In-House Affiliate Management vs Hiring An Agency

Can an in-house marketer compete with a best-in-class affiliate marketing agency? Consider these five points before you draft that job req.

Over 80% of brands have an affiliate program.

If you’re reading this, odds are your brand is among that 80% or plans to launch one. However, digital marketing has grown more specialized in the last few years—affiliate marketing included.

Publishing models, user behavior, tracking and attribution have transformed. Basic marketing tactics are no longer enough.

In short, affiliate marketing is not the simple proposition it used to be.

While it may be tempting to bring your brand’s affiliate efforts in-house, this isn’t always the best course of action. Your brand may be missing out on the in-depth capabilities offered by an affiliate marketing agency.

In this article, you will see why top brands in affiliate marketing trust us to manage their programs. Here are five reasons to work with an agency instead of managing your affiliate program in-house.

1. More resources to expedite your program’s growth.

Starting and maintaining an affiliate program requires significant time and resources.

This includes:

• Creating the initial offer.
• Connecting with publishers, websites, bloggers, and other influencers.
• Tracking and measuring performance over time.

A lot goes into the process.

Few companies have the combination of internal manpower, historical data, technology, and professional connections to execute a groundbreaking affiliate marketing strategy on their own.

Meanwhile, affiliate agencies are specifically structured to address the unique needs of brand programs. Since they represent multiple businesses, companies share the agency’s resources and expertise to minimize costs and maximize impact.

Consider this:

An internal marketing person may only be able to contact 10 to 20 publishers a day. They also need to set aside time for follow-up phone calls and pitches.

On the other hand, a marketing agency leverages a team of account managers to pitch hundreds of potential publishers in that same timespan.

As an agency, we’re able to build sweat equity faster, making your affiliate program more valuable in a shorter time span than it might take to do yourself. This is because we’re purpose-built for affiliate marketing.

Gen3 Marketing also employs more affiliate resources than any other agency in the world. We bring the power of numbers to every client, including immeasurable mindshare from hundreds of affiliate marketing professionals.

We’re able to leverage efficiencies of scale to identify trends, tap into relationships with our publishers, and find the best fit for your product or service.

2. Next-level data and trend tracking for your affiliate campaigns.

Working with a marketing agency that maximizes affiliate programs across various industries, niches, and outlets helps broaden the perspective beyond the focused scope of internal marketing efforts. In other words, you’re getting fresh insights and strategies for success.

Companies are no longer limited to news and trends that affect their industry. Marketing agencies bring broad-scale insights to the mix to give clients a competitive advantage.

Identifying trends, including methods that are going out of vogue, is critical to the process. It often results in opportunities that can otherwise be missed when the focus is too narrow.

At Gen3 Marketing, we leverage a “hive” of collective knowledge in our approach to affiliate marketing.

This hive is largely data driven. Information about previous successes, campaign results, and other details are fluidly shared between account managers. This enables them to find the best areas to focus their efforts.

The process is like having a drawer full of local takeout menus: You have all the available choices at your disposal, so it becomes a matter of choosing the best “fit” for your current needs.

We’re constantly in communication with thousands of publishers, which gives us insights that we can put to use across our portfolio of clients.

We also don’t have to reinvent the marketing wheel with every client. A lot of the daily research into trends and performance can be applied across a variety of use cases. This means we’re able to get results for our clients faster, reducing the guesswork involved.

Similarly, an agency will serve as a powerful resource when it comes to affiliate compliance, something in-house team members may struggle with.

By gaining a bird’s eye view of affiliate marketing across industries and clients, Gen3 Marketing can quickly identify the best opportunities for your program.

With a finger on the pulse of every industry, companies can tap into this expansive knowledge base to get a better return on investment without the expense of trial and error.

Accelerate growth with the power of agency support and resources.

3. Expert guidance on commission rates and structures.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks of affiliate marketing programs is knowing how much of the sale to share.

The offer should be attractive enough to woo affiliate marketers and encourage them to participate, but the cost of doing so shouldn’t be so high that you give away all your profits. This holds especially true with prospects who already have a high propensity to purchase.

There’s a delicate balance to strike. Fortunately, a dedicated marketing agency can help you find it.

Marketing agencies serve as a knowledgeable and impartial resource for determining commission rates. Due to the depth and breadth of their publisher networks and historical data, agencies have the benefit of knowing how placement and exposure on specific channels and outlets may impact your affiliate sales.

More is more when you’re using a dedicated affiliate marketing agency. You have more people working on your program to get you noticed in more places with more publishers and—ultimately—get more sales. This is one area where cutting corners will be readily apparent in your results.

At the end of the day, you can trust that you’re maximizing your rate structure, avoiding unnecessarily high commissions.

4. Wisdom, experience, and professional insights.

Just as Nike resonates with athletes and The North Face with travelers, there’s a certain momentum that accompanies partnership with a leading agency.

Publishers and top affiliate networks prefer to work with agencies over individual businesses. There’s a higher level of credibility that comes along with a known, proven channel partner.

Likewise, agencies know what publishers want. They’re in the best position to make the right connections with the right people at the right moments.

What’s more, established marketing agencies have the added benefit of knowing the history of their publishers’ preferences and ways of doing business.

The longer an agency has been in business and working with its portfolio of networks, the more insight it has into what performs well with those networks, what the publishers like or don’t like, and what motivates them.

All the above can lead to better affiliate matchmaking. Publishers want their advertisers to have successful programs. Naturally, every party’s interest is aligned around that success.

At the end of the day, we want to create the best win-win scenarios for our clients, our publishing partners, and their websites. We always advocate for our clients and their brands, because we know that their success determines our success.

Our clients rely on our expertise in the industry to know what’s right for a certain space, so their programs perform better.

An agency can fill in the missing pieces of your affiliate program, guiding you on the path to success.

5. Strong and abundant publisher relationships.

Affiliate marketing has been based on relationships from the very beginning. It takes time and dedication to forge a good relationship with even just one publisher. The best affiliate marketing agencies create and maintain thousands of these relationships.

What’s more, these relationships don’t just stop at the coordinator level. They include account managers, directors, executives, and other roles as people move up and advance their careers.

The publisher isn’t going to be on a first-name basis with every business that reaches out to them, but they will know the agencies they work with regularly.

They’ll pick up the phone when an agency calls. We’re representing a much larger body as an agency. Publishers know that, when we call, we’re bringing them something that will be mutually beneficial.

Why go with an in-house affiliate marketing specialist?

Leadership may choose to bring their marketing efforts in house for any number of reasons.

The most common include:

• Greater control, consistency, and flexibility.
• Deeper brand understanding.
• Perceived speed and efficiency.
• More direct integration with internal teams.
• A full-time focus and on-site presence.

While an in-house team certainly provides these advantages, it’s worth noting that it requires significant resources and commitment to hire, train, and retain talent.

Likewise, with the right digital marketing agency, many of the benefits of an in-house expert quickly dissipate. A good partner will offer the flexibility, efficiency, and brand understanding of an in-house hire while still delivering all the benefits of an agency.

As a result, it’s always best to weigh these benefits against the flexibility, expertise, and scalability that agencies can offer before making the call to onboard a new team member.

When you find the right partner, benefits to performance and your bottom line will often outshine the exclusive benefits of an in-house affiliate expert (such as a full-time focus or on-site presence).

Choose the right agency for your affiliate marketing efforts.

An agency can do a lot more for an affiliate program than one might think. The right agency can do even more.

There are certainly pros and cons to hiring an in-house program manager. However, the many moving parts of an affiliate program benefit most from the refined expertise of an agency.

Our agency has already built the professional connections, tracking systems, and strategies to give your program the solid foundation it deserves. Better yet, we can help it grow from there.

Alongside your own metrics, you’ll be able to leverage our learnings from other clients. The brand equity, professionalism, and status of an agency like Gen3 Marketing puts you on the radar of much larger networks.

Partnering with us is among the best ways to achieve your business goals.

Ready to learn more about our process? Message us to see how we can elevate your affiliate marketing program.

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