customers might need and what you can offer them.

Alternative Search Methods

With a growing number of consumers turning their search efforts toward voice and visual search, search engines have come to cater to searches that include videos, images, podcasts, among other recommendations.

The increased role of alternative search methods has, in a way, replaced long-tail keywords and text-heavy searches. The principle for marketers here should be to prepare content that can be easily found and well-optimized for the emerging search formats.

Keywords and search are closely related, and that has been the case for years. As a result, search keywords have been an excellent way to measure what your customers want and what they’re looking for.

To keep up with the constant need to appear first on search engines, you should create strategic content around central or core keywords to boost your SERP rankings.

You can start this by optimizing your content through conducting keyword research and a thorough analysis of keyword data. Also, stay informed about industry trends to strategize content plans better and stay ahead of the changing curve and competition.

Include Personalized Content In Your Marketing Strategy

According to an Accenture study, up to 91% of consumers are more likely to opt for the services and purchase products from brands that give recommendations and offers relevant to them.

That fact alone suggests that customers expect personalized experiences from brands they contribute to or are interested in. Yet, as more marketers begin to understand the importance and potential of content marketing, only a fraction has developed a well-thought-out affiliate marketing strategy to help their content reach a wider audience.

This has called for companies and brands to increase personalization across websites and other channels to win over a new audience and slate of customers. In turn, this will help generate new leads in a highly competitive marketplace.

Here are a few ways you can boost the engagement of your customers on your platform or website and leverage privacy as a benefit to your customers:

• Give first-time visitors an exclusive offer on your website: This offer can vary to anything from a discount code on your services, a referral-based commission, sign-up bonuses, or gated content.
• User experience is critical: It is safe to say that slow-loading websites and pages scare potential customers, leading them out of your online platform. If you want to improve this experience for visitors, make sure that your website works on all platforms, including mobile, tablet, and desktop.
• Create Relevant Content: Search engines will continue to prioritize well-written, high-quality content. Therefore, it is good practice to include industry-specific keywords and topics within the content that you put out.

Flexible Advertising

Today’s advertisement world demands more flexibility from publishers and advertisers.

First-party affiliate networks and programs will start to provide much-needed flexibility and easier access to data. Likewise, some affiliate programs will run through networks of independent sellers to leverage the lack of third-party cookie access.

Marketers will need to increase their first-party networks since more affiliate networks link directly to the advertiser’s website. In addition, trackable links posted by affiliates will be utilized as redirect links, meaning that there will be fewer affiliate members acting as middlemen between the publisher and advertisers.

In short, advertising methods will bring about more transparency, which will help these businesses maintain trust with their audiences and foster open communication between affiliate members.

Acceleration Of E-Commerce

Adobe Digital Economy Index reported that American consumers spent close to $8 billion online, more than what was initially forecasted in March 2021. What is unusual about it is that this trend has shown no signs of stopping yet. For this reason, market experts anticipate a rise in e-commerce volume and scale. Instead, however, the digital marketing industry has witnessed unprecedented growth this year.

The combination of old and new trends will create target markets for advertisers and publishers alike. In addition, the uncertainty revolving around tracking tools will require publishers and advertisers to develop better lead generation strategies.

Even with all tools and marketing channels available for affiliate marketers and publishers now, it is harder to win over new customers than to keep existing ones. For this reason, maintaining a good brand image may be one of the biggest challenges for affiliates.

Video Content Will Dominate The Field

According to Cisco’s Global Device Growth forecast, more than 80% of the consumer online traffic will consist of video. Since more and more customers favor video content over written text as their primary medium, using video-driven content for marketing campaigns has proven to be an effective means of marketing.

It’s easy to conclude that video content has become a driving force for some unique marketing strategies and advertising efforts. So, investing in video content to supplement your marketing campaign will put your product and services into a win-win situation since videos are more consumable by audiences. Plus, video content is versatile because it can be shared on pretty much any media platform.

Digital video ads are the future because they allow advertisers to connect with audiences in their preferred format. Owing to their format, video ads give advertisers unique opportunities to engage and convert prospects better than standard image ads or written content — making them a great contributor in the future of digital advertising.

Expanding The Role Of Social Media

There are currently over 4.4 billion social media users worldwide, and since every user owns several social media accounts on different platforms, this number can be safely doubled. Furthermore, with the rising difficulty of connecting with customers, the marketing focus gradually shifts from traditional marketing channels to social media outlets to increase brand value.

Social media has been an indispensable tool in raising brand awareness and increasing lead generation for some time now. So, it comes as no surprise that many marketers and advertisers have shifted their focus more toward social media platforms. They optimize their marketing efforts by using stories, short posts, and limited-time promotions, where they can fit necessary information in short 30-second videos.

As a brand, it is essential to be the initiator of ideas instead of trying to hard-sell your services to customers. So here are a few things to note during your next social media venture:

• Educate your audience about company-related topics to help potential clients understand why they need your services.
• To drive more traffic to your website and new leads to your business, make sure that the content on your home and product pages is straightforward and to the point.
• Utilize influencers to emphasize your marketing efforts and connect your brand with customers more organically through social media promotions made by influencers they already trust.

Consumers are more interested in high-quality content. However, with the amount of information already present on the internet, it is challenging to find unique content that appeals to educated audiences. In addition, with third-party cookies parting ways, good content will build trust and credibility for brands in the privacy-first digital age instead of the traditional methods.

Uniting your network partners into one dashboard is easy with Zero Parallel’s Open Market. You can try out its extensive toolset and opt for a free demo.