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SPEAKER_01You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by affiverse media.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 Martech 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_00Welcome to this week's affiliate marketing podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston. And today I'm super excited because I've actually got the author of Digital Marketing Strategy, which is a book that I have read, Simon Kingsdall, joining me on the podcast. And he's also the founder of SKS Strategic Marketing Agency. Simon, I'm lucky thrilled to have you here because I know that this conversation is going to be super interesting. So thank you so much for joining me.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely pleasure, Leanne. It's been obviously nice knowing you for as long as we have known each other now, which isn't that long, but it's enough to have some really good conversations about marketing. So yeah, pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. Now, before we get into the book, because I have, as I said, read it and I thought it was brilliant, and that's why I invited you onto the podcast. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your backstory and what actually led you to writing this book?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in marketing for about 25 years now, which is a bit scary, but that long, enough grey hairs to tell a few stories. Yeah, in my time I've worked for a lot of business. I've been a bit of a journeyman marketist, so I've worked for lots of different companies in different industries, the companies like Vodafone and Citibank and Lois TSB and Admiral Group and lots in financial services, but also in telecoms, but as well as the sort of big names, I've worked for a lot of startups and SMEs and a bit of consulting over here and contracting over there. So did that for a long time. And yeah, that was after after studying marketing at university back in their 90s. And yeah, I guess what I found was one of the reasons I wanted to work in lots of different businesses was to understand, and this is really my goal, to understand what works in marketing and what doesn't work in marketing. Not just what works for this company and this industry over here, but what generally, if I look across all these different scenarios, what commonly works and what commonly doesn't work. And fortunately enough to have worked in some great companies and some really interesting startups, some of which went very well, some of which failed, which again is great learning, right? So there's lots of things I've been lucky to dip my toes into, and in pretty much all of the fields of marketing during that time as well, directly at the bottom, doing it all myself and managing a large team that have done it as well. So I've been very fortunate in that respect. And I suppose about 15, 20 years in, I felt I had a pretty good grip on what I saw commonly working and not working. And looking around me, I saw three different groups of people at the time. This was about 2015 or so, in marketing that were having different challenges. So you had a group that had been in marketing for 20 years, but just the digital thing was pretty new to them still. Things like social media just didn't really have a good grip on it. Web design, a lot of the technical stuff that was coming through. They were very much the sort of old school marketer, which is absolutely valid and you've got a huge amount of experience, but just didn't really get the whole digital thing. And then you had the younger audience who'd grown up with digital and were coming into marketing, so they got it entirely, no questions at all, but didn't yet have any strategy experience or any knowledge of what works or at the early stage of their careers. And then you had quite a few people who were coming into marketing from technology as well. So people who'd learned programming but then would were going into developing websites, but didn't understand the UX or design side of it yet, and were building these journeys and these tools, but didn't really understand the consumer research piece and you know, targeting audiences. So three different groups there. And I felt like there wasn't really a place to go to get that information. There were loads of blogs and there were loads of YouTube videos and stuff, but they didn't really help you bring the whole thing together and say, no matter where you are in your career or what background you've got, how do you actually build a digital marketing strategy? How do you do that? There wasn't really a book doing that. So that's why I wrote the book, Digital Marketing Strategy to start with, having contributed to a couple of other books in the year or so before that. And yeah, that's now used by lots of universities around the world to teach marketing, which is nice. It was always good for the ego, but that's not what I did it. And then yeah, then from there I've gone on to write other books, the digital marketing handbook, and I'm currently writing one on AI and the future of marketing. So yeah, that's a quick whistle stop tour. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna have to bring you back about the AI one because that's massively interesting, especially in the affiliate space. But the reason why I wanted to bring you on to the podcast today is to talk a little bit about strategy, because a lot of affiliate managers come into this industry. They're either from a sales background or they're from a customer support background and they understand the product or the service that they're selling very well. And as you said, the younger people coming into the industry, they understand digital very well, but they lack the strategic, like theoretical background, which all of us had to learn on the job, and that's why we're in the management phase now. But there isn't anywhere to go. And digital as a degree or even at degree level, they don't delve very deep into all the different channels within digital. So what ends up happening is affiliate managers have to learn the strategy on the job while they're doing the doing. So I read this book because I thought it was really good at breaking down strategy and thought processes and thinking about how you position your affiliate program or your business in a way that made sense and was in bite-sized chunks. Because the other things is that you have a problem sometimes in marketing where very experienced marketers, they're very difficult to understand because they're so far advanced and they know what they know. So, what I wanted to talk about is strategy with you because this is really like your area of expertise. And we use that word in marketing quite a lot, but I think a lot of people don't really understand it. So, can you explain what strategy is and what it means and how you should approach it to create a solid marketing plan? Break it down into like really easy, simple, uncomplicated terms.
