Now here's your host, award-winning affiliate programmarketer for, the thought leader and the drums digital's top 50 UK agency owner, affiliate manager, motivator, the founder of affiliateinsider.com herself, Leanne Johnston. Lianne, over to you.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And I'm super excited today to have Alexander Phillips, the founder of Breezy.io, joining me to talk all things affiliate marketing. Hi, Alexander. How are you?
SPEAKER_01I'm really well, Liana. Great to see you and speak to you.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for being here on the podcast today. So we're going to talk about our favorite subject. And I know it's a mutually favorite subject between us because we've had many a conversation about affiliate management and partner discovery. And this is really the sort of crux and nuts and bolts of what we're going to be talking about today. But before we get started, I want you to just tell our listeners a little bit about the extensive experience you've had working Network side and what led you to launch breezy.io, which is a new product in the marketplace centered around publisher discovery and partner connectivity.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So I guess my earliest experience before entering affiliates was in the content space. I used to run an online user-generated content platform called Urban Times, and I didn't really know anything about affiliate marketing. We grew that platform over a few years. And we grew it to a couple million readers and thousands of writers and made no money because we eschewed advertisement. And after that business uh inevitably failed, which is you know it did in the UK, uh, you know, struggled to raise capital around this kind of media concept that was refusing to advertise in the traditional sense. Um, I looked around, I said, Well, what's one of the fast-growing tech companies today that is really uh interesting that I can learn from? And one of the ones that kind of was um clearly uh skyrocketing was transfer wise. And so they had a role which was affiliate manager, and uh I kind of bluffed my way into that role uh using my content experience and my deep understanding of content. I think um ended up managing that team, and then really uh on the back of that saw an opportunity and I set up an agency. Uh I left Transfer Y, set up an agency, and I worked on a 100% performance basis uh where I brokered, so running everything from the discovery to the outreach to the negotiation and execution of partnerships for various tech companies in the UK, from fintech to prop tech, and uh taking a proportion of the CPA or the RevShare, whatever the structure of that deal model was. Uh then having used various technologies, so everything from impact while at transfer-wise before they later transition to partner uh to partner ize, uh lots of eyes here. Uh, and then uh working with Awin, working with Rakutan, but also working, uh working with CJ, I mean plenty of the traditional networks, uh, and then also working with self-service kind of SaaS tracking solutions such as Tune, which at the time was has offers, working with Tap Filiate, and seeing the pros and cons of these technologies, uh, which all led me down the path of saying I'm gonna fund all of my profits out of Breezy, uh, actually, out of Afil, the agency, into a new business, which later became Breezy. And uh the goals at first were really ambitious. One was to to tackle some of the problems in tracking, yeah. Uh and then later that kind of pivoted to solving the problems in discovery.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh, so you know, there are still lots of problems with tracking uh that relate to uh attribution, that relate to uh reward structures being inflexible, that relate to um I guess uh uh first last click um uh versus linear click structures. But try explaining all of that to an investor and try figuring out how to reposition a tracking platform in a space where 25 networks and 25 SaaS own the PPC and own the search. So I thought, what's the gap here? And and and always uh this discovery problem was lurking there, kind of in the shadows.
SPEAKER_02I think, yeah, I mean, you know, 25 years of experience in affiliate marketing, finding the right partners to work with, and it doesn't matter what vertical you're working in, whether you're gaming, retail, finance, fintech, whatever it is, B2B SaaS, finding the right affiliate partners is always kind of like 80% of the job, right? So it's a very, very important part of successful affiliate program management. So talk to us a little bit about Breezy and what Breezy does.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So um, you know, got got to this point. I haven't really mentioned what Breezy Garda does, but briefly briefly mentioned the word discovery. So Breezy is all about helping businesses find their ideal partners. Uh now I I do use the word partner intentionally and not affiliate, because for me, uh, affiliate is well, our definition is when a content entity promotes a brand, a product, a service on a performance basis, and is one of various types of partnership. Uh so um affiliate is my favorite type of partnership because it is quantifiable, it is uh highly um rewards-based, it pushes obviously everything uh on the rewards side down the funnel, which is uh uh probably the fairest way of working. Uh, but broadly speaking, there are three types of partnership groups. One is promotional marketing partners into which affiliate falls, the other is kind of supply chain and distribution, and the the third one we see is technology partnerships. Uh, and the goal is over time to uh let brands identify the entities that have the highest overlap with their target customer base. So those entities may be other content partners with an audience that overlap with that customer base, or they may be brands with a customer base that overlaps with their customer base.
