You'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 Martec 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_01Welcome back to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast this week. I recently did an audio event on LinkedIn with our Affiverse Agency Director, Liana Klein, and we called it the three most important lessons for affiliate marketing managers to remember. Now, as you probably know by now, I've been in the industry for a very long time, as has Liana, and we're not short of a few lessons that we've learned along the way. This week we wanted to share with you some of our biggest learnings, as well as give you some future thoughts on where the industry is heading and engage with our audience to share insights together. Now I love hearing what other people are learning and doing around the globe. And this event really had us helping each other to even find new roles in this industry. It's about connectivity. That's what makes our industry great. And I love working in it and being part of it. And that's why I wanted to share this audio event on our podcast too. So get ready and enjoy and listen close to this very special episode. And stay on until the end because I'll give you a sneak peek at the predictions of what I think is going to become in 2024. You are here with me today, Lianne Johnston. I'm the founder of Afiverse, and joining me as well alongside is our agency director, Liana Klein. Liana, if you want to just say a quick hello to everybody that's joining us. Hi, everyone. So thanks so much for joining us. We're here today because we wanted to reach out to our community. Liana and I are quite active on LinkedIn. We're absolutely passionate about affiliate marketing. Our company is an affiliate marketing performance marketing agency. If any of you have been in my universe or seen any of my posts or come to any of our webinars, you'll know that when we get on a live, we want to share lots of insights and really engage with the community around us so that we can all benefit from learning. I just want to start off by saying a little bit about our business. If you don't know who we are and what we do, Leanna and I have been in the affiliate industry for almost two decades. So clearly we started when we were very young. We've absolutely built multi-million dollar programs, businesses, and throughout our careers. We've worked together for the last 15 years across multiple different businesses prior to starting this one, which is affiversemedia.com. We're an affiliate marketing agency or performance marketing agency or OPM if you're joining us from the US. Everybody's got different jargons for the jobs that we do. And we also have a media platform which allows affiliate programs to connect with affiliates. We run virtual events like these, small ones like this, and then huge ones, like the one that's coming up in March 2024, called the Amplify Summit. So if you haven't joined us at a live stream two-day event, get on over to our website and register for your free ticket to join us because A, it's loads of fun. B, I bring together some of the most interesting people in the performance marketing industry that you all get to learn from and C, the tickets are free. Really no reason why you can't get on and network and meet with other people in our community as well. The three things that Liana and I really wanted to kind of share with you guys were some of the important lessons that we've learned recently, maybe over the last kind of two to three years, that seem to be the kind of stalwarts of what of messages that I want to bring out to affiliate managers that are maybe starting out in the industry or looking to kind of level up their skills. And the things that we've seen have actually helped us to build scale with client programs, with people that we're training, or people that we're supporting or consulting with. Liana and the first one, which you kind of know I beat my drum about it quite a lot, but and this is one that we invest quite heavily in both of us, is really understand what the value add is of affiliate managers learning to build their own personal brand. So I don't know if you want to talk through some of those things and why you think they're important and how they've actually helped brands to elevate their performance when we work with their affiliate teams.
