You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by affivermedia.com. The chapter and verse of everything you need to know about running a successful affiliate program for your business. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies and ma tech providers who operate, support, or manage affiliate marketing programs around the globe. If you want to launch, scale, and grow a successful affiliate marketing program, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing, and tune in to industry experts who are getting behind our mic to share tactical insights and practical knowledge to help your affiliate program grow. Here you'll discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing, how to run your affiliate program successfully and gain industry insights from experts and practitioners from around the globe. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Now here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, an industry veteran, your affiliate marketing guide and the founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_02Welcome back, all you lovely listeners, to this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, where we'll be diving into part two of our intensive interview with Todd Crawford from Impact.com. Tune in now to listen to his advice about the future of affiliate marketing.
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SPEAKER_02What do you think the future of this channel looks like? Like, where are we going in the next five years? What are going to be the key things that you think are going to happen that might be big news?
SPEAKER_00For us, we feel very strongly about creators and influencers. I think, as you mentioned, some of the lower funnel micro, mid-size influencers are better managed under a partnerships team. They have more experience recruiting, contracting, measuring, and optimizing these types of partners. We're already seeing either teams consolidating or coordinating to help each other because of their experience. I think PR teams and or you know brand building influencer teams are gonna exist. Like if it's really aligned for you to work with athletes or certain types of larger creators that are gonna just be paid per post. But you know, it's been our experience that once you get below that, the hybrid, you know, pay per post plus revenue share, or this concept of always-on influencers, similar to affiliate, is very, very desirable. And so I think you're gonna see this become more incorporated into under the partnership's umbrella. There are brands that are doing it today, there are brands that are discussing it, there's brands that are considering it, there's brands that aren't talking about it. Just like, you know, it's always like that, the adoption curve or the maturity curve. So I think we're gonna see that happen more. We're just about to release a solution that will be press releasing. We talked about it at our IPX uh just in New York that happened, our big conference. So I think, you know, uh the biggest challenge is that you would never take a one of your clients and say, I'm gonna launch an affiliate program on an influencer platform.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it wouldn't happen. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Square peg and a round hole. Right. You wouldn't do that. That's just not built for that. Likewise, you wouldn't say, we're gonna launch an influencer program on an affiliate network, a traditional affiliate network. You don't have the right tools if you're gonna run campaign-based where you know you you want there's just so many things that you need. Not that you couldn't make it work, it just wouldn't scale the way it would on a really robust influencer platform. I think I know we're gonna be the first platform that's gonna be able to do both of those very well. They can live side by side, and you're gonna get great data and great capabilities, and you're gonna be able to do those hybrid and solely performance and always on, but also the campaign base, which are equally, if not more, important for a lot of brands. So I see that. I see the continuation of just expansion. I think B2B, brand-to-brand type partnerships are still being so underutilized. And I'll just give you an example of why this is a huge opportunity for brands. If I'm a brand and my average order value is $75, and maybe the net profit to me is $20, right? $25, let's say, 30% margins. So I have my costs to market, pay the commission, cost of goods, shipping, you know, all the things. So I'm taking $25 or $20 out of that $75. If when you open that package or in the confirmation email or on the landing page or all of those, I had other offers that don't compete with me. You know, if I'm a retailer promoting some streaming service sign-up that maybe pays me $20, $40, $50, let's just say it pays me $25. And that converts 20% of the time, right? Now I'm suddenly making 20% more profit per order. Right. So my margins go up. And I don't know of any brand that wouldn't love to make 20% more margin within a you know, three to six months, once you've kind of dialed in, figure out what offers were, where they work, what what's the best way to do it. So to me, I think there's a lot of opportunity there for brands. Uh, and I think the C-suite should be looking at that. Like that's their job. Uh, make more money, be more profitable, share increase shareholder value. So I think brand-to-brand um offers are something that some companies, there's literally companies that is their business model. What they sell you is not, it's it's the co-marketing is where they make all their money. So, I mean, I'm not saying that's how retailers operate, but I'm saying there are companies out there that that's more of their business model.
