What gets marketers’ content noticed and trusted by consumers? It isn’t just relevance – it’s immediate relevance – links to content, offers, products or services that offer an opportunity to engage that matches the viewer’s in-the-moment intent. Affiliate marketing and search marketing are changing—and savvy marketers should be aware of these changes to ensure their strategy produces the best results.
Discover Hybrid Search and Affiliate Marketing
The first step in transforming your marketing strategy is understanding how consumers are searching for products today. It may seem counter-intuitive, but 83% of users don’t even go to Google once they know exactly what product they plan to purchase. In a customer’s journey from intent to purchase, they may consume a wide range of content – from product reviews on social media feeds to video. At each point, there’s an opportunity for a brand or performance marketer to capture their interest and win a conversion.
That’s where hybrid affiliate and search marketing comes in. Affiliate marketing can make content and search work for any marketer by amplifying the value of an existing or new search marketing strategy — delivering new value — like a coupon, relevant content, or a link to a brand’s searched-for product — each time consumers conduct a search.
Rethink Search: Consumers Already Have!
Marketers will spend $15.7 billion annually on affiliate marketing by 2024—and the reasons are obvious: it can be phenomenal when it works. In a 2019 survey, publishers ranked affiliate marketing as one of their top three sources of revenue, and 20% of marketers ranked affiliate marketing as their most important customer acquisition channel. In addition, while a mix of organic and paid search brings 68% of trackable website traffic, affiliate marketing amplifies search value for marketers, drawing in more revenue generation opportunities and accelerating consumers’ path through the sales funnel. Leveraging affiliate and search marketing simultaneously to increase marketing performance means creating a new model for marketing strategy—one that takes advantage of modern hybrid marketing tools.
Evaluate Search Alternatives
While consumers may resist a bombardment of poorly targeted ads, ads that provide relevant information, offers, or content are welcome by 71 percent of consumers. At SitePlug, we’ve worked extensively with brands and affiliate marketers to develop hybrid affiliate marketing and search marketing solutions that can effectively plug bottom-of-the-funnel leaks based on the best attributes of affiliate, content, and search marketing. Using “search-like” performance marketing products and contextual ads that were initiated by a keyword search, we direct consumers to a highly relevant page containing precisely the product or service they were looking for.
- Site Suggest
When a user types a product name in a search box on browsers and keyboard apps, Site Suggest recognizes the user’s input and displays a relevant product ad, bypassing the search engine results page altogether and navigating consumers directly to the brand’s link. - Site Direct
Mistyped domain names can cost brands millions in sales and result in a loss of trust and reputation when users are led to broken pages, parked domains, and malicious websites. Site Direct identifies these spelling errors and automatically redirects users to a brand’s correct website. - Site Discover
As consumers search for reviews, deals, coupons, and social media posts from friends and influencers, they generate valuable data on their intent. At each of these touchpoints, Site Discover leverages this data and directs users to product purchase pages through ‘buy now’ widgets, coupons, and banners across more than 10,000+ carefully vetted publisher sites.
- Increasing touchpoints across more than 10,000 unique content and coupon publisher sites
- Creating a frictionless shopper journey
- Boosting bottom-funnel conversions of high-intent users
- 100% transparency for brands to make efficient and data-driven decisions
By strengthening the relationship between search and affiliate, marketers can overcome consumer avoidance of irrelevant ads and remain visible when high-intent users are ready to engage. Write to us to find out how.