SPEAKER_02It is important to ensure that everybody knows who you are and what you bring to the table. So no matter what company you're working for, maybe you work somewhere today, but in a couple of years' time you work somewhere else. Having a personal brand and having people understand what you stand for, what your experience is and how you've been out in the world by using your skills, that's incredibly important, not only to you, but to the company that you're with right now. So whether you're running your own business or if you are working for a large corporation, your personal brand stands out. And in affiliate marketing, this is specifically important because you do have to create those partnerships. And those partnerships often start with a one-on-one conversation and not necessarily with the partner knowing exactly where you work and what your offering is in terms of your affiliate program. So building your personal brand feeds into that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And the other thing about personal branding is that are we talking a lot about AI in the affiliate space at the moment? There's a lot of talk about how AI tools are making things easier, faster. But the problem is that this industry is still built in relationships. And to give you an example, I'm actually going to give you a real life example because it's the best way that I can explain why your personal brand is so important. So we went to an affiliate conference that wasn't in an industry that we really operate in, or and we were there because we were actually trying to market our agency to get new customers. We weren't actually there to go meet affiliate partners. But what ended up happening is somebody walked past our kiosk or our booth and they sat down because their feet were sore. And normally if you were at an event, you'd go, oh no, here's another time waste to get off my stand because I actually have other people to meet. And we've all been there. And um, you know, we've all been at big conferences where we have to come back with leads. But what ended up happening is the person actually recognized me and had seen some of my posts on LinkedIn. And they came over and they had a chat and they asked if they could sit down for five minutes. And what ended up happening is we ended up finding the biggest affiliate that we've ever met in our lives with traffic sources that matched pretty much all of the customers that we were working with, even though we weren't at an event that was targeted to the industry and vertical that we typically work in. So when you build your personal brand, you actually attract more partners to you because they're interested in what it is that you want to say and they're interested in your viewpoint and how you view the market. So it's not actually about what you're selling, it's actually about who you are. And this is still how very big relationships and campaigns and partnerships and meetups are still happening in our industry right now. And as an industry, we do tend to be a little bit old-fashioned where humans speak to humans. But I think that is actually what makes this industry great. So when you're thinking about building your personal brand, think about what are the things that you're really passionate about and kind of think about it like when an author writes a book, they don't write about things that they don't know about and they don't write about things that they're not passionate about because very quickly people will be able to pick up on that and discount you as not being authentic. So when you're thinking about building your personal brand, what I want you to think about as an affiliate manager is who are you and what do you stand for? And what are the things that you want to portray in the relationships that you're building for your business? Now, I don't know how many of you who are listening are actually affiliates or affiliate managers. You could be bugged, but it doesn't really matter whether you're an affiliate or an affiliate manager. The problem is that you still need to be building a personal brand because even when you want to do business sales, whatever it is that you're busy working on, people still buy people at the end of the day. Other things that I want you to think about when you're building your personal brand is where do you want to position yourself? Because there are a lot of social media platforms at the moment and there are different segments of audiences. And depending on where your business is and what kinds of partners you want to be working with, you might need to tailor some of the content that you're creating that builds the brand of you. So if you had to think about yourself like a shoe brand or a cosmetic brand or whatever kind of brand you currently resonate with in your world, something that makes you passionate, something that tells you a story about who that brand is and what that brand is about, you need to be thinking about yourself in that way too, and thinking about how you're going to position yourself. So if you found me here on LinkedIn, you'll see that a lot of what I post is on point. A lot of what I talk about is on point about affiliate marketing, about strategy, about building affiliate programs authentically and building relationships authentically one-on-one and never discounting small affiliates and thinking about how you can make relationships and partnerships work because that's what resonates with me as an affiliate manager.
SPEAKER_02Liana, what about you? I was just thinking of that personal brand, it is a lot easier to cold-call outreach to new partners. Now have the option to add your personality into those emails. I think maybe one of our listeners was at a dinner with us not that long ago, and he had mentioned that publishers and affiliates really helping ask the same questions over and over. So if you could add a little bit of personality into your outreach and into your introductions, into your connections with people, then that really helps. And knowing your personal brand will help you to understand exactly where you are hitting home with those that you want to work with, and then it makes it easier for you to connect.