SPEAKER_02I also think that with better data and more collaboration, where we bring in all of these different channels into one platform, I think that we're going to start to see a change in how we have always traditionally commercialized affiliates, whether they're influencers, you know, traditional partners, non-traditional partners, whoever they are, PPC partners add by, you know, this that economy is so huge now, there's so many different types of traffic sources that you can pick and choose from. But when you start to bring all of that into one ecosystem and start to see customer journeys, where things are dropping off, where you can tweak to increase margins, like you've just said, I think that opens up a whole new ball game in terms of how do I commercialize my referral partners. Because for eons, we've relied on CPA, revenue share, a hybrid of both, or fixed fees. And actually, when you start to get intelligent data, which we are now at the point of getting, which we haven't been at before as the as the channel's matured, you can start to think about remunerating partners not just for net new, but also remunerating them on different types of outcomes, as you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. So for me, I'm quite excited to see who's gonna go and innovate first. Like who's gonna actually manage to get all of their data? And it will be the big brands. I mean, it's you know, it's not possible for the smaller brands that have limited budgets, but I'm really excited to see how many of these bigger brands are actually gonna go and leverage all of that data, leverage all of that information about where their customers find them and at what point they find them in their kind of like research journey and really start to hone in with their partners and move those levers to actually get that profit margin in place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think one of the things that is holding this industry back is this addiction or philosophy that this channel is solely pay for performance. I think if those teams could start getting budget to do CPC or hybrid against, you know, hey, I will pay you 10% commission or a dollar CPC, whichever is greater, because your traffic is worth it. The content you're creating, the real estate you have is in such high demand that if I'm not willing or capable of offering an alternative payment model, I'm gonna lose out on that traffic. And my competitor that can is gonna get it. So it's not about, well, we just don't have the budget, so we're just not gonna do that. I mean, you're ceding that revenue to somebody else, right? So I think the historically CPC has been looked at by the affiliate channel as you know, fraud. You're gonna get just destroyed if you do CPC. And I think in the past, you know, again, looking back 25 years, a click was raw. Meaning if you double click hyperlinks, because you're over 50 or over 60, um, you know, that a lot of affiliate networks, even to this day, see that as two clicks. And the IAB, you know, their definition of a click is 30-minute window. If you click twice within 29 minutes, it's one click. 31 minutes, it's two clicks. So having more control, and we offer this today, you can use our IAB window. I mean, that's how we report clicks, is is the IAB. Um, so you can still look at raw clicks uh through our data lab tool and compare them. But you know, unique clicks protects you. The ability to say, even change what a unique click is, like I could work out with you and say, look, I love your traffic. I will pay you a dollar a click, but it's one per day. One user, one click per day. So I could change in impact what I call a click that's payable. And so I can protect myself from fraud, and and I can start working with publishers in ways that maybe my competitors can't, which again gives me an advantage. And I'm gonna get better placements, more placements, more traffic, more conversions, more customers. So I think, I think, like I said, that that to me is probably one thing that really holds back this industry. And if anybody's listening, you know, getting out of that mindset that it it can only be paper performance is is just it's it we gotta get beyond that. I mean, it's not like you just switch everything to CPC, but when it makes sense, you should test it and use it. Or other payment models.
SPEAKER_02I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think a lot of people don't do the testing, they just sit and forget and then come back and check at the end of the month and go, is this working? Is it not? Let me go and have another conversation. But I think when you have technology that allows you to do these kinds of small iterative tests, that's when you start tapping into that extra value, which is what you spoke about before. And to me, that's what is making this next kind of 10 years in this industry exciting. And please, God, may I still be here to see it, roll forward, because the last 20 years have been super interesting anyway. So for those of you entering into this space, you know, go and have a look back at some of the stories and podcasts and articles from yesteryear and go and look at what we were doing back then, and then try and apply that and think forward and go, what could this industry really look like in 10 years from now? And I think you guys probably have the closest vision to that because you're building the technology to help us get there, which is great. You're kind of building that bridge. I want to just quickly, before we close down, ask you also what is your current pet peeve about the industry? Like what are the things that we haven't got right yet that people are still talking about 10 years later that we really do need to get over ourselves with if we are going to move forward into this new bright future?
SPEAKER_00I I did just mention one pet peeve, and that is the you know, philosophy or that narrow viewpoint that it's CPA only. And I think just being more open to other payment and partnership types is great. Personally, my personal pet peeve is I shop a lot online and I want a deal, I want a coupon, I want a promo code, I want a voucher code. And I would say 80, 90% of the time when I look for one, they don't work. And that I don't think is good for the industry. I don't I think if you're a coupon site, they're kind of struggling with they want to index well in SEO, so if they have 20 codes for a brand and someone types in brand plus coupon, their their likelihood of coming up as a search result are very high. But of those 20 codes, only two work, and the consumer didn't find those two, or those two weren't really applicable to what they wanted to buy, I think that's just not good for the industry. It's not it it makes brands not appreciate those publishers as much, but really it's really not good for consumers. Like I can't remember when I found a good coupon outside of the brand emailing it to me or showing it to me on their website.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that's something that is actually being picked up quite a lot in the US with recent regulation that's just come out this week, I think, where user experience is going to become a lot more important and accuracy is going to become a lot more important in order for you to remain compliantly working with some publishers and partners. So I think we're going to be discussing some of that stuff at our Elevate Summit in a couple of weeks' time. And um we've got, you know, some serious big hitters in in the US that are coming on board to talk about this. So I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's something that people need to be looking at right now and really thinking about how do they fix these gaps and actually give their customers the best user experience, whether it's on their site or on their partner's sites, the customer's still going to find you through any of these channels. It's not always going to be direct. So I think that's that's a brilliant one to kind of head us into the end of this podcast. And my last question for you, Todd, is what are the things that you want to see happen in the next 18 months for brands to become more successful?
