Head to Head: Affiliate vs. Influencer Marketing
Whether you’ve got a quirky product or a simple service to share with the world, choosing the method to spread your message is where the magic happens. With trust solidified as an integral component of sales and brand reputation, it’s a smart move nowadays to capitalize on third-party marketing methods to bolster your strategy. It’s much like deciding whether to get someone to hand out flyers, hire a sign twirler, or even employ a bold guerrilla marketing tactic in person.
Online, there are two main third-party promotion techniques: affiliate marketing and influencer marketing. These terms are often confused with each other because they both involve getting external parties to promote a brand. The golden thread running between them, however, is that they have an incredible targeted reach, so you can connect with your audience where it matters to them most.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
If you’ve ever read an online blog and seen an in-post carousel of products or watched a YouTube video where the creator promotes a service with their own unique promo code, you’ve seen affiliate marketing in action. Affiliate marketing is all about earning a commission in return for marketing a company’s products. Plenty of brands have these programs in place where relevant creators or fans with a following will encourage others to purchase items and earn a profit from each successful sale. The cycle starts with the seller, who provides special codes or links to the affiliate, who then shares them with interested consumers, who then make a purchase.
Core Benefits
Marketers love a cost-effective strategy, which is why affiliate marketing is so widespread. With a performance-based cost structure, businesses don’t have to fork out an upfront investment. There’s little financial risk here, and the scalability factor and the diverse channels that this type of marketing can happen on are vast. Whether social media, email, blogs, websites, or another touchpoint, potential customers can discover products and services in a heartbeat.
Potential Challenges
The biggest downside to the affiliate approach is that you don’t have much control over how your affiliates promote and represent your brand, even though your marketing success depends on their performance. There can be a lot of oversight as your affiliate program grows, especially since the premise of this approach is more transactional than anything. Although the performance-based cost structure is a plus, it can quickly turn into a downside if your program scales much more intensely than you expected.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Aren’t YouTubers considered influencers? Yes, but their method of promotion differentiates whether it’s considered affiliate or influencer marketing. Suppose you see a YouTube review video entirely centered around a brand’s product, for example, a line of skincare products – that’s influencer marketing. They’ll often include personal testimonials and some sort of call-to-action to drive purchases. Of course, these promotions aren’t limited to YouTube – sponsored posts on social media, blog product reviews, and product showcase live streams are all part of the influencer marketing family.
Types of Influencers
Influencer marketing has a much more complex structure than affiliate marketing, as there’s a lot more weight put on who exactly is promoting your products and services. While you’ll need to partner with an influencer that’s relevant and has a fitting audience base no matter what, the type of influencer they are is extremely important to consider. It might seem right to go for high-profile celebrities and mega-influencers (those with over 1 million followers) with extensive followings. Still, micro-influencers may be able to better reach and engage a specific audience.
Core Benefits
Where influencer marketing has a leg up over affiliate marketing is authenticity and engagement. Influencers typically adopt a more creative and refined approach to promoting a brand’s products, leveraging their authority in their field and the trust they’ve built with their audience. These creators have a strong bond with their followers and thus wouldn’t want to come across as overly salesy and contrived.
Potential Challenges
The costs of working with an influencer are directly tied to their follower count and presence in the industry. Working with high-level influencers is likely to be expensive due to their higher visibility and more extensive reach, while smaller, niche influencers may still offer affordable rates. The best part of this is that influencer size doesn’t correlate to value, but the issue with this is that reach doesn’t correlate to engagement either.
How to Make a Choice
Pretty much all business decisions come down to your current and long-term goals, and this is also relevant to the affiliate vs. influencer marketing debate. If you’re looking for conversions and direct sales, the performance-based model of affiliate marketing matches up with those goals. In contrast, influencer marketing will resonate better if you want to develop a more nuanced and personal relationship with your audience and strengthen a defined brand identity.
How much control do you want over your brand presentation and messaging? Affiliate marketing will let you track performance a lot more closely, but affiliates often operate independently. In the same vein, you’ll want to consider your budget. Are you able to afford the upfront costs of influencer marketing? Or would you rather pay when results occur, like with affiliate marketing? Regardless of the method you end up choosing, clear and enticing compensation structures are key to attracting affiliates and influencers, just like lower playthroughs can make an offer more enticing in iGaming.