SPEAKER_01The other thing that's really important about building your brand as an affiliate manager is that you need to remember that your brand follows you wherever you go. So whilst you might be working at a company right now that has a massive brand, in future you might be going to a company that doesn't have a big brand and that you're going to be tasked with building that brand. And this is really where the value of your personal branding comes into place in terms of growing and extending your career as well. So, how do you invest in building your personal brand? It's not something that happens overnight. You can't go and create a paid media campaign and say, hey, I'm the greatest affiliate manager in the world because people aren't going to believe that. So what you really need to be doing at the early stages of your career, or even now if you're in the mid-stage of your career, is coming together and building networking relationships. A lot of affiliate managers that I speak to, they say to me, Oh, how do I build a personal brand when everybody's my competitor? Yes, everybody is your competitor because we're all working with a finite group of affiliate partners. But your job as an affiliate manager is to make sure that those partners know and resonate with you. And also using and leveraging your competitors and your peers in the industry to support each other and grow. Because many times I'll have asked an affiliate manager from a competing company if they can introduce me to somebody. Because I've helped them out in the past, and because my brand is always about collaboration, I've always built myself out to be a very collaborative person. They're only too happy to help and share. Where it does get complex is if you're in exactly the same vertical and exactly the same industry and you're trying to compete to get exactly the same placement, then obviously that's going to be a little bit more difficult. But building a relationship both externally with your partners is important, but also building your relationship externally with other businesses is important too, because this industry over the last 20 years has been built on relationships. I still call on people that I maybe haven't seen in three or four years, but had a really great experience with at an event six years ago. And when you when somebody contacts you and they've had a personal experience with you, they're more likely to help you and to be willing to support and share and help you to grow and develop your community as well. So it has to be give and take. It can't just be about you, it has to be about the people around you as well, whether that's your partners, your competitors, your suppliers, whoever it is that you're connecting with in the affiliate industry. Absolutely every connection that you make is important and something that you need to value and treasure. So I almost want to say like your net worth is your network. And I know that's a saying that gets bandied around a lot, but in this industry particularly, it's very important. So we now know why personal branding is key to building your business. You need to be getting out there, you need to be building partnerships and networking daily so that it can impact your business positively. Now we know that it's not easy for some of you, and maybe some of you don't even know where or how to start to begin to approach this. Our first question in this live audio event focused exactly on that as we discuss the best way to build your personal brand and be visible in this very competitive industry. Listen in now and hear our thoughts on this subject.
SPEAKER_02One of the things that I very much admire about Leanne is she builds her personal brand every day by sharing her knowledge. So that is one great way. When she has an interesting thought or something cool that's happened in the recent days, she'll go up on LinkedIn and actually make a post about it and share some content. So I think that is one way because once you start sharing your thoughts, people start to react to those thoughts and then conversations begin and they'll remember what you've talked about or posted online. So I do think that that's a relevant way to actually go about it, is to be open with what it is that you're thinking about, what you might have questions about or thoughts that you might have on industry changes. And once you start to share more, people will start to see your name more. All social media has algorithms. So the more you share, the more you're actually gonna reach people. So I think that is one option for opening up your personal brand a little bit more.
SPEAKER_01The other thing as well is to really just get out there through COVID, through the recession, we've had a difficult couple of years and people have wanted to retreat into their own space and work remotely and kind of just get on with the day-to-day and not really engage with people anymore for a multitude of reasons. And I'm like that too. I get days when I just don't want to talk to people. No, I'm I'm just tired. I don't want to get my head down and do my stuff. And I don't want to get on calls and I don't want to have a million Skype chats and I don't want to answer emails and really talk to people. So you really in this job, you have to get out there. You know, how do you build your brand? You build it a little bit every day, like Liana said. You get out on social media, you post, you connect, you comment on other people's posts, you attend virtual summits. Virtual summits are so undervalued. And I have to be honest that we run our own, which broadcasts to thousands of people around the world once a year. And the connections that we get and the referrals that we get and the people contacting us going, wow, that was really great content. Thanks for sharing it. That is how we have built our brand. You know, we haven't been around very long. We've only been going for four years now, but we've made a huge impact because we all, every single one of our team, builds their personal brand every single day. And that personal brand is attached to our company, which is Afiverse, but that's okay because all of that branding adds value to the business and brings new business in. In fact, and