4 ways to help your affiliates get started with marketing your business

If you’ve got people signing up for your affiliate program, you must be doing something right! Now, the question is: How do you help those affiliates get off the ground?

Getting results from your affiliate program isn’t a passive process; affiliate sales are essentially products of the relationships you build. Empowering your affiliates is everything, and a major part of that is setting them up for success from the very beginning.

In this post, we talk about 4 ways you can help your affiliates get started with marketing your business.

1. Provide comprehensive branding assets and guidelines

If there’s one thing your affiliates can’t do without, it’s branding assets and guidelines for promoting your business. After all, how can they feel confident representing your brand if they don’t have parameters to work with?

If you’re not sure where to start, think about these questions:

• What’s off-limits? Think content, language, and imagery. If your affiliate program is relatively new, do you have examples of other brands to refer to?
• What’s your brand voice? Casual? Professional? Quirky? Fun? How do you want your products and business to be represented?
• How does your brand translate to the affiliate’s audience? Ideally, you’d validate this compatibility beforehand.
• What are the real-world benefits of your products? These are important things to know when communicating with affiliates about their promotions.

Help your affiliates get started by fully equipping them with any logos, graphic elements, and copy they might need to effectively promote your business. This can include things like your company name, product names, catch phrases, and taglines, including any particular spellings and syntax that they should use.

To make things extra easy, create a branding assets page on your website, so that affiliates always have access to what they need.

2. Make quality affiliate creatives

Affiliate creatives are bread-and-butter components of running an affiliate program, and an affiliate who is well-equipped with quality creatives can start promoting right away! Creatives may include the branding assets mentioned above, or things like landing pages, text links, banners, social media graphics, or videos, for example.

Whatever types of creatives you choose to make, the principle is the same: Make them as high-quality and high-impact as possible. Modern designs, uncluttered information, and catchy copy can all go a long way toward putting your affiliates in the best position to succeed.

Affiliates can use creatives in their newsletters, social media posts, YouTube videos, and blog posts – all of which are great places to attract customers and get those affiliate conversions happening. While making quality creatives may require more work upfront, they exist to help your affiliates thrive, which means more money for you at the end of the day.

3. Give your affiliates exclusive offers

Affiliates love exclusive offers that they can pass on to their audiences. For one thing, an exclusive offer gives them a competitive edge; plus, affiliates are always on the lookout for fresh new content to publish.

Exclusive offers can be customized to different affiliates and their audiences, which makes them more relevant and more effective for conversions. Exclusive offers for different audience segments also help you test out different marketing strategies. But, with respect to the topic at hand, they give your affiliates a powerful tool for promotion straight out of the gate.

4. Provide one-on-one support and onboarding

By far, one of the best things you can do to help your affiliates get up and running is to give them one-on-one support. Whether you do it yourself, or you assign them to a dedicated affiliate manager, make sure your affiliates have someone reliable they can go to with their questions and concerns.

You also might consider creating a webpage outlining frequently asked questions, as well as an onboarding process to help your affiliates get acquainted with everything. At the least, you could send your new affiliates a welcome email with all of the main information they need to get started, including direct contact information, links to branding assets and creatives, and some information on how to use their affiliate dashboard, what to expect for payouts, and what promotions are available to them.

In general, supporting your affiliates in any way you can – especially at the beginning – can reduce friction and help get them from point A to point B seamlessly.

Let’s hear what you have to say. What have you found to be most effective for getting your affiliates started with marketing your business? Comment below and let us know!