Affiliate Marketing Plan Structure

Hello all,

We have been talking (sorry for the silence for months) about Online Marketing effectiveness and how Marketing Strategies are accountable and measurable. Let us go a bit into detail and describe a structure of Affiliate Marketing Plan.

We know that loads of online businesses are using Affiliate Marketing and it is the major marketing tool for business success.

So as a big supporter and believer in making things simple and structured, here goes my proposal of how Affiliate Marketing Plan may look like (by the time of writing I am working for an online gambling business, so it can surely affect some details).

Ok, we apply the model of Marketing Strategy and Plan, proposed by Chartered Institute of Marketing and go particularly for an Affiliate part of it.
We assume we are talking about one product (either poker, or casino, or sportsbook) and one country (we would need to make further adjustments and modify the Plan from country to country).

The main criteria to bear in mind when you fill this in is to make sure it is timed, realistic and achievable and, what's the most important, measurable in terms of linking to the business needs.

1. Current Situation - Research:
- competitors;
- existing affiliates;
- trends on the market;
- fill in the Boston matrix to determine where to go;
- set up the current grounds for Affiliate Programme, including key selling points.
All this should give an idea what are the opportunities.

2. Defining - Goals:
We need to define the SMART Goals that reflect the business needs:
- sales - Player Acquisition?
- revenues - Revenues from Player Quality?
- traffic - Increased Brand Awareness.
Make it measurable!

3. Marketing Strategy
We use the opportunities defined in step 1 to develop strategies to achieve the goals defined in step 2:
- bold strategic points to be developed;
- describe the targeting;
- describe the positioning and branding.
We bear in mind that we can use in-house technologies and affiliate networks (Income Access, eGaming-Profit, DGM-UK, etc) for Acquisition and Retention parts of teh Strategy.

4. Marketing Mix
There are many issues to consider whilst designing a proper Marketing Plan using a standard mix and they are as follows:

Product
- Technology
- Support
- Promotional package
- Affiliate staff (experiences and customer-centric managers)
- Fraud management
- Terms and Conditions / Restrictions

Promotion
- Cold leads
- SEM
- Organic traffic, SEO
- PR
- Social Media
- Conferences
- Affiliate forum
- Affiliate blog
- Affiliate Programme sales presentation
- Tools (Syntryx, HitPath)
- Internal communication with Affiliates (e-mailings)
- Promotions to motivate Affiliates

Price
- Affiliate compensation: decide on the plan - CPA, Revenue Share, Hybrid, etc

Place
- Set-up
- Optimize lead funnel (landing pages)

5. Resources and Budget - a good idea to start with a 1 year operational plan?!

6. Measurement
ROI - isn't it what we are all striving for?

The plan is optimally short and descriptive and proven to structure all the affiliate marketing efforts and leave some time for creativity and innovations for a skilled marketer.

Please should you have any comments and suggestions do not hesitate!

e-Mail me NOW or use the Comment feature below please

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Marketing vs Sales: a conflict can be resolved? Online marketing prospective

Just a few thoughts about a usual conflict between Marketing and Sales departments.

Have been thinking about a way to resolve it from the online marketing prospective.

Ok, first things first. The conflict arises when marketing sets up the targets quantified by the number of leads and then sales dept basically starts working with leads, but only with the ones who qualified (by various criteria that was set up by the business).

So from the marketing prospective narrowing down the targetting would result in lesser amounts of leads and thus lesser efficiency and underachievements.

And from the sales dept prospective only qualified leads would convert into sales (lets say real money and revenue).

So basically the answer to the conflict resolution is pretty obvious: to find a way how to turn a big number of leads into qualified ones. So we do have a second group of leads which was disqualified for some rational criteria.

Now we have a solution to educate our disqualified leads for sales department. One of the things I have leant from different SEM and affiliate campains would be to develop a brand new landing page based on the analysis what is the discrepancy point between qualified and the largest disqualified group.

Can we say this landing page nurturing project can really work or you can suggest another tactical marketing tool to be used in turning disqualified leads into qualified (the more percentage to be converted the better of course)?