I'm very happy to share with you listening that we've never spent any money on paid media to grow our business. We've never done a PPC campaign. In fact, we did a PPC campaign once to get new business and it didn't work for us. So everything that we've ever done has been organic. So you don't need money to build a personal brand. You don't need to have a lot of time to build a personal brand because it really doesn't take a lot of money to post every day. It's few, you know, we all have mobile phones. We can all post something or comment in somebody else's post that we've seen and really start to just chat in the community that exists around us. The second way to build your personal brand is to get out from behind your screen. Get out from behind your screen, start speaking at events, start putting yourself out there as a moderator on a panel if you don't feel confident enough to speak at events. It's not everybody's forte, not everybody can get up on a stead talk about something or a subject that they're passionate about. Um and really just making sure that you're getting seen and heard in places that matter. So go to every event, go to every virtual summit, sign up to every webinar and start building your network that way. I think those are the kind of two main things. Those are the things that have really worked for me. It really isn't brain science, um, but it does take time and effort, and it's not something that you do overnight. So thinking about opportunities where you can add value, thinking about where you can publish information, even things like medium are great channels to publish information. There's a whole bunch of media portals where you can publish your thoughts, add your conversation to topical questions that are being asked, forums and communities that you can join and start a network with people in. So building a brand doesn't have to cost money and it doesn't have to be complex. That's my first thing. Liana, I don't know if you've got anything else that you want to add to that.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I was just going to say, perhaps if you are an expert in a certain area, because often in affiliate marketing we are generalists, but sometimes we have a specific subset of expertise. Maybe there's a certain type of product that you've done affiliate marketing in for a long time, or perhaps within affiliate programs that are likely to be stopped or some specific vertical and you are a specialist, I think that that can also help. So as you're sharing your thoughts, as you're getting out on social media, as you're going to live events and connecting with people, if you have a specific area where you can be of value to others for sharing that information, I think that can be helpful as well.
SPEAKER_01So the second important lesson that we wanted to share with you guys today, and that Deanna and I have actually really learned the hard way over the last 20 years, is that you really do need to know your numbers. And the reason why it's important for an affiliate manager to know the numbers that they're dealing with and what's important and what isn't, we'll go into a little bit of details about this now, is because it can impact how you are wasting your time when you are growing an affiliate program. So I'll give you a little bit of an example just to be practical about it. So, what do I mean by you need to know your numbers? The first thing is you need to know why your affiliate program is in existence and what its objectives are. Because for some clients and some brands, having an affiliate program is about brand awareness. Having an affiliate program is about selling products that maybe need to be shifted through other digital mediums or channels. Having an affiliate program could be a way to reduce their paid media costs and SEO costs by leveraging affiliate partners to help them grow. There are so many different reasons why businesses open up affiliate programs. Sometimes the right reasons, sometimes the wrong reasons. But if you as an affiliate manager don't understand what your target KPIs and outcomes are for working with all of these publishers and affiliate managers or affiliates, how do you expect the affiliates to be able to perform for you? Now, more often than not, when I'm having a training course with affiliate managers, the first question I ask them is what is your lifetime value of your customer? What's the price point that you can afford to pay for a customer? I'm telling you, almost 70% out of the people that I get to train don't know the answer to this question. And it makes me sad because they're not going to be able to actually commercially negotiate effectively with affiliates who are coming into that sales conversation with way more data than what they have, which means that they are automatically on the back foot and they don't actually know how to commercially negotiate their deals. So when I talk about knowing your numbers, it's not enough to know what your conversion rate is or how many clicks convert into a sale. You need to be understanding the why behind why you're driving this affiliate program forward and what it is that you're meant to be getting affiliates to achieve for you.
SPEAKER_02So many of you might be working on subscription-based products. So the tenure of a subscription will help you understand your lifetime value. If you're working, say a gaming affiliate program, obviously it takes time to know the lifetime value of that customer. If you work retail, how many times does the customer come back and purchase again? So it's not just about the one individual purchase or when the customer comes through the door. You really do need to know what is the value of the customer overall. And you can work backwards from that to figure out what you can offer them because your program is probably going to have a base commission structure. And so that's in general what you can offer. But what can you really offer? Like, where's the room for negotiation? And where can you start to build stronger relationships through providing publishers that are going to drive high-value customers to you? Where can you provide them with a little bit more? Where can you give them that's extra?
