From the previous post about Affiliate Marketing (AFM) which has received a lot of attention from the marketers in Thailand and Southeast Asia, now Yuya san, InterSpace Thailand CEO, also an expert in this field is willing to answer my interview to share his deep insights about the role and impact of AFM in the industry.
According to Wikipedia: “Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts“.
Who should be the most suitable persons for AFM?
All people who want to have a high performance: want to generate leads & achieve their high ROI marketing result. In general AFM is good for generating lead & it’s a cost effective method.
What do you think about the role of affiliate marketing if compared to other types of marketing: SEO, SEM, Email, Social Media…
Compared with SEO
Companies can take care of SEO by themselves basically. But it’s very difficult to take care middle and tale words by themselves. Because in SEO, one webpage can target maximum one to three keywords. And one web page can reach up to one position from the search result. If one company has affiliate marketing campaign, webpages which created by affiliate marketers can take care of middle & tale words. Otherwise, these web pages have possibility to make search results monopolized and eliminate competitor web pages from the search results. SEOers always have to follow behind the frequent change of Google’s algorithm as well.
Compared with SEM
In my opinion, if one company needs to get a new customer or generate conversions online, it must do SEM and optimize SEM campaigns. Because SEM is very effective to stimulate consumers to make their final decision. SEM plays role of closing your sales.
What AFM can help to make result of SEM better is contribution of consumers who haven’t make final decision. Consumers have a trend to trust on neutral content more than advertising. Most of the web pages made by affiliate marketers seem not like advertising. Because they have knowledge about content marketing based on their experience in each categories.
Content marketing can influence consumers to make final decision. And content marketing are sometimes difficult for company by themselves. If company promotes product by both SEM and AFM, they can improve their result better. I bet that many consumers who didn’t make final decision reached by SEM will make it by Content Marketing by affiliate marketers.
Compared with Email marketing
In my opinion, Email Marketing is better for AFM than lead generation. So I’d like to ask our clients to go for an Email Marketing solution to be engaged with consumers got from AFM.
Compared with Social Media
Nowadays Social Marketing is essential to build brand awareness. But it’s not good for generate lead directly. AFM works after build brand awareness.
So I’d like to propose those companies are building brand awareness by Social Marketing use AFM not to waste budget for building it.
What is the value in term of time and cost Affiliate Marketing can contribute to eCommerce firms?
Conversions come from AFM don’t need optimize CPA. Conversions have been already optimized in AFM. So it’s very effective to achieve CPA target. In general, CPC Ad-network costs higher than CPA at first. Because based on an theory of optimizing CPC network is that optimizing comes after reaching broadly. It means e-commerce firms don’t have to waste time and money.
Which online categories AFM can play an important role and why?
In our experience in Japan, lead generation in financial industry, e-commerce and mobile Apps are most effective categories in AFM.US and some other countries where AFM is popular also have the same situation.
In terms of finance, CPC has come to very expensive in those countries. So AFM contributes to create a lower CPA. Mobile Apps is now one of the biggest industries in AFM all over the world.
What is the disadvantage of AFM?
AFM is not well known in Thailand yet and ACCESSTRADE is still new. So we don’t have a big inventory at the moment. But it’s a temporary problem. We have a lot of experienced affiliate marketers in Thailand. If ACCESSTRADE provides attractive offers to them, AFM in Thailand should be popular in the very near future.
What should we pay attention while using AFM?
In AFM, CPA is optimized from the beginning. So what optimization means in AFM is keeping track of quality of consumers come from AFM.
In our experience, affiliate partners are classified into 4 group.
- “Get huge numbers of quality conversions”
- “Get huge numbers of low quality conversions”
- “Get small numbers of quality conversions”
- “Get small numbers of low quality conversions”
We propose commission structure for each group to maximize result of ACCESSTRADE. Details is only for our advertiser. If you need details, please join ACCESSTRADE.
Can AFM be applied in mobile/ social channel? Any example?
In mobile market we are a top lead of experience in Japan. And we know much about how affiliate marketing have been working in US market as well. In those countries, so many mobile APPs are promoted as CPI offers (Cost-per-install) and monetized by CPI campaign. Some of CPI networks provide tools of cross promotion as well. We are supposed to provide localized solution like them.
Thank you!