SPEAKER_02And that's quite important. I want to just kind of like stop you there because, as you said, our ecosystem of affiliate marketing is changing. It has changed dramatically, I would say, in the last five to seven years with the onset of social media. Pretty much anybody can become a publisher if you want to use the word affiliate or publisher to just classify what we're talking about. But you've brought up a really interesting point in terms of brands. So, brand-to-brand referrals. And I want to kind of stop you there and just make you talk about that a little bit. What does that mean for affiliate managers that are listening and have never heard that term? Talk to us about brand-to-brand referrals.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So um it's it's something that's obviously existed for a very, very long time, uh, but is not traditionally viewed through the lens of affiliate. Uh, so an example uh that is uh you know one that I have direct experience with is in the prop property space, the prop tech space. Uh so let's say that you are uh an online estate agency, your customer is one that wants to sell their home. There's a high likelihood that on the journey of selling your home, you may want to get a mortgage in order to buy your next home. You may also need a conveyancing service, you may need a home removal service. Now you may need an insurance service, insurance service, and and it goes on and on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So property space I mentioned because it's one that's already doing this, it's one that a lot of uh kind of uh the entities in that space have already figured out ways to upsell and diversify. And it's really weird that less than one percent of the world's businesses are actually diversifying their revenue models. Now, now another example might be a company like LV, which sells maternal breast pumps for uh new new mothers, yeah, selling on another brand's formula, uh, or selling on type of nappy. Uh, the the need there is is a combination of the target customer overlapping, it's a combination of the timing of the the purchase being relevant, and it's often what you'd see in in kind of uh recommendation algorithms on the likes of an Amazon. But the question is how do I identify those partners that are likely to want to resell me, that are likely to want to refer me? And how does that work?
SPEAKER_02So, change is the way that affiliate managers should actually be looking at growing their affiliate program because traditionally we've always been taught that you start with a keyword. You start with a keyword that your customer might be looking for, and then you go find the partner that can bring you the traffic around that keyword. And what this actually does is it's it makes you think about starting with the customer first. Who is my target customer and where is that target customer hanging out? Because it isn't only on affiliate websites or in social media pages or influencer channels or whatever the case will be. It very much, it very well could be at a at a company that has no relevance to you but still has the same target audience. And this is really what brand-to-brand referrals is about. And I remember a case here in the UK. Um, if you've ever booked a train line ticket, um, you know, to go from London to wherever, they did a really good upsell many, many years back. I'm talking six, seven years ago, where after you bought your train ticket, they would upsell you hotels, or they would upsell you car hire, or they would upsell stuff that even though it wasn't part of their product offering, they were monetizing in an affiliate way in order to generate additional revenue outside of just taking the share of your wallet for the train ticket. And this is really what you mean by sort of brand-to-brand referrals. And finding those brands with those similar customer segments to you is something that we don't really have tools for at this point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I so I think that you've first of all shown a great, great example there. Uh, I think the the industry that has typically got the closest, you know, uh to brand around furlough is the travel, uh, is the travel industry, often with a lot of upsells built into the product. Um, when it comes to finding your idea partners, you mentioned