SPEAKER_01There's a reason why it's so important to know the lifetime value of your customer and why you should always be looking back at how partners are performing to really understand this metric. We had a really interesting question from the audience come up in this next segment on what changes we have seen in the industry with the adoption of AI, and what are the impacts and learnings that we can all be taking from these current changes. In terms of AI, I think it's going to change our lives significantly in terms of saving time with the immense amount of manual tasks that we have to perform as affiliate managers. Reporting, data, analysis, pulling together structured reports for senior management, looking into hyperpersonalization, all of these tools. I'm looking at the moment at a lot of AI tools for our agency, but also because I'm genuinely interested in what AI is going to do. And I'm always looking forward. I'm always looking at what's the next big thing in affiliate marketing. And I see a lot of cool tools, especially in relation to partner discovery, outreach, which is hugely time in time sensitive stuff that we have to do as part of our agency service. So I think AI is definitely going to change things, but what I don't think it's going to change is the need for relationship building. Because I don't think that a computer can replace human interaction and it never will. I hope that I never have to see it do that. But I just feel like on menial tasks, uh, it's a godsend and we should be embracing things that save time and money on tasks that don't have huge monetization impacts but need to be done. But yeah, I think time will tell. You know, people are clever and they will find ways to use AI in in imaginative ways. I've even been approached a Asked if somebody could make an AI of me with all of my content, which would be hilarious. How many of you give me a thumbs up? Would actually like to engage with an AI Leanne Johnston to ask her questions whenever they need to.
SPEAKER_02It is possible that AI can help us with our data-driven decisions, though, too, since we are talking about knowing our numbers. Now there might be there are tools out there where you can actually put detailed data in and ask for an analysis. So it could be interesting.
SPEAKER_01So let's get back to knowing your numbers. The other thing that I wanted to say about knowing your numbers, which is a second important lesson that we're sharing with you today, is that the reason why it's important for you to know your numbers is because it actually starts with knowing your customer. When you know who your customer is and you are crystal clear on who your customer avatar is within a niche, it then directs you to find the right partners to actually bring the traffic sources in. So I'll give you a really classic example. We had a client that came in and they were all about their mobile app. So they were, you know, they loved their app, they had developed their app, they'd made so many great things available in their app for their customer. And when we sat down and looked at their affiliate program and did a little mini audit, they were heavily reliant on SEO affiliates. And there were very few app-based ad networks that they were working with to actually drive traffic to this wonderful app that they built. And the question that we asked them was, why are you so heavily involved in SEO affiliates when all you actually really care about is app and mobile-based customers? And the only reason why they did that was because it was easy to recruit SEO affiliates and then convert those customers over to their mobile platform. So they were bringing in traffic from desktop and then converting them over to the app as part of their retention strategy. And to me that was sad because there were so many opportunities that they were discounting and not looking at because they simply didn't start with understanding their numbers and what their why was. And they'd ended up spending hours and hours of time trying to get traction with partners that didn't actually even have the right traffic sources for them. So when you start with looking at who your customer is and you understand your why and understand the value metrics that you need to be going after in order to bring these customers into your business, it then starts to map out a very clear acquisition strategy in terms of what kinds of partners you want to be working with. So, Liana, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about segmentation and why it's so important as well from your perspective.
SPEAKER_02I was actually just thinking on the back of your last slide, we've actually seen affiliate programs that are far enough along as well, where the data shows that it's not necessarily about 100% about bringing in new customers, which of course it's always somewhat about that, but also maybe helping to retain customers. And there are certain types of partners which can help you to retain players andor find higher value players. And we've worked on one program where they were looking only for super high value players. And so you're looking actually put them in the right direction. If you look at the partners you're working with now, what they're doing, and maybe find that one gem in the pile is a little bit different than the others, and their customers are providing you with more value because they're they're purchasing more, taking longer subscriptions, playing more on your site, those different types of partners can be very useful to you. So really digging into not only your numbers, but if you've come to a point where your program is starting to really mature, you might actually use your data to not only acquire, but also to retain and also to produce more value per customer.
unknownSo I think that's really important.
