Saving on affiliate marketing?
Why you shouldn’t cut back

With the pandemic, some businesses face difficulties like revenue decreases, consumer behaviour and uncertain outlooks. Resulting in them making cuts in their marketing department to quickly save some money. Which is very understandable.

But the pandemic aside, making cuts in your marketing spending can be devastating for your business down the line. This brings marketeers into conflicts about making the right decisions.

One way out of this conflict are investments into performance marketing channels that are directly related to your revenues and transparently tracked and paid for.

In this article, we introduce you to the importance of new thinking in regards to affiliate marketing and why investments into it should be viewed from a sales rather than a marketing perspective.

Affiliate Marketing and its budget needs

Due to the pandemic, a big part of businesses shifted from offline to online, making online marketing your most important marketing channel. Due to this affiliate marketing is the approach many companies are considering to increase their revenue streams.

For affiliate marketing it is very important to work with flexible budgets and push the programs for growth. Fixed budgets stop the momentum of your affiliate program and disrupt the relationships with your business partners as they find it difficult to react immediately to the sudden budget cut. As a result they might not start working on your affiliate program again and  – even worse – increase their activities for your competitors or similar products. The long-term damage of restricted budgets in affiliate marketing is large flexible budgets and a sales perspective.

Reasons to reallocate budget to affiliate marketing

Obviously, if businesses feel the urge to cut their budgets, it is not easy to have some extra spending for affiliate marketing. The underlying misconception, however, is to see affiliate marketing as pure marketing and to ignore sales and commercial thinking. Once that thought has been established, the budget should be shifted from other activities to affiliate marketing, as in affiliate marketing costs are only incurred in the event of success.

Ensuring visibility

Investing in affiliate marketing ensures the visibility of your company in the long run.

Long-term partnerships

A change in thinking is necessary. Businesses should not view affiliate marketing as a one-time affair. Rather, it is about viewing affiliate marketing as a sales activity, building long-lasting partnerships and still benefiting from them in years to come.

Payment for performance and sales

With affiliate marketing, you only pay someone if a sale is made. Thereby you are already making sure your marketing spending is cost-effective. So why would you cut your budget for affiliate marketing, if you only pay for the performance you get?

CONCLUSION

Marketing is tough, but crucial to success. Affiliate marketing offers a flexible approach that is cost-effective, easy to manage and has a positive impact on your business and your brand overall.

Budgeting affiliate budgets just like other forms of advertising doesn’t fit the intentions, procedure and outcome of affiliate marketing. When affiliate marketing budgets are viewed just like TV, print or other online marketing streams, the temptation is to cut budgets uniformly. And that is not the best solution for your business. Instead, affiliate marketing should be viewed from a sales perspective and this should be accompanied by a shift in the budget towards affiliate marketing.