Here It Is Why Affiliate Marketing Won’t Give Your Brand the Tailored Service a Digital Advertising Agency Will — And Can!

Many times I’ve encountered business owners that, while exploring the available options for growing their brands online, asked questions about our experience with Affiliate Marketing.

For a long time we have partnered with Affiliate Networks, driving extremely profitable campaigns on the affiliate model. When creating our agency Targeto as it is today, we wanted to bring our collaborations with brands to a new level, moving away from the affiliate marketing model that was lacking in our opinion for the long-term value creation we want to provide to our clients. I have written the following article to evidence the differences for a brand/business in working with an Affiliate Marketing model, and partnering with an Advertising Agency like Targeto.

You, business owner, have decided you want to spread your Brand and your products’ online visibility and that the best way to do so is hiring a team of professionals that can help you with the job. You understand the potential of the Digital channels, however you recognise it is a new business world where competences are crucial. As soon as you start your research, you find yourself face to face with various growth options and all of them seem valid. Mainly, if you search for information about how to make it possible for people to see your advertisement, externalising the workload you’ll find yourself frequently meeting options such as: starting Affiliate Marketing and hiring a Digital Advertising Agency.

Which one should be the option you pick?

First of all, let’s see what they are:

• Affiliate Marketing: this is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to a partner for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. If you hire a team in this field, be aware that most of their earnings are from direct ad sales and sponsored posts. That means that an Affiliate Marketing Agency decides what budget they need to invest in organising a campaign. The marketing affiliate takes the risk of the investment. Making their earnings from how much your advertisement spreads, they tend to try to expand a business’ conversation rate using overstating copy and aggressive sales — style. One of the significant factors to generate disappointment in the customers is often a lack of customer service when questions arise, or there is the necessity to change the initial budget. An Affiliate Marketing Agency tends to be in control of the message they want to deliver about your brand and since they want to provide it quickly or else they won’t have a return from the investment, they carry out a marketing plan based more on spreading your message everywhere than spreading it at the audience you want to target.
• Digital Advertising Agency: this is a team of professionals that focus on media planning and media strategy, analysing the customer’s online presence and suggesting tailored solutions to improve their online effectiveness on a more complete level. An Advertising Agency usually works managing the budget the customer allocates to the campaign and discuss every step of the process to respect the customer’s needs and core message about their brand. The primary goal is to promote your brand among the target that is likely to be interested in your product, idea, or message. This also happens when a brand works with affiliates. The great difference is that agencies will also include other elements to help a brand acquire new customers, a marketing consulting element which is not present when working on the affiliate model. For example, measuring metrics and analysing data over time is a crucial part of optimising a strategy: Developing a 1–1 relationship with an Agency Account Manager will ensure that the client will always be up-to-date about any progress made on the Ad Campaign and its results, and will align their full business model in a coherent way. Moreover, the acquisition of the Big data generated from the marketing campaigns helps the brand in leveraging on them for the future development (even after the end of the collaboration).

As you can see, a Digital Advertising Agency is the perfect choice for an entrepreneur that wants not only to expand their online presence of organising a digital marketing campaign, but who also wants to build a long-time online reputation for their company.

How does Affiliate Marketing work?

The problem with the Affiliate Marketing is that to gain users’ attention while staying in a budget, they use a lot of strong slogans or sometimes misleading headlines — when not clickbait!

To understand how this type of marketing works, in the real world, we can compare Affiliate Marketing to a SALE billboard you see while walking down a street. It’s there for everybody to see, but it takes real, genuine interest about the product they’re sponsoring to have someone stop and look at it for more than two seconds. A brand that wants to start gaining results through affiliate marketing needs to “hire” capable affiliates that will sponsor the offer at their own expenses, in a correct way.

People who choose an Affiliate Marketing Agency do so for two main reasons: the agency promises a high conversion rates and a quick return of your investment. It can also appear a cheaper option to pick, but as always happens with investments the more affordable option isn’t always the best one.

There is also another factor to keep in consideration. Sometimes, it could happen that when an Affiliate Marketing Agency starts running ads, you commissioned, the results are immediate:

• Potential customers see your ads
• They visit your Landing Page through the referral link
• The new customers buy your product

Encouraged by the results, you start to produce more, because your esteem tells you sells are developing well.

Then, time passes — usually 30 days or even less. Your ads haven’t been touched or improved, you haven’t engaged with customers because the Affiliate didn’t follow this part of the process, your ads stop generating a Return of investment.

The story ends with you having a misrepresented selling situation which leads you to produce too much since you think you’re going to sell every month like your first one being advertised by the Affiliate Agency.

The truth is that you have no control and predictability over results generated

The Affiliate Agency stops the digital marketing campaign because it doesn’t generate any profit anymore and you are left alone with a stock of products to sell and no digital coverage, due to your campaign being dismissed. The result is clear, great return in the beginning transformed in a huge loss in term of BRAND reputation and investment due to the overstock or failing in predicting the demand.