SPEAKER_01100% agree with that. And and that's also a very good reason why as an affiliate manager, you shouldn't be working in silos. You should be talking to your paid media team, you should be talking to your SEO team and understanding what numbers they're seeing in their channels because all of that interlinks and comes back to the different traffic sources and segmentations that you run in your own program to be successful.
SPEAKER_02You're looking for a very niche subsect of your of your customer base. Maybe it's work working with SEO affiliates to find that rather than using PPC to find those particular customers because that's going to be very expensive if they're very niche. So your affiliates, your partners can actually help you to reach that audience without the massive costs that it might give you if you're doing it through another channel.
SPEAKER_01The third lesson that Liana and I wanted to share with you guys is really one that we've kind of learned the hard way. I know the only way that you learn is by making mistakes. And when I first started out as an affiliate manager a million years ago, I was just like everybody else. I was target-driven, sales stressed. I had to go and get more partners, find more traffic, get more customers. And we kind of live in the mindset that bigger is always better. And one big lesson that I've learned very faithfully throughout the two decades that I've been working in affiliate marketing is to never discount a smaller affiliate. So out of the three lessons that we wanted to share with you guys today, build your personal brand and invest in building your personal brand every single day, knowing your numbers and understanding who your customer is, and then working backwards to find the niches so that your numbers are panning out and that you're working alongside the other digital channels in your business. This third one is probably the one that's most dear to my heart and the one that I actually wanted to share with you guys today, which is to never discount a small affiliate. Because when you do meet a small affiliate, they are probably starting out like everybody else, growing a business. But never ever discount a small affiliate that comes across your desk because affiliates are some of the most cleverest people I have ever had the privilege to meet. They are absolutely living on the edge of digital and thinking about how to drive traffic and how to convert and how to hustle and serve and make money every single day of their lives. So they are looking in things and places that you haven't even heard about yet because they're constantly living on the edge. So when you go to an event, when you get targeted by an affiliate, when you even look in your own affiliate program and see that there's a partner that isn't really delivering a lot of value to you, remember two things. One, they might be starting out in their business journey. Two, they might be incredibly clever and have a really good plan, but they just haven't been able to show it to you on their homepage. And three, they might end up being a huge conglomerate in five years' time that you desperately want to work with. And they will always remember that first impression that you that you gave them when you first met. So you never really know what's going to happen. You never really know how big an affiliate is just by looking in your own program and seeing the stats that they deliver to you. And you never really know where people are gonna end up. So always be courteous, always be kind, always be gracious with your time and consider everybody as a potential partner and don't be too picky and go, oh, I need to build my targets and I need to run my program and I need to deliver sales. So I'm not gonna spend time with you today because you're not a big affiliate. Because that's some of the biggest mistakes that I've made in my career over the last 20 odd years. I have discounted people in the past and gone, you're not gonna be a priority for me today because I've got five other affiliates that deliver more traffic. That one conversation can be the start or the end of a beautiful relationship. That's that's another lesson that I wanted to leave you with here. Lee, what about some of the experiences that you've had? Because we're being really raw and honest with you guys today.