keywords. That's actually still the uh one of the main components of Breezy's discovery today. And the reason for that is we haven't yet identified every customer base and quantified it for every entity. That's a very big task. We estimate that there are globally about 100 million businesses uh worth their salt. There's also about 100 million content creators, including uh 38 million influencer accounts, uh, but seeing a lot of overlap between one influencer who's on three different social media platforms. So this is a job in the long run of categorizing every entity for the purpose of matching them. And that's very different from categorizing them for say search or categorizing them for another purpose. Uh and the kind of things that you're looking to understand are obviously one of those main things is who is their customer base. Now, because we don't yet know who their customer base is, uh, unless they come in and tell us, uh the best thing to do is to use search. Uh, the the person that is ranking for your keywords is either going to be one of, or the entity that's ranking for your keywords, is either going to be one of uh two things. They're either going to be a competitor, which is useful to know because you can learn more about your competitor landscape. And uh also, as I'll get to, you can use that to search new partners using Breezy, or they're going to be uh an entity that talks about the things that you sell or talks about to the customer that you're selling to in some way. And that's all about using smart keywords uh to run these searches. But historically, it's always been really challenging. You type a keyword into Google, you have a hundred set sort of results to go through. So, how do you do that at scale? So, what Breezy does is it takes two sets of data. It takes a list of keywords that can be directly the keywords you rank for, directly the keywords uh so the keywords that your customers would search to find entities like you, and it runs them across search, intersearch in high volumes and pulls all of the results combined. So if you run 100 keywords, we'll pull 10,000 results. If you run 500 keywords, 50,000 results. Then in parallel to that, it says who's linking to your competitors. And if you don't have a competitor, because I know there are some brands out there that like to say they have no competitors because they are so unique, but yeah, exactly. But I've seen quite a lot of that, and uh it will be who well, if you don't have a clear competitor, who is the closest thing? And if it's not even that they sell a similar product, then what are brands that you can think of that sell things to your target customer? Yeah, and you go more lateral, and so we will ask for that, and we'll then pull all of the links to that data, we'll combine it all together, all the results for the keywords and all the results for backlinks to your competitors, uh, which you historically would have to use SEO tools like Moz and Ahres and SEMRush, great tools for SEO to find, or you'd have to manually search and Google or build a scraper to do so. And we combine that all together, and that for us is what overlap looks like. So that's the current snapshot of the first stage of saying, Oh, whoever overlaps with all that stuff is either going to be a competitor. Oh, great, then I can add them to the competitor inputs, or they're gonna be a potential entity, and that entity may not be a traditional affiliate, they could be an incentive site, they could be a blog that works on affiliate, but they might be an editorial magazine or a PR partner, and that's why Breezy is a discovery tool for finding the third-party entities and not just for finding affiliates.
SPEAKER_02And that's the kind of long tail because I mean, I know you know it's it's about it's about having the tools in place to actually look at that long tail and how that can augment what you're doing with the direct um partners and publishers that you're working with. Now, we've spoken a lot about sort of hybrid content partnerships recently and and how brands can incorporate this into their program growth strategies. Is this something that that kind of pooled list can actually help you identify as well, or is that something else that you should be looking at as a as a matter of course to improve your affiliate program management?