SPEAKER_02I'll do my best. I I think to be a strategy can be a bit of a dirty word. I I think people often think of strategy as if somebody who's doing strategy is sitting around producing lots of PowerPoints that never really mean anything or go anywhere. And and I've been in those organizations, by the way. I I have been in a company where there is an entire strategy department of about 25 people. They spent the entire year producing PowerPoint presentations and presented them to people and nothing came out of any of it. So nice job if you can get it. But I find that most people and most businesses are on a scale of strategy at one end and execution at the other, right? And some are very heavily focused on the thinking and the talking and the powerpoints and not really getting a lot done. And others are at the other end of lots and lots of running around and doing stuff but without really thinking about what you're doing, which causes a lot of frustration, a lot of wasted money, a lot of wasted effort. And of course, as with most things in life, the sweet spot is in the middle where you know you need to go out there, you need to have a strategy, you need to say, What where are we actually trying to go here? What is it we're actually trying to achieve? And how is that different to the other people out there that are doing the same thing? Because I guarantee you there'll be other people doing the same thing. In fact, I was talking to a member of my team yesterday who went to a web summit in Portugal a couple of weeks ago, and she said there were there was a business there that was talking about how they were game, they were changing the world with AI, and there's a very specific proposition around what they were doing with AI, and the next four booths were also saying they were unique and changing the world with AI. So all of them thought they were doing something completely unique and wonderful, and they hadn't actually stopped to look at the market and say, actually, we're not unique, right? So we need to find a position that that makes us different. There will be other people in the market doing that, and you need to say, so what are we authentically doing? What are we doing to change the world? What are what's our our goal over the next five, ten years? What's our vision? And and how is that different? And how are we going to specifically deliver on that? So taking it from that, this is where we want to be, actually moving it along that line to and this is how we're actually going to deliver it. So it's ultimately what you end up delivering is feeding into your strategy rather than just running around doing a load of stuff. Because it not only does that waste money and time, but also in my experience, it really frustrates people as well. If you're working in a company and your boss is saying, hey, do this, and then the next month they're saying, I'll change my mind now, do that, and I'll cancel that over there and do this. You don't know whether you're coming or going. You get really frustrated. You get very high staff turnover from that situation as well, which is just not great. It's not good for anybody. So having a strategy is really important to have somewhere you're heading towards. I always start with every business I work with and with my agency, as we work with a lot of companies, different, all sorts of different stages, from your massive global corporations to quite young startups who are just saying, look, we we don't know where to go next, right? We've got to a certain level, which might just be we've got some funding, or it might be we've had this fantastic growth, but it's dried up, or something along those lines, or we want to move into a new market and we don't know how to position ourselves there. And we always start with, okay, so what is that goal? And often it'll be okay, we want to grow, but what does that really mean, right? You've got to break it down to the specifics of what do you mean by grow, right? Do you want to do you want to double in size over the next five years? Do you want to grow and own the US market, but actually you don't care about the other markets? And if not, why not? Let's understand whether that's right. That might be right, that's fine. You might be absolutely right to be focused entirely in your territory, your product is highly relevant to your audience there, or they're just going to understand it better or be better placed to buy it from you than someone in another country. So absolutely, you know, push that market as hard as you can first. But it's important really to interrogate that question very hard at the beginning of what is it we're actually trying to do here over the next few years, and how is that different to anyone else?