SPEAKER_00Well, again, I I go back to having more than one card to play when it comes to working with partners and compensating them. You know, it's a combination of having the data and having the tools that allow you to contract uh in a way where you feel safe, you're not overexposing yourself, and you can do that. We're launching some additional capabilities on top of some of the stuff I already talked about in our contracting part of our technology stack that will allow that to happen. And again, I think data is probably the most important thing. And I'm really proud of our data lab solution, which is basically uh it's like having a pivot table where you have all your data in our platform that you can just drag and drop and create amazing data without having to use more, you know, we have tons of canned reports that you can run and change filters. But this is it's all your data, you own it, you can create whatever you want, get the answers. It's an extremely powerful solution. And to me, it's the data that helps you feel confident in decisions that you have made or that you're considering, right? And being able to measure and test. Yeah, that that's really what I think, even over the next 18 months. And again, I think um I'm super excited about our creator solution that we're gonna be rolling out. That's gonna be amazing. That's gonna help brands again get more value out of our technology because the same technology is just applying it to another channel. So you're gonna get tremendous insights and uh contracting capabilities, things like that. And I'm really excited to see more brands run always on influencer programs, which I think a lot of brands aren't taking advantage of. They see it more as campaign-based, right? And we launched a new pair of shoes, we're launching a pair of shoes, we're getting, you know, 100 creators to talk about it, and that's gonna create a big spike for two weeks, and then it's on to the next thing, right?
SPEAKER_02What advice would you give to people managing them for their programs? Like knowing what you know now, 25 years in, like what would you have told your younger self 25 years ago? And what would what would that advice be relevant for people coming into the industry today?
SPEAKER_00I think a lot of people when they do their job, you know, they have their go-to reports, they look at that data, and it's very flat to them. And it's maybe how they're being measured. Their boss says, I want you to look at this and met and you know, optimize to this, or you're being gold to this. But having more perspectives on the same data, you know, data is, you know, people use the word data cube. Data is three-dimensional, and most people are looking at it from a one side of that cube in a two-dimensional format. And just looking at your data from the other side of that cube, a different perspective, understanding data from multiple perspectives helps you understand the data better. And I think becoming fluent in data, it can help you in so many ways. Future career, current career, helping other teams understand that you have data they don't. You can see things they can't see because they're relying on, let's say, Google Analytics, and there's only certain things that it lets you see and do. It helps elevate the conversation and uh it helps people internally have conversations that they probably weren't going to have. That's my my advice. Because I think a lot of people just default to you know, two, three reports and they don't really think much about it.
SPEAKER_02And I don't get additional insights as well, the stuff that you miss, because you do get sightblind when you're working on a program for a year or two years, maybe even three years in a job, you you tend to revert back to the things that you already know because you know that they're gonna work. So you you you tend to devalue your innovation and your your thought processes because you're always looking at the same stuff. So I think that's brilliant advice. And on that note, I'd like to thank you so much for being on this podcast. It has been my pleasure to interview you and get to tap into the 25 years of knowledge that you've had building this industry and building impact.com. And thank you so much for being here with me. I really appreciate your time.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks so much for having me, Leanne. It was totally a pleasure. I love talking with you and uh look forward to many more conversations over the years.
SPEAKER_01This podcast is brought to you by AMP. The Affiliate Manager Performance Program is designed for ambitious affiliate program managers working at brands, agencies, or affiliate networks that are looking to grow and scale their affiliate programs and partner performances. We've already helped hundreds of affiliate program managers from a range of industries get the best out of their affiliate partnerships and build consistent sales within their affiliate programs. With just one hour per week over a 12-week period, this program is unlike any other. You'll learn proven tactics, tested strategies, and accessed decades of experience with industry veterans who have launched, scaled, and grown multi-million dollar affiliate programs around the world. Book your seat on our next cohort by visiting our website, at diversmedia.com, and hit the training menu. From there, you can register your interest for our next cohort launch or contact our sales team to find out more. That's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down, why not head over to Apple ITs and give us a five-star review? Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel so you never miss another insightful episode or one of our free webinars ever again. Till next week. for more digital affiliate marketing insights, trends, tips, and content to keep your affiliate and performance marketing fresh and your partners driving consistent sales.