SPEAKER_01So when it comes to using this list to identify or refine your strategy, think about it as a landscape assessment. So the first thing I often think of is when you're when when you're deciding to launch a channel in the first place, uh a lot of businesses that don't yet have a channel will be faced with a choice. Their choice will be either do I go to an agency, in which case the agency is probably gonna set me up with a network. Do I hire in-house an affiliate manager, in which case I'm probably gonna go to a network, but if I'm potentially shrewd and the manager knows really how to do discovery in a targeted way, I'll set up a self-service in-house or an in-house, you know, uh tracking uh situation on Tune or on uh Tap Filiate or one of the many uh that exist that are that are worth their soul. Um that doesn't tell you the size of your opportunity, doesn't tell you the and that's a bit like setting up a business without doing your market research and your opportunity assessment. No one is gonna do that. So, why would you launch a partner channel without doing that? This is what Breezy allows you to do. So it's not just refinement down the line once you have an established channel. So, you know, a massive household brand name with a 10-year-old channel is looking to diversify on its 10,000 existing partners, you're also making a decision at the early stage. And I think if it you know of entering in, and that's what we can help with both those different needs. So if you're at the early stage of that decision making, you know who your target customers are, you know the keywords that even if you don't rank for them yet, you'd like to rank for, and you know those competitors, then you can run that through Breezy and see a snapshot of that content landscape. And what that gives you is the following: here are thousands and thousands of results ranked by their overlap with your inputs. Here is the reach, we look at things like the Moz rank, we look at things like the Alexa rank, uh, here is uh their geographic spread, which we also rely on Alexa for. But also, here are the specific keywords from your inputs that they overlap with in the top 100 results, and here are the competitors that they link to from your list of inputs. Now, with that data set, oh, and the final thing before we then add our secret source is um relevant pages. So here are the two most relevant pages based upon your inputs, and that's useful for two reasons. One, you might actually find a content page you want to appear on. You know, it might be a list or a comparison table that you want to get in, that your competitors are in that you haven't that you haven't seen before. And that's that's that's your outreach right there. We would love to appear on this link. This is our CPA, you know. Uh, we would love to appear on this page. The other thing is, oh, we noticed that our competitor, you're working with them on this basis. Do you think we could replicate something similar? Right? Or just knowing that they have a piece of content that overlaps with your customer base or talks about something similar in a way that resonates with your brand or your culture or your values, is interesting and useful and may somehow impact your outreach strategy. Once we've got the results, they go into our database. Once we have an entity discovered, it may not be in our database yet, it may already. We have six million entities currently in our database and growing. That's a six percent of three percent of the 200 million I told you about. Um interesting. We start passing every page of that of that entity and we look specifically for signatures. We look for signatures in the redirects that go out from that page, and we look to identify is there an affiliate link? If there's an affiliate link, we figure out that this blog has an affiliate relationship with that brand on that network, yeah, and that is the data that we're collecting that no one in the world is collecting right now. Now it's taking a lot of time and it's expensive to map that, but our vision here is to map the entire affiliate landscape. So we think about 30 million uh partnerships, partnerships of entity to entity relationships, um every single page and have that database there so that any business can see the relationships that a publisher has, but also flip it. Tell me everyone that my competitor works with in real time, uh, if there's an update. And that's where we want to go. So I'm like Puma has suddenly decided. To work with um uh Uprox or whatever, uh, and and you know, can we get alerted of that? And is it an affiliate relationship? So uh that secret source is about seeing the signature that tells us this is you know an A-win link, this is a Skim Links link, and that's also really interesting. Most people don't know what their subnetworks are doing, you know. That's an opaque like place, you know. Uh, you know, you have Skim Link sitting on the network, you have Vidilink sitting on the network, you have DigiDip sitting on the network, all great subnetworks. But which partners are they working with within that? Well, you only see the one publisher on AWIN, you only see Skimlinks, but we know those uh relationships under the hood under the hood. And that's that's also a nice little side side effect of of what we're building.
SPEAKER_02That is quite important, I think, because you know, programs, especially in retail, they work with blind networks or blind publisher networks because there's less resource management, it's less labor intensive. Because what I find from looking at the gaming industry to looking at retail, you know, retail finance, insurance, um, which are the sort of areas that we mix in, there's a lot less resource applied to the affiliate channel in retail because they rely on networks to provide some of these um services and account management resources than what there is in gaming, where everything is taken in-house and just the technology platform is rented, basically. Um, so you have like more in-depth, bigger teams. Um but I still wanted to talk a little bit about that sort of hybrid content partnership that we spoke about as well. So I want to kind of bring you back on track to that. How can brands incorporate that into their affiliate program growth strategies? Because it's clear now what the tool does, but the other thing that we need to be careful of is data overwhelm with affiliate managers because they've got such a broad job spec, because they're expected to do so much within the confines of managing their program, from the partner discovery to the execution to the commercial negotiations, everything that goes into that job role. What are some of the things that you can recommend that are going to help affiliate managers? And and I wanted you to talk specifically about the hybrid content.
