Affiliate marketing has been a popular digital marketing tactic for many brands. Businesses usually partner with bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and niche website owners as affiliates who promote a business’s services or products on their channels. It is a transactional relationship aiming to grow the merchant’s sales and traffic. In turn, publishers get a commission after each successful conversion.
Influencer marketing emerged as a separate strategy capitalizing on influential individuals' knowledge or relationship with their audience. Influencer marketing works wonders if businesses and their creator partners build long-term relationships and focus on authenticity. Brands can achieve many goals with influencer marketing, yet the most common ones are raising brand awareness, building authority, and growing engagement.
Recently, many brands started combining the two approaches by hiring influencers as affiliates and reaping the benefits of both methods. Traditional affiliates may be less costly than sought-after creators but they don’t necessarily know how to engage younger audiences. Influencers, however, are young social media users themselves and they know how to attract new followers and maintain old ones.
If you hesitate to start an affiliate program with influencers because you’re unsure where and how to identify them then read on. This article will share tips with you on how to find affiliates, more precisely affiliate influencers for your conversion-focused campaign.
Key Differences Between Creators and Affiliates
Influencers usually create content to engage their audiences, whether it is with high-quality videos, stunning photo posts, or storytelling. Yes, occasionally they promote products or brands but their main purpose is to cater to their followers with their videos or posts. If they enter into a partnership with a business, they usually get a flat fee for their work or free gifts, however, their payment isn’t always tied to performance.
Traditional content creators can work with brands short and long-term. However, in recent years companies have been putting more focus on forging long partnerships with influencers to build credibility and maximize their success. Therefore, when looking for influencers for awareness campaigns, brands primarily analyze creators’ audiences, engagement, and popularity.
Affiliates also create appealing content, but they are more likely to make tutorials, product reviews, and unboxing videos. They link their content to a promotion that intends to drive conversions, mostly sales. They are compensated after a successful conversion, be it a purchase, a subscription, or a click.
Affiliates may partner with several companies simultaneously to secure a steady income. These campaigns are generally associated with seasonal offers or product launches and hence they may not build on lasting relationships between the merchant and the publisher.
Bear the above information in mind when you start looking for influencers for your affiliate marketing because apart from audience, niche, and brand alignment you must analyze their track record. Pay special attention to past collaborations, conversions, sales, and the overall campaign performance.
How to Find Influencers for Affiliate Marketing Campaigns? Here Are 8 Methods
1. Use an influencer marketing platform
An influencer marketing platform offers several tools that allow you to search for and analyze influencers for your brand affiliate programs. For example, explore HypeAuditor’s 137+ million creator database and identify possible affiliates on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Apply the Discovery tool’s filters to find influencers whose audience demographics align with your target audience. You can set the influencer’s size, determine the engagement rate, and see whether they mentioned other brands. If you think, the promotion works in videos, select TikTok or YouTube as the major platforms. If image posts are sufficient, look for influencers on Instagram.
You may search for the keyword ‘affiliate’ in the content or bio of influencers. Be sure to set the audience quality score to 60% or higher and the engagement to above 1% and define the influencer’s and their audience’s location, age, and gender if needed. The disadvantage of searching by keywords is that you can’t pick the category so you have to comb through the list of influencers and identify those who are in your niche.
2. Do a social media search
The most genuine affiliates are people who already know or, even better, use your products. Therefore make a list of product- or service-related hashtags and enter them one by one in Instagram’s Search bar. Check your brand mentions and the individuals who tagged you. Of course, this method will take a lot of time to yield results, because you will need to manually review the posts and videos of these influencers one by one.
3. Host a giveaway
Test how active your followers are when an opportunity arises. For example, you can develop a giveaway or contest where you encourage people to take a photo of your product while using it or write a testimonial about it. Observe how much effort your most enthusiastic followers put into the task and how engaging their content turns out. Evaluate the past content and profile of those who actively participate in giveaways and online quizzes.
4. Collaboration with customers
Look through your customers' purchase history and pinpoint individuals who ordered from you numerous times. Segment your most dedicated shoppers by age, location, and other differentiators. Check if they have any social media accounts, how many followers, and how big an influence they have.
You may check the review sections of your e-commerce store product pages and look for individuals who left a detailed overview of your product. Reviewers who share why they use a product and describe the benefits and their experiences are probably already passionate about your brand.
With HypeAuditor’s Influential Customers feature, you can track what users say about your product and pick those who left positive feedback. Connect your Shopify store to HypeAuditor’s platform, start monitoring reviews, and identify customers who can become your next affiliates.
5. Google search for bloggers and niche experts
Consider subject matter experts and niche bloggers as affiliates. Even though these people create information-laden, in-depth, text-based content, they can still attract many people who look for comprehensive guides and tutorials.
A financial blogger who specializes in personal finance and budgeting can advertise a budgeting tool or an investment platform on their website. Or an editor or proofreader can promote an online copyediting or proofreading course on their blog. Check whether these bloggers are active on one or more social media platforms and have a significant following. This way they can promote your brand on various channels like blogs and websites along with social media.
Combine keywords related to your niche or industry with the words ‘blogger’ or ‘expert’. You may refine your search by adding modifiers like ‘top’, or ‘best’ to find reliable voices in the topic. To gain even more accurate results, combine your service’s or product’s name with the words ‘review’, or ‘rating’.
6. Create a landing page for your affiliate program
Design an enticing and SEO-optimized landing page where you give a brief description of your influencer affiliate program. You must mention the commission individuals will get if they refer their followers to your product. Provide a short step-by-step application, and a straightforward call to action, and share who can apply. You may add positive reviews from your current affiliates to grow interest.
7. Ask for referrals from current influencers
Chances are that your current creators are in touch with similar influencers or even collaborated with them. Thus constructing an affiliate referral program enables you to approach valuable creators who may be attracted to become your affiliate partners.
Evaluate your existing influencer roster and gather top performers whose content generates the highest engagement or grows conversion and traffic. Reach out and explain to them that you want to expand your program and are curious about their opinions and recommendations. Motivate influencers by offering bonuses and rewards or premium partner status if they refer quality affiliates who join your marketing campaign.
8. Look around in affiliate networks
Affiliate networks are platforms that connect merchants, the companies who want their products to be promoted with publishers or affiliates. Businesses can set up their campaign on the platform by establishing the affiliate sign up terms, compensation, tracking, and providing promotional materials. Affiliates can browse these publications and register for those programs they think align with their niche, audience, and promotional styles.
Affiliate networks let brands create unique discount codes and links that they distribute to affiliates. This way, businesses can easily monitor sales, link them to specific influencers, and pay their commissions accordingly. Companies can check which influencer and content is driving the most sales and use this information for future programs.
Conclusion
By working with influencers as affiliates you can expand your campaign’s reach, grow awareness, and simultaneously increase conversions. Even better, if selected well, influencers can easily make your promotions seem organic and in line with the audiences’ preferences. from others, we listed several methods for discovering influencers for your affiliate program. The strategy for finding influencers differs from that of traditional affiliates, so consider incorporating new search techniques in the future.