SPEAKER_02I think what you're saying is like when you invest in stock, you might have a more risky portfolio, a medium risk portfolio, and a lower risk portfolio. And so you might be spending 80% of your time on your high value affiliates that you know, or your publishers that you know are driving traffic, and then a little less time on the medium, but leave that small amount of time to each week, put some effort into it and reach out to those smaller affiliates, those smaller partners. And in that way, you'll never discount them because you'll always have a certain amount of your time dedicated to them in your program. Now, although we have so much to do in our daily lives as a focus in managing affiliate programs, there's a lot of different apps that we wear. If you are really dedicated to your partnerships, or about that 10% of your time, actually set it aside, maybe even block it in your calendar, and then go after those smaller partners of yours, go have conversations with them, build relationships with them, ask them what they're doing, ask them what they're doing with other programs that they're working with, because as Leanne said, maybe they have way more than what you can see with your eyeballs or what you can dig up online. So maybe you can just have those basic conversations and you might find those really great partners who either have more than what you realize or that might grow in the future, or even if they don't, but somewhere down the line, you never know. We all change tasks in life every once in a while. Some they might be working somewhere else. You might have other great B2B relationships that you can create with them. There's a lot of value there. And so if you just take out, block out a couple of hours out of each week and focus on those. I think that's a really great way to find a publisher or an affiliate that others haven't really been paying attention to.
SPEAKER_01In fact, make that a task that you set for yourself personally. You're gonna post, you're gonna build a brand of you, make that your goals for 2024, build your personal brand, find ways to be seen and heard, have these conversations, step out from behind your screen, get to know your numbers a little bit better because the data will really give you ins insight on as to where you focus your time, your efforts, and energy, and make it a personal task to actually find a small affiliate and encourage them to grow. Because I have also done that in my career. I've helped small affiliates that have started out and seen them grow into massive businesses. And then even at some point there was one year where we went to an award and the affiliate actually won an award, and they came over to our table and said, We, you know, we started out our career learning from you, and now look at us, we've got an award that we've just won. That is really amazing to have in your career when you are spending so much time doing the grind and building relationships with these partners to actually see their success and know that you are a part of that. So take those moments in your career, not just the stressful moments where you are chasing the hustle and getting the numbers done, but look at the rewarding moments that happen when you build successful relationships with these smaller partners and when they grow, because that is also part of the job. It's part of the journey of being a really good affiliate manager is to take your partners on a journey through your business, whatever company it is that you're working at, but also to help them along in their journey and to give them advice and insights and things that they can use to actually grow their businesses. And then one day you look back like I do, like an old person, an OG, as they call me, and I go, wow, I've impacted so many people's lives. My job has had meaning and it's and I've learned so much from it. And we forget about taking the personal moments when we work in affiliate marketing because it is an incredibly stressful role and it is incredibly target-driven. And we need to take time out to actually think about the good things that happen in our jobs and in our daily lives when we're working every day.
SPEAKER_02Last year you published what you thought were gonna be the trends in affiliate marketing in 2023, and you were pretty accurate. So I was wondering maybe you could do a little uh look into the crystal ball again. Tell us what are the trends, what are gonna be the hot topics of 2024? What do you think?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you guys are hearing it from me first because I haven't actually publicized this anyway or spoken about what I think the future trends are yet, because I am still looking into the future. I do actually do this as a personal exercise myself every year as I go back and I think every year I write a blog about what I think the future trends are, and every year I go back and I have a look and I see was I correct? Did I actually accurately read the market? And seven times out of ten, I'm correct. So I'll give you my thoughts and my take, my early take on what I think the future trends are for 2024. But I'd love to hear your thoughts too, from whatever parts of the industry you're joining us in. I think with better data, and we really are seeing some amazing tools come into the marketplace that are helping affiliate managers to deep dive into data to accurately track multiple attributions source, to really get under the thick of where is our customer journey coming from. With that accurate data comes improvements of margins. So we're not gonna see budgets being cut next year or being shaved, but we are gonna see expectations for affiliate managers to get better margins on the deals that they're doing come into place because the data is available. So I think data-driven decision making and getting really close to BI teams if you have them in your business is a trend that I think all affiliate managers should be looking at. With that data and that insight on what customers need and want from us, I think hyper-personalizing and some of the AI tools that are being developed to personalize user journeys, to personalize onboarding experiences for partners, pretty spectacular. They really are really, really good in setting the bar and the quality high. So I think having hyper-personalizing or personalism in your affiliate program in terms of how you welcome affiliates in, how you onboard them, how you educate them to promote your products, I think that's gonna be a trend. I'm already seeing a lot of programs build really towards like activation strategies with partners using their CRM, their data, and also gamification tools. So I'd like to see more affiliate managers adopt that and really implement those things into their programs. And then I'm gonna start to say that I believe the affiliate industry is going to split into specialisms. So if you're an affiliate manager that knows a lot about SEO, you're gonna start to specialize in SEO. If you're an affiliate manager that works well with influencers and really gets a kick out of working with content creators, you're gonna start to find that you're gonna specialize in that. We've seen agencies start to specialize, like agencies like us. We specialize only in affiliate and performance marketing. We don't do any of the other digital channels. But I think really big programs are going to look to have their affiliate managers start to specialize in certain areas too, or certain types of traffic too, because it really is becoming very complex for affiliate managers to be specialists in all forms of traffic, just like it's very difficult for a CMO to be a specialist in every single digital channel. So I think we're gonna start to see hyperpersonalized data-driven decisions of better margin and value being driven, and then also people specializing in certain types of partnerships. This year the trend was very much on B2B, which I think is going to continue for 2024. We're seeing massive growth on B2B partnership and B2B to C altogether. Um so I think that's gonna continue as well. And yeah, I think technology is just gonna drive us forward and at such a rapid pace next year, probably faster than what we've seen. But the one thing I can tell you all is that I definitely know that we're all working in the right industry. If there's one digital channel that's going to continue to grow at a double-digit figure, it is this one. So could you know, congratulations, you're all in the right place. Some of you might be looking for jobs, but believe me, performance marketers are the ones that are most sought after. So the future looks bright. To me, I think it's gonna be a really exciting year, and I want to see how AI is gonna kind of revolutionize and change the way we do menial tasks. And that's pretty much what I think the future looks like. Thank you so much for being here with us. It's really been my pleasure to be here and to share the three important lessons that I've learned in my career so far to date. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna learn a lot more lessons because my career is not over, and hopefully you guys are learning lessons too. There's just one other thing I actually want to just leave you guys with today. And I don't know why I'm saying this, but I feel like I need to share it with somebody here on the screen. You know, we deal with a lot of imposter syndrome in affiliate marketing as well. We second guess our strengths, we second guess whether we're doing it right because we all have to learn on the job, and there is no textbook that says this is how you do this job. It changes with every business that you go into. So, one of the things that I do want to say that has served me well and really want you to think about and change your mindset about is that you only learn by making mistakes. So please don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make measured mistakes. I mean, I've made some pretty big mistakes in my career where they cost a lot of money. Thankfully, I've had very good supportive bosses. But the only way that you learn in this industry is by testing and making mistakes. So take that with you this week. Go try some campaigns that maybe you've put off because you've been a little bit scared about whether they would work or not. I just felt like I needed to share that with you. Go out there and make mistakes because that's the best way to learn. Okay, so have a great week, everybody. Okay, thank you very much for being with us, guys, and hopefully we see you again very soon. Want to amplify your affiliate program performance? The Amplify Summit is the only affiliate marketing event you need to attend to stay ahead of affiliate trends in 2024. You'll get no sales pitches, just honest advice and answers from industry experts to the questions that you have about affiliate program marketing. Get ready to save the date in your diary as we bring you the biggest and best amplify summit yet. Taking place on the 19th and 20th of March 2024. We'll be giving you the inside scoop on how to amplify your affiliate program and partner performance. Plus, book an on-demand ticket for £49, and you'll gain exclusive access to masterclasses, personal group coaching sessions, and all important Ask Me Anything sessions with real live industry experts who will show and tell you how to implement new tactics that drive consistent results. Get your ticket to join us at Amplify Now. Visit affiversemedia.com and click the button marked Amplify Summit to register.
SPEAKER_00That'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.