SPEAKER_01So just for the audience, defining the hybrid uh partnership, um I view that as uh a collaboration with um an entity, a publisher uh that usually works on an upfront payment basis. So typically would would uh charge for a blog uh and would not really consider being rewarded at End of Funnel. Uh agreeing to meet you in the middle. That that to me is is is the hybrid relationship. So uh I'm gonna come to, you know, as an affiliate manager, I would go to uh this publisher that may be traditionally an editorial magazine, it may be uh you know a large renowned publisher that and say to them, let's let's meet in the middle. Instead of paying you 500 pounds for this blog piece, we'll pay you 250 plus performance on a CPA basis.
SPEAKER_02Now that is prevalence in gaming, not so prevalent in retail, but we have seen companies like Vogue and you know, especially in the fashion retail in the makeup industry, more and more of these publishers are moving to this hybrid partnership. So, what are some of the key things that affiliate managers need to know when they're approaching companies like this to do a hybrid partnership?
SPEAKER_01Oh, great question. Um, well, so so first of all, the affiliate manager needs to get internal sign-off on some budget, right? So that internal sign-off, it might be from the brand team, the marketing, the head of marketing, they're gonna need to convince internally the team that they're gonna they're gonna be able to go out there and offer something up front. And that is already a behavioral change because already because currently you have silos, and those silos mean that that budget isn't allocated uh uh and apportioned in in a way which is really allowing affiliate managers that kind of flexibility. So, assuming that that has been done internally, I'm gonna create that relationship with that publisher first of all by by looking, and probably the most traditional approach is the publisher's gonna send me a PDF of their media pack. And I'm gonna go through that media pack and I'm gonna have to first of all have all the regular conversations. The the regular conversations I'm gonna have to learn that relate to uh more traditional marketing manager roles are things like, well, if I'm paying this up front, how do I figure out that journey all the way down to the conversion? So we'll essentially get to my cost per acquisition. And and I'm gonna have to explain that to the publisher who might not be particularly receptive to it. So uh, first thing I'm probably gonna have to go through each of their different offerings, right? Well, here's the display offerings, and then I'm gonna say, well, these are our typical conversion rates on our side. So, like, what is the most important thing I'm gonna typically say? Well, this is my this is my from a click to a sale. Like if I'm paying on a sign up, then it's a click to a sign up. What is the the conversion rate there? Now, if it's two percent, then immediately I'm gonna be anchoring that number. You're telling me you're gonna send me uh, you know, you're gonna have 10,000 page views, which is already a promise that publisher is gonna rarely make. Then they're really either gonna make that level of quantifiable promise. Absolutely. If that's the case, what is your likely click-through rate? Right. So on your 10,000 page views, what's your likely click-through rate? That click-through rate is then gonna allow me to say, well, we have a 2% conversion rate, which means that we're gonna get this number of customers and this is what we typically pay. And then if you make that calculation and you are miles apart, then you're probably gonna want to stop the negotiation right there because it's probably impossible to meet in the middle. But if there is some uh if there is some kind of reasonable uh appeal, that the the the I guess the conversion rate is something that that is closer to the kind of target goal that you want to see internally, um, then you're gonna continue that conversation and you're gonna say, well, here's the thing, right? This is a lifetime revenue. And if you agree to discount your rate up front, I can sign off on say 50% of that rate, but over a year you're gonna earn it back and more because your article will rank and it will start to generate ongoing passive income. Yeah, and that is obviously what any affiliate manager is trying to sell to a typical blogger, but that has to, it's that same sell, uh, and you've got to convince them of that.
SPEAKER_02I think the key thing here as well is also that affiliate managers need to start backing up and knowing what their numbers are, and they need to be thinking about their role less as an account manager and an administrative support and more as a media buyer, because ultimately you're responsible for budget and you are responsible for maximizing your company's budget, whether you're working network side, agency side, client side. It's it's a fact that our industry is becoming more sophisticated and that we need the data in order to make informative decisions, but also to educate the partners that we want to be working with, because there is this meld, this meld merging of everything and everyone is an affiliate now. And we sort of spoke about that at the beginning of the conversation where you said you don't like that word because it doesn't encompass everybody that we possibly work with in the affiliate channel. Um, and using tools like Breezy can actually help you to find these people that slip through the cracks that aren't what we call traditional affiliates or traditional influencers. It could be any of these partners that overlap that can actually become affiliate partners with a little bit of education and a little bit of training, but also companies knowing that their account management teams, their affiliate management teams, need to be trained on digital media buying and being able to have those conversations with these publishers to create these hybrid content partnerships, which now form part of this program.
SPEAKER_01This idea of learning to be a media buyer is, I think, the crux of it. Uh, there is a creative component to that campaign, there's a uh to that campaign you're gonna run, which may not fall into the well, certainly doesn't fall into the traditional incentive strategy that that kind of affiliate uh you know encompassed for for well over a decade. Um and increasingly bloggers are scared of being cut out, you know, by incentive sites. So you know, if you're gonna convince a blogger that is gonna rank and then that incentive site is gonna come in and and kind of get that acquisition on the last click and overwrite the blogger. Uh you've got two things you're gonna have to convince the blogger of. One, uh please, uh you know, please acknowledge the fact that we've we've got improved attribution, an actual linear attribution model. Uh so that's something you're gonna have to convince them of that they're actually gonna be attributed, which is technical as well.
SPEAKER_02So your account, your affiliate account managers need to understand technical tracking.
SPEAKER_01And then it's also saying, well, and because we're rewarding you and we're gonna guarantee that, um uh you know, please do also work on performance with us. And I think bloggers now are increasingly scared to work on performance, they're increasingly you know, you know, sending out the same kind of PDF and media pack uh that a large established media, uh, media company uh and and and and prominent publisher uh will be sending out. And uh I think you know that's where that's where the value is for long-term ranking. It's with these, it's with these uh quality content entities that over time are going to be appearing on the first few pages of Google uh for those more long-tail keywords uh and uh are also gonna be highly resonating in your customer base as as trust uh trusted um uh referral partners. Uh that trust you know is is gonna be higher with a blog uh that has their own style and tone of voice than with most you know most kind of more traditional affiliates. And um I think I think because you've got to acknowledge that as part of your your strategy, uh you have to start incorporating hybrid into your into your um your work, your workbook.
SPEAKER_02You can't shy away from it anymore. I mean, the industry is becoming too complex now. And I and I think, you know, if you really do want to invest in this channel for the long term um to reduce your marketing costs, because effectively that is what an affiliate channel does when it's operating properly and not in a silo, it can actually help you reduce your marketing costs in other digital channels because you're paying on performance. But it means you're gonna need to get cleverer because the pool of existing, you know, 30,000 partners or whatever it was that you mentioned earlier, um that's a finite pool. You need to start educating people to bring more long-tail traffic in if you want to continue growing and becoming a more established affiliate brand. Um, you know, there's some really big affiliate programs in the retail space that have been around for many, many years, but how do they continue to grow? It's by looking at these things, these niches like um hybrid partnerships and educating new uh you know upcoming uh media publishers to take on a paper performance model. So there's a lot of education that's happening in this in this space. And I think the key thing, I mean, which takes me to my next question, is you know, if you could predict the future of affiliate marketing, where do you think this channel will be heading? I mean, it sounds like it's kind of messy at the moment because everything and everyone can be a publisher, but what are your thoughts and and what's your take on kind of affiliate marketing in five years' time?
SPEAKER_01So most of my focus right now has been what I'm what am I trying to build that that actually defines defines that future somewhat. Uh so for me, there is uh I think related to this hybrid uh conversation, for me, there is a a major problem within the frameworks that exist for these negotiations. So um if I can just kind of uh talk a little bit about what what it is that we're going to be trying to do to solve that problem, and then I'll try and maybe I'll answer the more macro question. Um, what we would like to do is imagine that any publisher and any profile, instead of having a media pack, uh, can have their ideal way of working specified in one place. That place, in our view, will become breezy. Uh, you know uh where I, as a manager, an affiliate manager, a marketing manager, or business development manager can come along and say, Well, that's I see your ideal way of working. This is my ideal way of working. Can we meet in the middle and digitize that experience? So I don't know if you've ever seen content uh uh website buyers where you have an agent uh that basically it has a reject, negotiate, reject, counter, accept functionality. We want to create a place where you can see the target on both sides and literally speed up that process by forming the uh the negotiation in real time, the same way you might negotiate with uh someone on Upwork to develop the ideal uh freelancer relationship, um, building the terms of service of your relationship and setting out clear KPIs, clear accountability around which the state which stakeholders in the company are responsible for what, uh, and really develop digital frameworks and user experience around the frameworks that keep relationships from failing. So there is a 70% failure rate in partnerships. It's a McKinsey statistic, and it's not just affiliate specific, it is broadly speaking, all partnership types. And the reason for that is misalignment of goals, yeah, misalignment of expectations. Yeah, the the way to solve that is is by by filling holes and bridging uh well, making improvements at every step of the universal funnel that you sorry, the universal journey of a partnership, yeah. So that means refining discovery and improving recommendation and uh uh matching, but it in between that, there is really no network that feels like a CRM, that feels like a hub spot or a sales force for partnerships.
SPEAKER_02And I think networks are going that way because I think Impact Radius has, you know, they've they've purchased media models recently. Yeah, so I think I think you're a hundred you're spot on. You you're kind of predicting the future there in terms of getting more aligned with working with your publishers in a deeper way. It's not just about here's the opportunity, here's the deal, are we gonna do the deal? Do the terms match, and then kind of the campaign runs, and then where does it go next? There's gonna be this more life cycle approach to dealing with your partners and to dealing with your publishers, but also um a less macro approach to how we've had before because we're gonna be looking outside for hybrid deals, we're gonna be looking outside for B2B referrals, we're gonna be looking, you know, the kind of context of what an affiliate is now is very different to what it was 20 years ago when we first started, and it was a person with a blog. You know, then it became a person with a social media channel, then it became a person with an app, then it became a person with a media. You know, that like that whole context of what the affiliate channel is going to look like in five, 10 years time is gonna be completely different again as we go through more digital life cycle changes. So I totally agree with you in terms of you know, we're looking at a much broad, how do you navigate this broad universe without tools, without data? It's impossible to actually do that properly.
SPEAKER_01So now I'm gonna have another go uh answering the question a little bit with uh I think two two main kind of uh umbrellas. So uh in terms of impact, uh it's in terms of terms of the most uh impactful changes that we can expect to see. I think they're gonna sit one on the technology improvement side, and on the other, the behavioral uh changes we're gonna see within the way that teams function.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So on the behavioral improvement side, it's really about looking at technologies that support best practices from the end to end of the partnership journey. Yeah, we're already seeing companies like Impact and Partnerize really improve the user experience around this, but there is a long way to go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So obviously, on the discovery side, you have your recommendation and partner matching, the algorithms that underwrite that, and you have diversification of what it means to find a partner from traditional affiliate to finding businesses, finding influencers, and finding various types of publisher in one place to suit different products and different customers that I have within within my business. Yeah, but then when it comes to outreach and negotiation, kind of really lack frameworks that are necessary to do the job of encouraging successful outcomes. Yeah, so that includes things like defining what are the benefits, defining what are our overlapping cultural values, defining what are the things that we're measuring, and who are the account holders, and what is the time frames we're going to. Yeah, there it currently this stuff happens on Gmail in a conversation like you and I are having. There is no technology like what Asana is doing for project management, or even Salesforce for sales, exactly or Salesforce for sales or HubSpot for sales, you know, or seeing what Slack has done for internal team collaboration, all of this stuff needs to come together to allow best practices to enter into the workflows, but also bring best practices in for companies that may not have all those skill sets. Because uh, you know, a lot of the times one thing, if you've you know, if you've read all the books and and you you have a lot of experience in the space, but if you're entering in the space, you don't know the best practices, you don't know uh the best way to build a negotiation framework. So you need tools to support that. Um, and this is where the behavioral change uh you know, moving to that, I think is is gonna be really I think I don't know if it's gonna happen, but I think this is what should happen. I think that silos need to start bridging. I think that the same entity that could be a PR partner might have one contact within that entity that is dealing with PR and another that is dealing with paid editorial. Uh, and and what that means is you have different internal teams dealing with the same entities. If that's going to happen, then really what this is is about saying who are ideal partners and then who within our business owns the different executions around that relationship. So you might have a marketing manager, a PR partner, and a PR manager, and an affiliate manager all collaborating together to own different components of a single relationship.
SPEAKER_02That's very telling in retail as well, because we do see that quite often where we where even I'm approached by different people in different companies asking for different things. Some will want to do pay data or some will want to be on our podcast, some will want to be just um you know PR exposure and coverage. And it's very difficult to manage that. And it also impacts your cost efficiencies because it impacts resourcing. And resourcing is often something that we forget about as a cost parameter when looking at the profitability of your affiliate program. Um, and inefficiencies on resourcing, I think, is what you're you're also saying, is that because we don't have all of these tools in one place or the skill set in one place, it's impacting the efficiency of your affiliate program running at the most cost-effective price margin. I mean, that is like the nuts and bolts of it, is really we need to find ways to get all of these technologies integrated, talking to one another and giving the frameworks to the people that need to manage these budgets so that programs can become more profitable because there is a lot of leakage. Um, I think if you look at any program, I mean, we do a lot of program audits at Affiliate Insider, often we'll find leakage points that can be plugged with tools. And this is why we're so interested in speaking to um, you know, business owners such as yourself and you know, lots of other SaaS providers that we talk to on the podcast, is because efficiency is what I'd like to see going forward in the next five years within affiliate program management. Um so yeah, I'd I'd really love to thank you for your time today. You know, we've had some amazing nuggets shared here and some great um numbers. As well, you know, that's 70% of partnerships. I mean, that's a great. I'm going to try and link to that in the in this podcast so we can get people to read that because it's interesting stuff that uh maybe affiliate managers working client side don't ever get to hear because they're only in their own company. So it's been great to have you on the podcast today and just share a little bit about what you guys are building and how you see the affiliate um industry moving forward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been really enjoyable. Uh and uh I think at the end there you kind of summarized some of my points better than I did in the answer. But uh yeah, I I I think um we're fully on the same page. It's been really hopefully we can do another one down the line uh and uh see see the uh the updates that really and also tell you telling you about the updates that really would also discuss the ongoing changes in the industry.
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah, I think it's it's great to have so many different viewpoints on our podcast for affiliate managers to just see how everybody is viewing the affiliate channel right now because I think you do get a little bit blindsided working client side or network side for that matter, or even agency side, um, to to the bit of the industry that you see. So I I love having people like you on who have a really broad strokes approach of what's happening in the affiliate space. So it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
SPEAKER_00This podcast is brought to you by AMP. Affiliate Insider is an independently owned business. So we're sponsoring this podcast episode to showcase our exclusive affiliate management performance program. AMP is our unique program for affiliate marketing program managers. We've helped hundreds of affiliate managers across a range of brands to get the best of their affiliate partnerships and build consistent sales. Seats to access to AMP each semester are very limited, so don't miss out. Run as a live coaching session once per week. This 12-week intensive training program is suitable for affiliate program managers at all levels. You will learn proven tactics and strategies that allow you to upscale your program or team performances. Growth hack your sales using tried and tested strategies that have been gained from decades of experience running million-dollar affiliate programs worldwide. For more information on what AMP offers or how to book your place on the next open cohort, please visit affiliateinsider.com and hit the training button to find out more.
SPEAKER_03And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving, tips, tricks, and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales.