When William J. Tobin created the first-ever affiliate marketing program in 1989, for his company PC Flowers & Gifts, “influencer” was several decades away from being a job title. Even when Amazon created what would become the model for affiliate marketing with its Associates Program in 1996, “influencer marketing” wasn’t a commonly used phrase, let alone a way one could earn a living.
In the past decade, however, influencer marketing has become a major industry, pegged to grow to $24 billion worldwide by the end of 2024. In comparison, affiliate marketing is expected to be a $15.7 billion industry by the end of the year.
And now affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are converging. The result is influencer affiliate marketing and benefits abound for retailers, brands, and content creators alike. Here’s how to make sure you benefit.
What is Influencer Affiliate Marketing?
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Influencer marketing raised the stakes for all parties. Influencers are often relied on for top-of-funnel brand awareness as well as sales. In exchange for creating content touting a brand or product and promoting it to their hard-won followers on social media, influencers often want to be paid an up-front 'fee-per-post'. Retailers on the other hand like to pay on a performance basis and the affiliate marketing platforms are a great way to measure influencer results. Without affiliate marketing, measuring the effectiveness of influencer campaigns can be trickier and can be more qualitative than quantitative so therein lies trend twards convergence.
Our research survey of creators and brands with affiliate marketing leader Impact showed 47% of brands prefer flat-fee with performance bonuses. Pay-per-post plus commission is emerging as the top compensation model across all follower counts, offering a win-win by sharing both risk and reward.
Influencer affiliate marketing offers the best of both worlds: Retailers and brands gain access to the influencer’s audience on social media but pay the influencer via commission, or via commission plus a small flat fee. Influencers can earn a steady income even when they don’t have a brand sponsorship deal. And when influencers use a platform-agnostic deep-linking tool (such as URLgenius), they can link ''app-to-app' directly to the retailer’s category or product pages so that they receive the credit—and the commission—for each sale, as well as metrics they can then show to potential brand sponsors to prove the value of a partnership.
What's the Catch?
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Of course, that means two-thirds of influencers would—and many, many do. Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 benchmark survey found that nearly 50% of brands and retailers now pay influencers a percentage of sales, up from 21% in 2023, making it the most popular payment method for the first time. In contrast, only 24% pay a flat rate.
Macro and mega influencers—those with at least 500,000 followers—are most likely to demand an up-front sponsorship fee. But followers shouldn’t be your only, or even most important, criterion when choosing influencers to partner with. Engagement levels are at least as critical, and smaller influencers typically have significantly higher engagement rates. Can the influencer move product? One study found that micro influencers (those with fewer than 15,000 followers) had an average TikTok engagement rate just shy of 18%, while those with more than 1 million followers had an average engagement rate of less than 5%. The same pattern held on Instagram and YouTube as well. Other studies come to a similar conclusion: Influencers with smaller, more-niche audiences not only engage more with their followers, and vice versa, but they also have more credibility. And that’s on top of their being much more affordable!
How to Attract and Keep Influencers
Let’s say you’ve compiled a list of influencers you’d like to sign on as affiliates. You’re confident they fit your brand—perhaps they’ve already featured your product in their content or mentioned you in hashtags—and you like their content. They are active on platforms that appeal to your target audience, and you’re impressed with their engagement levels as well as their number of followers. Below are a few tactics to woo, win, and retain influencer affiliates:
- Personalize your initial pitch. If you’re unsure whether they know your company, introduce it. If they’ve already referenced it, let them know you saw the post. Let them know why you want to work with them and how your affiliate program works. Just as important, explain how working on a commission basis benefits them: by providing them with steady income in between sponsorship deals with other brands.
- Be flexible with the payments. Should an influencer you really want to work with balk at your standard affiliate commission structure, consider a fee plus commission, or bonuses for achieving certain sales goals.
- Offer added value. Influencers are continually searching for ways to distinguish themselves from the competition. Giving influencer affiliates exclusive discounts, free products, or early access to product launches they can pass on to their audience helps them stand out, with the bonus of also boosting their sales and engagement.
- Provide high-quality assets. In a traditional affiliate program, the retailer or brand typically creates banners and other collateral for affiliates. Offer similar content for influencers including images, videos, and copy. This also ensures that the messaging is consistent with your branding. Influencers love product history and details which help creators tell your product's story.
- Establish expectations with content guides. Let your influencer affiliates know from the get-go how many and what type of posts you expect from them within a specified time frame. Also, provide them with guidelines regarding usage of your logo and taglines, presentation of products, and the like. However, don’t be so prescriptive that their creativity and authenticity—their superpowers, after all—are compromised. Rather than insisting on, say, four Instagram Stories, two TikTok unpacking videos, and a YouTube explainer video each month promoting a specific product, allow them a certain flexibility regarding the type of content, as they likely know what their followers respond to better than you do.
- Co-branded e-commerce shopfronts. Amazon, Walmart, and Target are among the major retailers that strongly encourage influencers to create pages on their sites featuring their product picks. This can be especially appealing for influencers without their own blog or other website.
- Consider creating an influencer referral program. Giving influencer affiliates a bonus for referring other influencers helps expand your network with very little effort. Just be sure to structure it similarly to an employee referral program, in which no bonuses are paid until the referred influencer has met certain goals.
- Make it easy to track and measure performance. One reason some influencers are wary of affiliate programs is that they don’t have access to the retailer’s or brand’s metrics. Be sure to equip them with tracking tools and to regularly share your own metrics.
- App-to-app linking reduces friction and increase attributable sales. If you're not using app links for influencer marketing, followers click an influencer’s link to a product from social media and they're sent to the web login to the retailer make a purchase. When the app does not open, most will abandon at that point. The influencer and your campaign will not receive credit and commission for a sale.
Platforms like URLgenius solve for that web login friction between apps (not website required in between). As a cloud-based, platform-agnostic app-to-app linking solution, URLgenius enables influencers to link directly from social media apps to ecommerce apps like Amazon and Walmart, bypassing web login pages. This has been proven to boost conversion rates for influencers dramatically, which of course benefits, influencers (affiliates), retailers and brands. What’s more, it accurately attributes those sales to the influencers, enabling them to double, triple, or even quadruple their commissions, motivating them to continuing promoting the products. Another benefit is that URLgenius measures non-personally identifiable information (PII) including clicks, app opens, device, and platform. Beyond being able to track performance, influencers can use the information to even see approximately where their followers are located and the most popular links so that they can continue to optimize their content.