How to Start with Affiliate Marketing for B2B

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing means that your business sets up a program that rewards other businesses or people for giving you leads and customers. When you do affiliate marketing for B2B, you encourage businesses to work through your affiliate program. You can establish communication with businesses through a SMS marketing channel or other communication channels.

If you look at this image, you can see that affiliate marketing usually involves four steps.

1. Affiliates place your ad on their websites.
2. Their customers click on the ads.
3. You track any conversions based on sources. 
4. You give your affiliates commissions based on their leads and traffic that they send you.

This creates a constant cycle for your business and for your affiliates. They constantly advertise your business, get you more customers, and increase your profits. In return, you provide them with money for every new customer or business that they introduce to you. As you use automated marketing software, you can easily keep track of their referrals.

In short, affiliate marketing allows you to work together with other businesses so that you can get more customers and make money while benefiting your affiliates.

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

When you use B2B to improve your affiliate marketing, you can help your business in multiple ways.

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Companies see converting leads into customers, increasing their website traffic, and increasing their revenue as their three main priorities with marketing. If you use B2B affiliate marketing, you can address all three of these priorities to help your business to meet expectations.

When you have your affiliates put ads on their websites, it addresses the first two points. First, you will convert more leads into customers as you increase your number of leads. On top of this, if people visit the websites of your business associates, then they may want to see your business’ products or services. You also generate more traffic through those ads.

For the other point, you can increase your revenue by working with those other businesses. Not only do they find you more customers with an interest in your business, but they also provide you with customers that will likely return. Continue to meet their needs and they will turn into regular customers.

By using affiliate marketing, your business can address the points most prioritized by other marketers. Not only will you generate more leads, but you can turn them into returning customers.

Planning for Affiliate Marketing

If you want to create an effective affiliate program for your B2B marketing, you need to plan ahead of time. Try to keep these planning points in mind.

• Talk with your team.
• Discuss your affiliate marketing with your business partners.
• Figure out how you will manage your marketing.

Make sure that you discuss the affiliate program with your team. Let people know what needs to be done and adjustments that will occur because of the program. This way, everyone will know about the changes and you will avoid miscommunication. 

You need to discuss the affiliate program with your business partners. See what they think about the program, if they want to join, and their percentage for commissions. If you have enough businesses interested and they understand how you will do it, then you know that you can start an affiliate marketing program.

However, don’t limit yourself to existing business partners when considering affiliate marketing. Once you start your affiliate program we recommend you also find new partners, recruit experienced affiliates and media partners. 

Check and see how you will manage your affiliate marketing. See which teams members have the skills to work with your affiliate program and any automated systems that you may need to run it. This will vary depending on your business, so identify the needs of your business.

Proper preparation will help your business to transition into an affiliate marketing plan. This way, both your business and others will know the plan and you can get everything ready to implement it.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Some businesses may struggle with affiliate marketing at first, so you can use these tips to help your affiliate marketing.

• Use automated software.
• Make it straightforward and easy.
• Collect and apply feedback.

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Automated marketing makes the process easier for businesses. As you can see in this example, using segmented campaigns increases metrics, but trying to get a person to segment your audience would be near impossible. You can use automated systems to make things quicker and easier for your business and save you money in the long run.

Always make the marketing and the program straightforward and easy for your business partners. If they feel like they need to go through multiple steps to get their commissions, they might not want to join the program. Make things easy for them and keep it simple.

As you use your affiliate marketing program, you can have it collect data for you. You can use this data to find ways that your business falls short and make improvements to it. This way, you can adjust your plan to meet the needs of other businesses and your customers.

Affiliate Marketing Techniques

To finish off this article, we have some techniques that you can use in your affiliate program.  These techniques should help you to leave positive impressions on other businesses and customers.

• Negotiate commissions.
• Use personalization.
• Provide multiple channels.

Allow your business partners to negotiate commissions with you. Instead of having a set amount, see how much they want. Make sure that you provide them a fair amount, but don’t cut yourself short either. By allowing negotiations, you give your partners more choice and a more flexible affiliate program.

You can personalize channels for your different customers and businesses. Instead of sending generalized emails or text messages, set up your automated software to include their names and other information. Simple acts like this can help to convert customers to your business.

Not everyone wants to use the same channels: while some businesses may want to contact you through email, others might want to use text messaging. Provide multiple channels so that you can use whichever ones work best for your affiliates and customers.

Your affiliate marketing should seek to provide services and features that will appeal to other businesses. Make sure that they feel important and that you cater to their needs. Doing so will help you to form stronger relationships with other businesses.

Final Remarks

If your business already works in B2B, then you should consider using affiliate marketing. Doing so will allow you to work with other businesses and encourage them to send you more customers. By setting up an affiliate program with commissions, other businesses will want to work with you so that you can both make money.

Affiliate marketing allows you to encourage other businesses to share potential customers, partners, and businesses with you. This then allows your business to continue to succeed and grow. Look into adding affiliate marketing to your B2B strategy.