2020 affiliate marketing guides are out and here’s what they look like

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(Newswire.net — December 11, 2019) —  In a world where the internet drives almost every industry and market, it’s relatively easy to expand beyond your current country and attain new customers. Back in the day, when taking your products and/or services to a new country required the actual sales teams there, the market expansion was associated with a lot of resources and expenses. The internet is effectively getting rid of many such challenges.

So, since you’re here reading this article, one particular reason or another has led you to expand your reach to a completely new market. And while this is a very exciting prospect, it still requires a lot of attention and planning. One of the most important aspects of “conquering” the new country is marketing. 

Taking precautionary steps before entering a foreign market

Before you go anywhere with your actual products/services, you have to be pretty certain about how the prospective customers feel about them. If you enter the market blindfolded, no one can guarantee that your business doesn’t fail there. So, you need the proper tools to spread the word.

Now, the world of marketing knows many techniques that can work in different ways. For example, social media marketing focuses on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other websites and their customers by providing appropriate content that’s also promotional. 

But in your case, when the goal is to step into a whole new market, the conventional marketing tools can prove inefficient. See it for yourself: as a full-fledged company, you need to have a special marketing team that does several things at once: picking specific audiences, coming up with the actual marketing strategies, then testing them, etc. All this takes a lot of time, energy, and money, more importantly. 

Perfect marketing archetype for 2020

But there’s another very exciting marketing strategy that takes away all those burdensome undertakings from the companies and delegates them to the actual marketing agencies. Welcome to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a method of spreading the word but instead of doing that yourself as a product/service owner, you’re hiring others to do that. The affiliate marketing agencies are called publishers and they’re doing exactly that – they’re publishing you. 

Here’s the brief tear-down of this strategy: the companies connect with the affiliate agencies – also known as publishers – and come up with their preferred contract terms and conditions; it includes the list of promotable products/services, commission rates, paycheck dates, etc. 

What’s great about affiliate marketing is that it only pays based on the actual sales performance. There are no pre-payments of any sort. This enables businesses to save a lot of money that they’d otherwise spend on their own marketing departments. 

Besides, you don’t need to spend time, brainpower, and other resources on testing various marketing strategies. The publishers are already skilled in this regard and know what works best in a certain environment.

One of the biggest applicants of this marketing strategy is definitely the entertainment, and in particular – the gaming industry. The major casino establishments, both online and offline, have realized that their services were getting much higher traffic when opting for online casino affiliate programs rather than conventional ads and commercials. It had much better results because publishers were doing their best to push those services into new areas of consumers – only that way were they getting paid.

More beneficial affiliate networks in 2020

So, you get the basic idea – you hire a team to promote your products/services. However, it’s not even your task to communicate with the affiliate agencies. There’s a system called the affiliate network where all the communication and hiring takes place.

If you’re someone who wants to take their business out of the country, there are specific requirements to follow: when submitting your business as an affiliate merchant (the one whose products need to be promoted), you indicate the most incremental points of your partnership, such as:

  • What’s the basis of payment? Is it sales, views, clicks, installs? If you really want to make the most out of your marketing expenses, indicate sales since that’s the only real basis of your revenues;

  • Where are you planning to promote your product? Here you need to indicate the specific country of your preference. This also includes the targeted audience which you also need to describe in great detail;

  • What does your offer look like? If you want your affiliate partners to make the best efforts, they need to know that you’re offering and how your products/services stand out.

All those points are crucial for your account on the affiliate network. Once it’s submitted, the network will then notify the prospective publishers of your availability. What’s so exciting about affiliate networks is that there are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of various publishers that are waiting to jump on the opportunity.

What’s more, a lot of them can choose your products all at the same time. This means that many marketing teams will work on the same product, boosting its popularity in various directions and audiences. 

As we’ve mentioned earlier, you don’t need your own marketing divisions to promote your products. The publishers are there for that exact purpose. Besides, the affiliate industry is so vast and flexible that any company or individual, who agrees to promote your product/service at a certain price, can close a deal with you. As we’ve mentioned above, some of the most famous and successful YouTubers are feeding off of the affiliate deals from various companies.

However, you do need one person to assign the task of checking the affiliate programs every once in a while, so that the partners are doing their job and not oversizing their sales performance. 

Knowing competitors is becoming harder

To put it in a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a great tool for your company to expand the horizon and go to new places. With the help of affiliate partners and networks, you can find specific agencies that are already experienced in this area and can easily boost the popularity of your products.

However, there are other aspects that require no less attention from you. For instance, you have to know whether the product/service that you’re putting out has a demand in the country of your liking. It doesn’t matter how great you are, if nobody wants to buy anything from you, then there’s pretty much nothing you can do. 

You should know where you’re stepping in. Focus on some specific demand that hasn’t been met yet, and don’t try to compete with the industry giants on their own field. This also means that you need to know your competitors. Only this way do you stand the chance of achieving something on a foreign market.