SPEAKER_00See, now I think that's such an important question. And I get a lot of affiliate managers getting burnt out because they're just spinning the wheels trying to find new affiliates. So they go like their bosses say, get more affiliates, make our program bigger. But actually, they have no strategy behind that because they don't know how to position themselves against their nearest competitor to actually win the publisher's loyalty, placement, real estate, whatever it is that they're trying to bring in in terms of traffic. And they also don't know how to focus their time. So what ends up happening is they just start piling more and more work on themselves to keep doing more outreach, keep finding more affiliates, keep finding more traffic sources, and they're not actually looking at the strategy of whether any of that matches what their company is actually asking them to.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Because you just get pushed into a panic, right? Of oh, I've got to do more stuff.
SPEAKER_00That's gonna move the needle. So strategy is like the beginning point, the epicenter of everything that you're gonna be doing in your affiliate program. And if you don't know what that is and you haven't asked yourself the questions that Simon has just laid out for you, then you're really just spinning your wheels doing nothing of value because you're just gonna get burnt out, you're gonna get tired, you're gonna get disappointed, and you're not gonna be delivering to the end goal. Affiliate is actually covered in your book as well, in the third edition of this book, which is awesome, which is also why I read it, because I wanted to sneep in and see what you thought about affiliate marketing. And it's a part of your overall digital strategy. And in your opinion right now, should brands be spending more in this channel? And if so, why do you think that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I I do think that. And affiliate for me, alongside email, is a channel that doesn't get enough attention. Yeah, I've had so much phenomenal success, absolute game-changing success with affiliate marketing in my career. And when you're out there talking about marketing, if you're standing on stage talking about marketing, or you're reading books about marketing, or you're following YouTube or Instagram or whatever, and all the updates on marketing, it's always about SEO or it's about Instagram marketing or it's about AI or something that's like really sexy and cool. No one talks about affiliate marketing, right? Not many people talk about marketing marketing. Except you, Leanne. Absolutely. So it doesn't get enough attention. And that's because it's not as glamorous and exciting, right? You can't go out and record videos on a beach and it's not that you can, I suppose, but there's ways to do that. But it's not quite as sexy as some of the other channels. And and I think that's a mistake that Marxists can fall into, is looking for the fun, cool things because they're a bit more creative and interesting. I mean, we absolutely should be, and I think I'm sure everyone listening knows this, but we absolutely need to be data and performance focused. So when we look at our strategy and we're saying, what is it we want to achieve and we want to achieve growth, what does that mean? Does that really mean running around getting more affiliates in the door? Probably not, right? And yeah, there might be a bit of that, but if we're really strategic about it, what it probably means is going out there and finding the bigger affiliates or the networks or the really niche players in our field and building super strong relationships with them so we can sweat them as hard as we can. And then we'll always be top of mind for that affiliate. We'll always be able to tap into their email addresses, their social media, whatever, if they're listing companies on their blog. For me, strategically, I've always found a lot more value in building really strong human relationships with the right people in the right niche rather than scattergunning just trying to bring in thousands of affiliates that may or may not be high performance and may or may not be a good brand fit, and you know who knows, it's it can be incredibly difficult and time consuming before you can even get into the reporting on thousands of affiliates.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So, in your professional opinion, affiliate is the place to be this year.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I really do think it is, and I think it's only gonna improve. And I think also it depends how you define affiliate, right? Because I think a lot of people think of influencers as social media. I would put influencers as closer to affiliate marketing than social media, really. You're building a relationship with someone who has a dedicated audience that's gonna send leads over to you for some kind of set price. So the vast majority of that really is is affiliate marketing. So I think with that is only gonna continue to grow, AI will continue to further improve the channel. As we know, without waffling too much, Leanne, I think one of the things we all know is a headache in affiliate marketing is the data and the reporting and the accuracy and that everything is correct and everyone agrees and has a nice happy time rather than fighting over numbers. And that can be a headache. And I think as AI is continuing to come more heavily into the mainstream, that is gonna take some big headaches away with areas like the reporting and the consolidation of the data and everything, and even the targeting and sourcing new affiliates as well. So that I think is going to make the channel which historically has stayed a bit more manual than many other channels have, is gonna become, I think, far more automated than it has been. I think that only opens the door to it being more effective because you you don't need to hire a bunch more affiliate marketers in your team, but everyone in your team can work much harder and spend their time on the things that matter, which which is building those relationships and finding the right affiliates rather than let me check this number against that number over there, or that doesn't quite match, let me send this email off to make sure we get that's a headache, right? So I think that is a game changer, and that that for me is one reason affiliate marketing is a really important place to focus over the next few years.
