Affiliate marketing can be an easy and cost-effective tactic to drive click-throughs and sales, particularly as the battle for Christmas spend heats up.
But handing over control to a third party partner is not without its challenges. So how can marketers make the most of affiliate marketing without risking their brand reputation?
August is the point marketers must start planning and implementing seasonal marketing strategies.
Despite consumers being occupied with thoughts of barbecues, beachwear, and sunburn, it’s when summer is at its peak that brands need to begin their preparation to ensure they’re not caught out by the festive season.
If the vertiginous rise of video-sharing and streaming platforms such as YouTube, which receives more than 6bn video views from 1bn unique users every month, has taught us anything it’s that people have a voracious appetite for video.
It should be no surprise then that more than four out of every five marketers plans to use video in their email campaigns in the future.
Every marketer knows that the key to an effective advertising campaign is reaching the right person with the right message at the right time.
And as every advertiser (of a certain age) knows, this used to be so much easier when people lived homogenous, predictable lives.
With new technologies like iBeacon, the in-store experience offers a rich seam of customer insight for retailers to mine, but ensuring shop-floor staff are trained to interpret those insights and act more like marketers is vital.
The growing prominence of mobile and online shopping has challenged marketers to refine and tailor how they target the ‘always on’ consumer.
Retail hours are a thing of the past and the individual lifestyles of consumers are becoming relevant to targeted campaigns.
The optimisation of brand websites and email marketing content for mobile devices is becoming ever more sophisticated as a result, and is increasingly tailored to smooth the customer experience.
This new 24-hour retail market means marketers have to engage customers across a range of devices at all stages of the purchasing journey.
Customers can decide to make a purchase at any time of the day or night, and marketers must be ready to help guide these decisions.
Smartphones can support impulsive purchasing – browsing a retailer’s website while waiting in a supermarket queue and clicking ‘buy now’, for instance.
Meanwhile, the widespread use of tablets as second screens presents the opportunity to make purchases, perhaps in response to advertisements, from the comfort of your sofa.
Digital window-shopping, or showrooming, is common among smartphone users and often leads consumers into physical stores to try on or test products, or to making online purchases from another device at another time.
The marketing potential of Advanced Attribution is huge, and many companies struggle to devise a strategy that’s suitable for them.
Everyone is talking about it, yet marketers find themselves confused, stuck, overwhelmed by the many options, model types, and data sets.
Although adoption is gaining momentum, with brands allocating more resources and budget to attribution modeling, only 26% of companies use advanced attribution that goes beyond last-click according to an Econsultancy Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing.
This is truly alarming, considering that companies spend sums of up to and more than £5m annually to drive customer acquisition in online marketing alone. This is huge investment that is not necessarily ROI proven.
So, how can you use the platform to turn data into insight and action?
Here are three ways marketers can approach it, without becoming stuck.