Affiliate Marketing in 2021
Don’t Forget Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing, after email marketing, is one of the most powerful, low-cost forms of marketing. It is like having an advocate in your camp, selling and telling others of your services. Affiliate marketing is also a perfect form of marketing for digital products, and you can reward those promoting your products and grow your business.
[1]Wake up at an ungodly hour. Drive to the office through total gridlock and streets jammed with other half-asleep commuters. Slog through email after mind-numbing email until the sweet release at five o’clock.
Sound terrible?
What if, instead of dealing with the monotony and stupor of the rat race to earn a few bucks, you could make money at any time, from anywhere — even while you sleep?
That’s the concept behind affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a popular tactic to drive sales and generate significant online revenue. Extremely beneficial to both brands and affiliate marketers, the new push towards less traditional marketing tactics has paid off. In fact:
- 81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing, a statistic that will continue to increase as affiliate marketing spending increases every year in the United States.
- There is a 10.1% increase in affiliate marketing spending in the United States each year, meaning that by 2020, that number will reach $6.8 billion.
- In 2018, content marketing costs were gauged to be 62% of traditional marketing schemes while generating three times the leads of traditional methods. In fact, 16% of all orders made online can be attributed to the impact of affiliate marketing.
- In March of 2017, Amazon’s affiliate structure changed, offering rates of 1-10% of product revenue for creators, providing the opportunity for affiliates to dramatically increase their passive income based on the vertical they’re selling on.
- The affiliate marketing of Jason Stone, otherwise known as Millionaire Mentor, was responsible for as much as $7 million in retailer sales just in June and July in 2017.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. The affiliate searches for a product they enjoy, then promote that product and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make. The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another.
[2]Ever-green verticals for the 2021 season
First, come the all-times classics of affiliate marketing, a.k.a. ever-green verticals. These are the universal advertising angles that are always in demand all year round. What’s especially interesting, but even more useful, is that we can adjust them for any occasion you’d like to match your marketing angle with.
In short, be it new year’s resolutions, Valentine’s Day, summertime, or holiday shopping craze — these niches will make money while you sleep. So, naturally, after you set proper campaigns, do your testing, optimization, and proper creative rotation.
The point being, with all the hard work that affiliate marketing campaigns entail, investing your time and money into these sectors is both a stable and profitable investment.
✔︎ Surveys & Sweepstakes
✔︎ Gambling (also Casino and Sports Betting)
✔︎ Gaming
✔︎ Dating (mainstream and adult)
✔︎ Finance (including Trading, Binary, and Crypto)
✔︎ Health & Beauty
✔︎ Nutra & Weight Loss
✔︎ E-commerce
Naturally, we’re all waiting for the big comeback of the travel niche in 2021, but this still has to be confirmed by external factors such as travel and airline regulations in different countries.
COVID-19 prompted verticals
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has surely exerted a huge impact on the way digital advertising operates these days — the affiliate sector included. But, luckily for affiliates of all kinds, the positive results outweigh the negative consequences. Given that the global lockdown forced millions of people to move their daily lives into the online sphere, affiliate marketers could benefit from the change in many different ways.
Here are some affiliate marketing verticals that experienced a surge in traffic and interest due to the coronavirus lockdown.
1. Make money online niches:
- Gambling (online casino, online poker, and roulette)
- Sports Betting (kick-off expected as soon as the season starts)
- Crypto Offers
- Trading/Binary
2. Home entertainment verticals:
- iGaming (also eSports)
- Online dating
- Adult niche (Valentine’s Day is coming!)
- Streaming (VOD, eGaming, eSports, adult)
- Hobbies & Education
- Home entertainment
- Home appliances
- Music
- Fashion
3. Work-from-home verticals:
- Utilities & VPN
- Antivirus
- App Downloads
- Hobbies & Education
- Online courses
- Electronics
- Food and grocery delivery
- E-commerce (still awaiting the travel part)
Given that the virus won’t go away the moment we flip that calendar page to 2021, these advertising angles will most likely continue to perform well in the upcoming year, too.
[3]Below are the most likely affiliate marketing trends of 2021
- Seasonal Advertising
- Native Advertising
- B2B Advertising
- Localized advertising
- Video content
Seasonal Advertising
Gone are when marketers were affiliated with the same products and brands until the end of time. Today, as and when there is a shift in seasons, there is also a shift in the products most advertised. Thanks to data-tracking tools, brands and marketers are quick to gauge the changing trends and quicker to leverage them.
As more and more businesses use consumer data for marketing their products, seasonal advertising will be big in 2021.
The trend is already gaining traction. For example, on the widely popular coupons website, GrabOn, there has been a surge of offers for Online Courses in 2020, with the advent of a worldwide lockdown. The coupons start-up says that they have experienced 210% more searches for online courses in 2020.
Tools like Google Keywords Planner provide forecasts of how your product will be searched in the online market. The statistic can be a valuable asset for your data-driven marketing.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is not done in the traditional banner-ads format but instead carefully slipped into the content. This will become excessively popular in 2021, as studies show it is a more effective way of marketing. In fact, with so much exposure to banner ads, users have developed a sort of “banner blindness.” Meaning our brains are filtering out unnecessary stimuli, leading to a complete disregard towards banners.
So, while we are side-lining ads to focus on content, it is great to place ads inside the content itself. In this effort, trends like influencer marketing and advertorials will gain much more traction. Research has shown that nearly half of all social media users trust influencer recommendations and convert that into a purchase decision.
B2B Advertising
We are now seeing a rise in B2B marketing. More and more B2B industries are opening themselves to affiliate marketing. As a result, affiliate marketers are no longer limited to B2C campaigns.
Affiliate programs for web hosting are especially lucrative, given their high-volume, high-payout structure. To get an idea, check out ResellerClub’s affiliate program itself. Depending on the package you choose to market, 25 sales can earn you anywhere between Rs.73,500 and Rs.1,47,500!
Localized Advertising
Localization is no longer just about reaching the local audience. Instead, it means reaching their mind. To do so, affiliate marketers are now studying the cultures of their audience, researching what works and what doesn’t, staying up-to-date with their trends, and understanding their lifestyles and priorities.
This leads to a much more curated marketing experience. Your niche is a collective of people from various backgrounds. Each person interacts with your product differently. For example, while organic soap is a premium to some, it may be non-standard.
How will you advertise your soap to both groups? While some want to buy your car because it is status-enhancing, others may desire it because of its space and functionality. What is the tone you want to use while advertising? These are only a few of the many considerations to account for while marketing for a niche.
Video Content
Video is a much more effective tool when it comes to advertising. Research done by Wyzowl shows that over 72% of people like to know about their favourite product through videos. Not only that, viewers of the video are much more likely to remember the call to action than blog readers. Here’s another piece of statistic from the same research: around 84% of customers tend to buy something after they’ve watched a video of the same thing.
That says a lot about the power of videos. But even then, this medium has not entirely been utilized in the past few years. So you see some brilliant content on YouTube, with high traffic and good scope for product placement, yet the video ends without any marketing involved.
In 2021, this process is likely to get more streamlined. It will become a trend for content makers to reach out to brands before making a video instead of brands always having to do the work.
Conclusion
The world of marketing is characterized by its dynamicity. No two years are the same. But while there will always be trends that catch you off-guard, it shouldn’t stop you from gauging, tracking, and being prepared. With an idea of what affiliate marketing will be like in 2021, we hope you’ll implement them successfully, try new methods, learn, and continue to evolve as a marketer.
Head to our Marketing Blog Category to know more and stay updated with the latest news in the world of marketing.
Article compiled by hughesagency.ca
Article Links:
