Low-Cost Affiliate Marketing Strategies: Do More With Less

In affiliate marketing, a smarter approach can outperform even the biggest budgets. Consider these high-impact strategies for your program.

If you’re feeling like the affiliate marketing space is getting tighter and tighter, you’re not alone.

Affiliate marketing is a cost-effective, impactful means of getting your product or service in front of target audiences. In turn, it’s drawn a lot of attention, meaning the channel is more competitive than ever.

Getting in front of affiliates who will become your selling partners is a challenge. It requires up-front investments, attractive offers, and a commitment to lasting relationships. These aspects of program design can be the hardest part for many brands.

Things get even more complicated when competitors offer higher commissions or perks that your budget can’t match.

How do you win when you can’t keep up with competitor spending? Believe it or not, it’s possible. We do it for our clients all the time.

In this article, you’ll find ways to succeed against big-budget competitors even when you have a low or limited spend.

Establish your value proposition.

Money has little to do with the value your product or service brings to consumers.

Put budgets and investments aside for a minute.

Next, think carefully about your value proposition and what makes your product unique.

• What problem does it solve for the target consumer?
• Who is the ideal consumer for your product or service?
• What makes your product or service stand out from your competitors?
• How is your brand and offering perceived by potential buyers and influencers?

As with most things, price still matters, but it’s only one of many factors. Consumers know this, and so do affiliates.

Affiliates understand a hot-selling item backed by a brand with a good reputation can bring in more clicks and sales. They also know a lower commission on a great product beats a high commission on one nobody wants or trusts.

So, before you fret over pricing, take a few minutes to define what else you bring to the table. Hone your message in a vacuum so that it stands tall on its own.

In other words, find your value and cast yourself in a way that’s distinct from your competition.

Remember: You have your own story to tell.

This same logic holds true for how you engage affiliates. Design an affiliate strategy based on your own consumer value prop and where you sit in the competitive landscape.

Likewise, avoid impulses to copy the competition. They may face an entirely different set of challenges in trying to grow their businesses.

Identify any overlooked pockets of opportunity.

When you can’t compete with a bigger budget, you need to get creative. Start looking for other “pockets” of opportunity with affiliates that competitors have neglected or overlooked.

For example, consider how your budget applies to your approach. Are you spending evenly over time, or do you often find you’ve hit your spend halfway through the month?

There’s an opportunity there to rethink your program design and even your commission model.

Here are a few more questions to ask yourself when seeking unique opportunities:

• Do your affiliates have certain exclusions or terms that prevent competitors from working with them? Could you work around these exclusions or terms?
• Have you explored all publications and types, some of which your competitors may be shying away from?

Be scrappy and lean in on original or creative approaches. These small pockets of opportunity can yield big results, helping you seize more market share.

Know your true competitors.

On the surface, identifying competitors is easy. Usually, top competitors sell similar goods and services to the ones you do.

In digital marketing and the affiliate space, competitors take on a new dimension. You’re no longer just competing with lookalike products and services. Now, you’re competing with advertisers who partner with affiliates to market products and services in verticals outside your own.

We see this all the time. We’ll bring a new advertiser on board, and they’ll tell us their competitors are A, B, C, and D. Then, when we look at publisher sites (i.e., the key players driving sales in their space). We often uncover completely different competitors based on our data and experience.

As an affiliate marketing agency, when evaluating a brand’s competitors, we typically look at:

• Who has the most visibility?
• Who has the most coverage?
• Who provides incremental ad opportunities?

Incremental advertising opportunities include emails, newsletters, and other placements. This helps us identify who’s really making moves in a given category.

In the context of an affiliate program, this is critical intel. In the right hands, it can uncover opportunities you may have never otherwise known existed.

Strategic thinking, market insights, and innovation—key elements to success when affiliate marketing on a limited budget.

Build strong relationships with publishers.

When you can build better relationships with publishers, your budget becomes less of an issue. You need to know what the relationships look like between your competitors and publishers. Then, you can start finding ways to outmaneuver them.

Building a good relationship with publishers is much like any other type of networking. Communicate well, listen, find areas of alignment, and get to know their model and audience. All the above can help you collaborate on a strategy that serves both sides.

Remember: You and your publishers both want real sales success for your program.

Best of all, your deep-pocket rivals might not have this advantage. If they’re just throwing money at the relationship, they’re missing out on all the nuances that make up a real partnership valuable.

If you can showcase how you’re going to bring more value to your affiliates, you’ve already won while spending less.

Start smaller, dig deeper.

When you have a small budget, it’s often better to go deep in a niche area than try to do too much with too little. Spreading your efforts too thin makes it hard to dive beneath the surface of potential publishers and audiences.

Instead, start with a segmentation and personalization exercise. Figure out the unique subsets of customers you want to reach, then look for the publishers that can help you reach them.

Start building your brand in one channel and growing your relationships with publishers. Rooting yourself in a smaller space can be more effective than loosely connecting to a larger one.

Over time, you will prove that you’re not just dipping in your toe to test the water. It will be clear to your that you’re committed to the channel, the publishers, and the audiences they serve.

Remember, budget isn’t everything!

Money is still an important part of the conversation, but it’s not the only way to win over publishers. Taking the right approach can be just as effective when managing a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

The right agency partner will go to bat for you, honing your value proposition. They’ll apply audience and channel research to your campaign using actual data. Most of all, they’ll improve your chances of appealing to the right publishers for your program.

You don’t have to go it alone. Discover how Gen3 Marketing advocates for your affiliate brand. Our experts have the data, tools, and experience to refine the perfect affiliate solution for you. Contact us today!

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