SPEAKER_00Now there was a very interesting graph in your book actually talking about different channels, and I think it was on page 37. So if you guys buy the book, just go check out page 37. It was showing how content strategy should feed into each digital channel that you are working in in order to increase customer conversion. Now you've hit on the topic of AI. I'm interested to know what your thoughts are in terms of how do we manage content because AI, obviously, Chat GPT has allowed us to start putting content out there on steroids, basically. Should we be allowing affiliates to create that kind of AI-based content? How should we be adapting our content strategies in all of these channels in order to continue to convert customers? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a huge area, and we could do a lot more than a podcast just on that one topic alone. So it's a massive area to think about. Yeah, I think for me, AI content is improving and will continue to improve, but for me, I'm not happy with the standard of it at the moment. I think if you're doing well understanding how to prompt a GPT, then I think you're you've got a you've got a better edge than many. I think at the moment the science of learning how to prompt a chatbot has not really got to everybody yet. And the the risk of that is is creation of really lightweight generic content. This I won't go into detail, but this can impact many areas outside of marketing as well. Obviously, education is a huge one. But I think for me, that there's a few things to consider here. So, one, you know, you mentioned Chat GPT there. I think Chat GPT is a cracking tool. It's great for helping you get into the detail of questions, helping you discover things that or remind yourself of things you may have not quite considered in in the work you're doing as you're thinking through the strategy for an area. You know, if we're looking to launch an affiliate marketing program in the USA for this specific niche, what might I consider? Who might I go to? What are the best affiliate marketing programs out there? What can I learn from this? Who's written about this? And you can get you know great research and sort of strategic points together that can help shape what it is you want to do. So it can be really powerful for that. I don't use it for writing content personally, and we have a fairly big copywriting arm in my business where we produce a lot of content for our clients, and we don't use AI for that at all at the moment. That's not entirely true. We use it for actually we're using it an AI tool for checking the SEO quality of the content so we can make some optimizations to it at the end. But we don't use it for the planning or the writing of content because there's that there is a huge stream of content that's coming out that is very generic and lightweight that I'm seeing. And you that includes video, by the way. When we think of content, we often think of text, but of course, AI content now can be created with audio and video and in presentations and all sorts of formats nowadays, which is very easy to do. You go on YouTube and you watch tutorials now, it's very easy to spot the AI ones, right? Whether it doesn't quite make sense, there's the bits that contradict each other, the voice is really generic, the pictures are clearly stock images that are coming up against each other. But you know, for me, using it to plan out social media content, using it to plan out your web content for SEO, using it to plan out content that you think might convert better, especially if you feed in the prompts around, hey, look, we've done this in the past and this has worked, and we've done this and this hasn't worked, therefore, what do you think we should do to make it work in the future? You know, it can do some of that analysis for you and save you some time. So I think there's a lot of value in AI and content, but I wouldn't rely on it, especially ChatGPT. There are better tools for writing, but I wouldn't rely on it for writing all of your content unless you're going to be really smart and sophisticated about that. That's my view. So if an affiliate is is running a website that is purely AI generated, I would have a slight air of caution around that.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So keep watching that, guys, and and maybe start thinking about how you change your T's and C's as well, and adding in some very clear points about how you want your affiliates to be using AI to represent your brand, especially if they are curating content. Now, the other thing that I wanted to talk about really quickly on, or maybe not so quickly, on the podcast before we we close down, is in chapter seven of this book, there was an amazing plan or structure that you talk about. And I like to call it a flywheel because I think it can work in any instance, whether you're launching an affiliate program or whether you're trying to grow an affiliate program. But there's like really four key steps that you talk about, and I'm gonna list them out here. The first one is goals, the next one's objectives, the next one's strategy, and the next one's action. So it's almost like a flywheel. If you follow those four steps all the time, you'll come up with processes that will help you to actually leverage and grow your digital marketing strategy, which is what the book is is about. Can you talk us through what happens in each step very briefly and then give us some real-world situations where you've used this flywheel to plan and grow a business revenue?
