I’ve worked in the B2B SaaS affiliate marketing space for 1.5 years and here’s my take on it: Affiliate marketing is not for the weak. It demands a lot of time, effort, and dedication to succeed. But the challenge is what makes it rewarding. The key to making it worthwhile? Using strategies to maximize your return on investment in your brand. Here are some core strategies we discuss with our affiliates that help them increase revenue.
Top 4 Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Maximize ROI
1. Humanize your brand.
Even though we work in the B2B space, we‘re still speaking to people — not businesses. Treating your audience as just another transaction isn’t going to set you apart from others. People respond better to more personal and relatable interactions because those types of interactions tap into our innate desire for connection.
“Your audience is made up of individual people with their own interests and needs. By humanizing your brand and focusing on authentic, personal interactions, you can create meaningful connections that drive better results,” says Lynsey Mc Hugh, Senior Affiliate Manager at HubSpot.
“Understanding your audience’s perspective and tailoring your approach to resonate with them on a more personal level can really make all the difference in maximizing your ROI.”
Let’s talk about how you can humanize your brand.
Use AI but don’t fully depend on it.
AI is one of the biggest tech advances we’ve seen in decades, which makes people feel a type of way. Some people are fascinated and excited, while others are apprehensive and skeptical. Many are both. In a recent HubSpot study, 76% of business professionals suggested that, “People should use AI/automation in their role, but they should avoid becoming overly reliant on it.”
AI enables humans to do their work, no doubt. But it shouldn’t be used to do all of our work for us. To be a successful affiliate marketer, your audience has to care about what you have to say. You can develop a loyal audience by engaging and connecting with them through your experience, wisdom, and creativity — all of which AI lacks.
Another consideration is that AI makes mistakes. It can output false information without you even knowing it. You’re playing a dangerous game if you rely solely on AI-generated content without verifying its accuracy.
So, how should you use AI in affiliate marketing? We encourage our affiliate partners to use AI for tasks like:
Brainstorming
Generating content outlines
Writing catchy headlines
Rewriting existing content for different platforms
AI can give you an extra boost when you’re hitting a wall, but it’s in your hands to create something that’s truly unique and valuable. All great things take time and AI simply helps us do our work faster.
Experiment with products and share your findings.
When you have personal experience with a product, it enhances your credibility and authenticity as an affiliate marketer. Your recommendations carry more weight because your audience knows you have used and benefited from the product yourself. This is why social proof like user reviews, case studies, customer testimonials, statistics and data-backed resources are so effective in the B2B SaaS market.
Social proof allows real users to share their stories, which can be incredibly persuasive when those stories reflect satisfaction with a company’s products. We encourage our affiliate partners to test out the HubSpot customer platform and document their usage of our software. They may consider creating content that discusses:
How I overcame this business challenge using HubSpot
How I achieved all-time-high goals using HubSpot
Why I like HubSpot more than a competitor’s solution
These prompts also support our affiliate partners’ E-E-A-T strategy (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) which can impact how their content ranks in search. The E-E-A-T principles are included in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a handbook used by Google to assess the quality of a website‘s content. It’s Google’s attempt to make sure your content is valuable and helpful to users.
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The “experience” element of the E-E-A-T guidelines highlights the importance of including relevant and personal experience in your content if you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website. Dorissa Saint-Juste, Senior Affiliate Manager at HubSpot, likes to emphasize the significance of providing a unique perspective that differentiates your content from company websites, other marketers’ blogs, or typical reviews.
“What sets you apart? Sharing your own personal experience with a product is a valuable approach. With prospects already leaning toward a product choice, they need less convincing compared to those searching broader terms, which makes your job a little easier,” Dorissa says.
Giving your content a human touch with anecdotal evidence will improve the discoverability of your content, build trust with your audience and compel them to buy the products you promote.
2. Optimize your website.
Not every B2B affiliate marketer has or needs a website, but most do because it serves as a central hub for their online presence and marketing efforts. But simply having a website doesn’t do you any good if it’s not optimized for SEO and the user experience. Strategically organizing everything on your website makes sure that your content is easily accessible, coherent, and valuable for your audience.
“Imagine your website is a well-organized library. Tidy shelves, clear signage, and easy navigation make it enjoyable for visitors to find the information they need,” says Rex Gelb, Senior Director of Paid Acquisition and Affiliate Manager at HubSpot. “Just like you wouldn‘t want to search for a specific book in a chaotic and disorganized library, users don’t want to navigate through a cluttered website. Keep your digital library in order for a seamless user experience.”
Website optimization through organization can be broken into two parts:
How your website’s content is interconnected
How the individual pieces of your content are created
Site Structure
At the macro level, organization refers to the structure of a website. By organizing your content in a logical manner, you provide a clear roadmap for visitors to enjoy exploring your site and find the information they need. Plus, a well-organized website enhances your SEO, helping search engines index and rank your content.
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You’re doing yourself a major disservice if your website lacks thoughtful organization. You might have the exact information that someone is looking for, but if they can’t find it quickly and easily, they’re going to leave your website without converting.
Whether you publish blog posts, videos, courses, or ebooks on your website as part of your content strategy, you should consider using categories. What does this look like in real life? Let’s use this blog you’re on right now as an example. HubSpot’s blog homepage provides a navigation menu that gives each type of content its own dropdown menu. For example, the “Blogs” tab offers several categories to choose from. These categories group content related to the same topic into one bucket. Visitors can even explore more granular topics if they’re looking for something specific within a category.
It’s almost impossible to provide a positive user experience without easy navigation. As a matter of fact, when Clutch surveyed 612 people, 94% of them said easy navigation is the most important website feature. Don’t underestimate logical categorization and intuitive user pathways when growing and managing your website’s content.
Content Structure
Organization matters at the micro level of content creation just as much as it does at the macro level. How you organize your thoughts can determine whether visitors stay on your site or leave without ever looking back.
How can you make every piece of content a masterpiece, you may ask? By focusing on these three elements:
Skimmable: Make your content quick and easy to digest to adapt to people’s shorter attention spans.
Quotable: Provide valuable and memorable information that visitors will want to share with others.
Actionable: Define the next steps you want visitors to take after consuming your content.
Here’s how you can implement those three principles into your written content:
Use subheadings, bulleted lists and bolded key phrases
Add meaningful visuals like infographics and screenshots
Keep your paragraphs short (4 sentences max)
Take a thought leadership approach
Incorporate reliable statistics
Implement concise and impactful statements
Provide clear call-to-actions
While these general ideas of optimizing content overlap across various forms such as video or digital courses, it’s crucial to know how audiences of different platforms and mediums prefer to engage and…
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