As we saw, the Affiliate marketing professionals earn money only if you make money in return from your digital advertising, where Media Buying Agencies have in most cases a Fixed Fee, often a monthly one. This difference gives an advantage to customers who pick a Media Buying Agency: they know their team of professional isn’t under pressure to make a quick profit no matter what. They have the time to focus on a specific client and its necessities, studying its case and operating in the best way to ensure a result that comes not only as an increase of customers but also as an excellent online presence. And especially if your brand is new in the market, reputation is a fundamental step to take for building a successful activity.

To build a reputation, you have to stick to what you can promise without failing a possible customer. Witty slogans and bold headlines can be beautiful just in case you can honor whatever they promise. A Media Buying Agency helps you to realise what type of digital marketing strategy suits your business better.

A Digital Advertising Agency seems expensive, though! Or is it?

One of the major misconceptions about having a tailored service is that many people tend to assume that a customised service means an expensive one.

This idea is not necessarily right. When hiring an agency taking care of your Digital Strategy and Media Buying the major advantage you buy is to have control of how much you spend, how you spend, and especially what message you are sponsoring. You are in charge, but with the constant support of a dedicated Account Manager that will guide you through your decisions. Agencies usually don’t get paid on a variable commission model, but they earn a fixed fee. They want quick results as you do, but they’re not obsessed in pushing your advertisement everywhere to gain impressions at all costs.

The Brand’s long vision comes first.

When jumping on a new project I like the agency to develop passion about the client’s business. The agency wants for you to gain new buyers that will eventually become fans of your brand. Converting users to customers and helping you creating a fan base for your brand it the goal. Exciting people in clicking on your ads, and targeting the ones who will more likely do so. We can say the these Agencies’ mantra is quality over quantity.

Besides, if you’re unsure or still hesitant about how you should put your trust in a Digital Advertising Agency, you could schedule an utterly free strategy session with us at Targeto to have our team analyze you online situation. Click here if you’re interested!

What else does an Advertising Agency do?

Speaking about money, this might seem that if you hire an Affiliate Agency, you’re going to pay less. This is not exactly true:

• First of all, a competent Agency is going to create a detailed Marketing Plan for you, meaning that the monthly fees are based precisely on what you need and therefore the workload that is required from the Media Agency’ staff.
• The Agency will work closely with you during the collaboration, to ensure that your ads are regularly spread among the right target, so your money is spent to make sure the visualisations are constant.
• The Agency will take care of the various stages that form the so-called marketing funnel, a plan the illustrates the first steps of your business online until its primary goal: convert users into customers.
• The Agency will monitor the digital marketing campaign you commissioned. For example, through the use of on site ads, used to track how a marketing campaign is going while promoting something.

As you can see, what you’re getting with your money is an entire team ready to think, promote, and push your advertisement for as long as you need or want.

There is another aspect the Advertising Agency such as Targeto takes excellent care of. We’re talking about the interaction between a business and its audience or regular customers.

It’s vital to keep the attention of people not only during the purchase but also before this happens — you want them to be curious about your business — and after — you want to know how their experience with you was:

• Customers are a great way to receive candid feedback, and they can help you bring others if you offer them something valuable. We’re not talking just about offering sales and special deals even if these ideas are good ones. No, you will need more to engage with them. You will need a team of professionals that are able to communicate with your audience, take their feedback, and monitor the engagement. Via this data, a digital marketing campaign can be reinforced or changed to obtain better results.
• Another critical point is the management of your social channels. Every social channel is unique, serves a unique audience, and guess what? It requires a different approach. Targeto knows all of this and can study a social channels plan that will engage with buyers and visitors, redirecting them to the main website or wherever they can find your product.
• And let’s not forget the brand awareness and the brandformance. We bet you heard these words before, but if you’re unsure about what they mean, let’s give them a quick look.

There is brand awareness when people can link to your brand the specific product you offer. It indicates that your idea is unique enough that people, not only your customers, know your philosophy or at least what you sell. This awareness is generated through a carefully crafted digital marketing campaign that spreads in the best way your content online.

We talk of Brandformance, instead, when a digital marketing campaign or marketing actions incorporate goals both branding- and performance-oriented.

• The Agency will use Remarketing techniques to convince users who have already visited your online channels, but that aren’t customers already. This goal can be achieved in different ways — special deals, presentation of the product, offers via emails — but the ultimate result is the same: convincing people to buy from you.

All this you can forget in using Affiliate Marketers, since they focus only on the initial sale, all the rest, branding, customer lifetime value, Remarketing, is on you. Are you ready to manage all that?

You now know how both realities work. A Digital Advertising Agency like Targeto won’t promise you miracles, but results!

Our primary goal at Targeto is to help you maximise the effectiveness of your brand online. As an Agency, we can guarantee you that you will always be supported by one of our expert consultants.

You can find us here: www.targeto.com