SPEAKER_02So the methodology applies really to any situation, but whether you're constructing an entire marketing strategy or even a level above that, your entire business strategy for your company, right down to if I'm just running the affiliate marketing program for the UK in a global business. So if you're just doing something at a smaller level, the methodology applies and helps you just get from what are my goals to what am I actually going to do? I mentioned earlier the strategy to the execution sort of line. So effectively, what this does is it takes you from that strategy and step by step through to the execution. So as I know that what I'm doing is feeding back up to that at the top. So if we look at those four steps, goals is ultimately what we mentioned earlier. What is it you're actually trying to do? What's the vision for the business? Or if in your specific role, what are my goals in this role? I need to I need to deliver a thousand more sales through the affiliate channel by the end of this quarter, or you know, whatever it is. And I'm sure we don't need to talk too much about this, but smart objectives, I'm sure you guys are aware of those. If you're not, go and look them up. That's a great way to start, but let's not get into that too much detail. So make sure that your goals are not just let's grow, but as we said earlier, what specifically are you trying to do? So you've got something you can actually measure and understand at this point. I should have achieved this have I. hit it or have I missed it. So that's important to start with those goals. And those could be something, as I say, it could be get ourselves to 10% market share in America, which would be a very top-level goal, of course. Or as I say, it could be get a thousand affiliate sales in. At this level, I wouldn't set something like build relationships with 10 new affiliates. That's not a goal, right? Because you know if you build relationships with 10 new affiliates and they're all terrible relationships and they don't deliver any sales, that's not going to get you your goal. Right. So you don't want more affiliates really realistically, that's not your your your goal is to to grow the business. And as part of the growing the business your role may well be make making more sales from the affiliate channel. It doesn't matter if you make those sales all from one affiliate or from a thousand affiliates most of the time. Your goal at the top is not that specific but it should be I'm trying to achieve this specific thing.
SPEAKER_00Add one more thing in there because I think this is one that everybody forgets. I'm going to advertise and promote my affiliate program.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00How many times I go onto a website and I go, oh, these people have they got an affiliate program or not? I can't even find the link. How are affiliates supposed to find you?
SPEAKER_02That that's something I always talk about as passive growth, right? And in if you're there sweating hard to try and grow the affiliate program, okay, that's going to be really hard work for you and you'll put an awful lot of time and effort into that. But if you can grow it by an extra 10-20% by just putting some information on your website why wouldn't you do that? Just take the headache off. If you're making a lot of noise in the market through your role about the affiliate program, people are going to hear about it and then they're going to come and look for it without speaking to you. If they can't find it it's a wasted opportunity. So that is absolutely one of those. So once you get down to the action level right down at the bottom that for me is is going to be one of the specific tasks you do. Make sure that we've got that information about our affiliate program and how you join it and how it works in T sales and those T's and C's you mentioned earlier that make sure they're there and people can easily find out what they need and easily get in touch and they're obviously encouraged to do so. So yeah so absolutely going through that how do we find more affiliates? How do we passively get more affiliates? How do we grow the affiliates we've got um all of that would be at a sort of objective level of the the different things you'd want to do. So then once you get down to the strategies so it's going to be well in order to source new affiliates I'm going to go and speak to these affiliates over here and I'm going to find out about their network and research that I'm going to do some research over here online. I'm going to go into the affiliate networks and I'm going to do an awful lot of research within that to see who's there and who's not there and can I pull any of those out of the networks as well potentially there's always that that game to play as well and have a look at my competitors and see who they're working with. So at this level you're saying what am I specifically looking at? And then when you get down to the actions as you say Leanne that's what am I actually physically going to do so I'm going to put this information on our website I'm going to email these people over here. I'm going to join this affiliate network. So those are specific actually tasks I'm going to do today, tasks I'm going to do next week. So if you follow that through from the the high level goals of I want a thousand sales through to here are three or four sort of buckets that I can get those sales from through to specific activities I'm going to do within those buckets to feed up to fulfill those to the actions I'm going to do day to day those are the four levels you follow. Which means that if you're just focused then on those actions at the bottom that when you get to the end of the quarter by going back up that ladder you're going to hit that goal at the top. So you're not wasting any of your time at the bottom running around doing things that just aren't going to contribute to that goal, which we all fall into that in our day to day we all fall into the habit of saying that's really interesting. Maybe that'll help maybe I'll go and look at that thing over there and I'll have these discussions over here and that person's asked for a meeting so I'll have a chat with them. Whereas if you have the strategic plan, you can say do you know what I know you want to talk to me at the moment but that's not going to help me with my objectives and I I can't make time for that right now. So we'll talk about that in a few months or do you know what we're not going to talk about it at all or so you can make sure that the priorities of what you're doing day to day are going to make sure that you hit those goals and if everyone follows that methodology everyone hits their goals and ultimately the business delivers on the the top of their pyramid as well.
SPEAKER_00So say then you've touched on something that's actually I swear to God it's a message for me today because we do tend up everybody does this. We want to do more because we think more is better. And you've just touched on that now where it's like if those actions don't serve the goal and the purpose of what you're doing they're just distractions because doing more isn't always better. It can actually devalue the end result and I feel like you're speaking to me at the moment. Because my team is always rain it in Leanne rein it in but it is very important to have focus because you do if you don't you do end up losing sense of where you're going and that's where the burnout happens and I see it so often with affiliate managers that are coming to the industry they're not focused they don't know where to focus their efforts they're trying to do everything because they're so passionate about what they do and they end up spinning out of the industry because they get burnout and they just can't take a pace. Really guys if you take nothing else out of this like podcast with with myself and Simon really think about what is your strategy and goal and it starts with goals and you said that you said if the goals aren't smart, measurable can be implemented within a certain time frame timely, then everything that you do from there is just going to be a waste of your time a waste of value.
SPEAKER_02Don't be busy fools right sometimes you feel like you're doing good work because you're busy but if you step back you realize that none of that actually is going to help you achieve your goals at all and as you say we all do it. It's very easy to see the shiny thing over here and think oh that seems exciting I'll go and have a little look at that I'll go and play with that and mess around with that and actually you get two weeks later and you think whoops I should have spent that time on something actually far more valuable. So you're having this structure and being focused and prioritizing around this structure will help you make sure that you're achieving those goals you need to be you need to be focused on. So yeah don't be afraid to say no really focus really be smart in the way you work and as I say don't be busy fools and hopefully this methodology helps and hopefully the book also and I have another book out there the handbook as well which is a bit more of a practical guide but the the strategy book is very focused on these sort of methodologies that can help you deliver more effective marketing across what whatever you're delivering.
SPEAKER_00Yeah I'm a big believer in learn the frameworks and then get the handbook to help you actually implement the frameworks. So that's why that that's one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on the podcast to actually talk about the book because it's great to learn the theory behind why you're doing things but then to practically apply them you need to sometimes get a little bit of help with that. Okay. Last question crystal ball moment because this is your area of expertise how do you think digital is going to evolve in the coming year? So with everything that's happening around us what do affiliate managers and even digital marketers that are listening to this podcast, what do you think we should be looking at and considering in our strategies?
SPEAKER_02I'm writing a book at the moment on on the future of marketing in web 3, looking at obviously quite heavily on things like AI and the metaverse and decentralization and but certainly with AI trends you need to have your finger on the pulse every week with that. So I think it's worth carving out some time to just do some research see what the latest trends are follow some news. In my company we have a we use Slack and we have a an API from multiple different sources feeding in news in a real time basis about changes that are happening in marketing which means we can all stay on top of it and over lunch we can stop and have a read through the channel and see what's going on today. And I think that's a useful thing to do. So keeping yourself in touch with what's happening is it's always been critical in marketing but never more so than now. So I think that's really important. As much as I was on a bit of a downer earlier about AI content I do think it's important for again Marxists to toy with that. Don't go over the top with it. Don't just start churning out thousands of blogs through AI. I I I would warn against that but have a look at the tools that are around don't just go to ChatGPT have a look at the there are dedicated tools for creating really nice videos really nice presentations and even assessing how good your presentation is if you're going to go on stage and give a presentation there's tools that'll film you and tell you whether you're any good or not it's up to you with your confidence levels whether you want that or not. But there's a lot there's a lot out there that's specifically solving problems and there are more being developed day to day as it's a hugely investable area. So I think it's important to stay finger on the pulse with what's happening there and to use it and use it for planning. And yeah there are even strategy tools out there for AI that will help you think through your strategy as well specifically dedicated to that. So use those tools I think the targeting piece is critical. This sort of relates to AI in that you know data's again always been important in marketing but now that more businesses are using AI more heavily to look at at the data and understand what's working what's not working where they should be targeting you are going to get left behind if you're not smart around the the targeting of your business and your work. So look at the niches you're focused on and continuously assess that through your advertising through your affiliate network through your your keyword strategy for SEO through your social media content and your hashtags and thousands of different other ways but have a look at that and think about are you really giving unique value to a specific niche? And if not, what are you going to do to change that? And how and if you don't know, how are you going to understand that? And again, let's say AI can be useful in that. Whilst there's a lot of focus on other areas like privacy and there's some cracking moves in the areas of advertising at the moment as well for me I think a lot of focus on the future of the internet the future of data I think one thing I've actually just have just written a chapter about for the new book which is a bit different is also understanding computer games right now some guys listening to this will be big gamers and that's great and you'll understand gaming. Some people listen to this will not be into gaming at all will have no interest in gaming. Now that's fine. I'm not saying everyone needs to suddenly become a gamer and suddenly get passionate about gaming. That's not the point. But I think for me as we move into Web3 there's going to be an awful lot more that that is taken from that gaming mentality and the many of the the methods used in gaming that we will need to use in marketing. It's been happening increasingly over the last 10-20 years anyway but it will only happen more so especially as we get to things like the metaverse. So how we interact with people the psychology of what people enjoy what they do in communities how they buy how you can get more data from someone willingly in a way that's that develops a relationship rather than just takes their data in more of a sort of meta style there's an awful lot that is used in gaming today that that is hugely applicable to marketing and has massive benefits with gamification and beyond that as communities become more and more important. So I think I am recommending to all marketers at the moment to go and understand games. Go and have a little look at things like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite. There's a load of these different things look at the environment so it's important for all marketers no matter your age no matter your interests to understand this. Don't consider it oh I have to do gaming consider it this is part of a professional research project and you need to understand the psychology of that and how that works and think about how you can apply that to what you're doing in your business. I think that's the probably the biggest message I've got out there at the moment.
SPEAKER_00So if you get caught playing games at lunchtime at US tell your boss you're doing research.
SPEAKER_02That's it spot on. Yeah I love it.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It has been a pleasure to have you and to understand and deep dive strategy and how we can apply that to our affiliate programs. You've given us loads of insight guys I cannot recommend this book enough. I have really enjoyed it go and read it go think about how you can apply some of the practical frameworks and tactics that Simon shares in there into your programs and let's have an exciting year ahead where we think about our strategies differently and move our programs forward. So thank you so much for being here Simon Absolute pleasure thanks Leanne I hope everyone got something out of that's affiliate marketing podcast is brought to you by AMP the affiliate manager performance program is designed for ambitious affiliate program managers working at brands agencies or networks who want to scale their affiliate program and improve their partner performance. We've trained hundreds of affiliate managers from companies like Microsoft, Omnicent, AstroPay, IQOption, PokerStars, Betson, Oxylabs, ConvertKit, and more we help them build consistent sales and trusted partnerships. Dedicate just one hour per week over a 12-week period this affiliate management performance program is unlike any other. Learn proven tactics, tried and tested strategies, and access decades of experience with industry veterans who've launched, scaled and grown multi-million dollar affiliate programs around the world. Go to affiversemedia.com, hit the training menu and put your seat on AMP for 2024.
SPEAKER_01That'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 iTunes 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. Tune in 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.