Marketing genius and economic downturn

I cannot help it not to share the results of CIM survey, published at http://www.brandrepublic.com/Marketing/News/865676/Half-marketers-change-plans-due-economy/

Particularly interesting is the quote of David Thorp, director of research and information at The Chartered Institute of Marketing: ‘Despite deep concern about the prospects for the UK economy, today's professional marketers recognise that they have a key role to play in helping their organisations identify and exploit the opportunities an economic downturn brings. By creating real value for their organisations and measuring the effectiveness of their marketing activities, marketers can demonstrate clearly how indispensable they are to their organisation.'

In the times of cost cutting and staff optimization it is very surprising the desire of many CEOs to fire professional marketers and as they say ‘stay with proven sales people only. I wonder if it is because those marketers could not prove their value for the success of the company, or disappointing results were laid on marketer shoulders only? The vital role of marketing strategy is even more important, as told by D. Thorp, to identify and exploit the opportunities, run optimization, set clear marketing metrics and continue delivering the products/services profitably.

I personally think that we would be witnesses of new “Japanese miracle” in a couple of years that would be delivered by marketing geniuses of today and tomorrow, the ones who were not frightened by the today’s downturn, the ones actually appreciated by CEO and stakeholders to seize new marketing opportunities. An era of effective and efficient marketers, market-driven products/services worldwide, increased customer power and permission marketing that have started already would be snowballing now.

Word of Mouth importance

Talking about marketing systems and effectiveness I couldn’t help it not to mention word of mouth (WOM) and its place in marketing communications mix.

We are adding Cutomer-2-Customer communications, referral marketing into our planning. We seek some information about permission marketing and how to generate WOM.

First of all, what do researches say?

WOM is more influential on customer behavior than other marketer-controlled sources. WOM is different, it definitely lacks boundaries. That gives the marketers and even the whole company the opportunity to be creative.

Francis Buttle in his article (1998) states that WOM influences awareness, expectations, perceptions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior.

Sheth (1971) stated the following: WOM is the most effective in raising awareness and stimulating trial purchase then traditional direct advertising.

Day (1971) also added that WOM is 9 times more effective than advertising, especially for concerting unfavorable / neutral perceptions into positive attitude.

Murray (1991) added to the discussion that personal communications (C2C) are more trustworthy.

How can we describe WOM giving some characteristics? WOM has valence (positive/negative), focus, timing, solicitation, and intervention.

By solicitation we mean the fact that it could be generated by opinion leaders and other influentials.

We define intervention in case WOM is not spontaneously generated, but pro-actively intervened by the company to stimulate and manage WOM activities.

We are now approaching the interesting question about interventions and negative WOM. It is known that negative WOM generates twice more feedback than positive WOM.

In the times of financial and economic crisis we might saw the numerous facts in the UK and in another countries how WOM was generated publicly about some particular bank problems (i.e. queues to withdraw cash, or deposits, whatever practically). Public made those banks almost bankrupt and then they were bought by another financial institution (you remember, ten times less, or something like that). So, frankly speaking, an effort of a journalist (it is not a topic of a discussion whether it was only the effort or “highly well-paid effort”) created such a WOM buzz that actually almost collapsed banking systems of not only developing countries (“Prominvestbank in Ukraine”), but also developed ones.

Negative WOM (or direct customer dissatisfaction) influence the customer either exit the relationship, or create some voice dissatisfaction, or generate another WOM to social networks.

These three ways are actually pretty different in its consequences for the company. The exit from the relationship means that company won’t sell its products and services to this customer and he/she won’t recommend and generate positive WOM to another audience. The generation of negative WOM to social networks means particular disaster for the company, because it can loose not only one customer (and not gain another from him/her), but also lose its present customer base through negative WOM buzz on the market. However voice dissatisfaction is actually not so bad for the company in case it is managed properly and this particular voice was heard and company did something about it afterall. Customer who expressed voice dissatisfaction is actually a pretty loyal customer who wants to stay in a relationship with company in case some particular problem would be solved for him. Company should actually encourage this kind of customer feedback to find out as well prospective problems and pints of discomfort that may occur for the wider audience and eliminate those. This approach will definitely minimize the percentage of customers who generate negative WOM and who are influenced by it.

Another side of the WOM generation strategies is referral marketing and country culture. Referrals could be either customer initiated (brand advocates or other positions within loyalty ladder) or company initiated (i.e. incentives). The huge development of company initiated WOM started in 1998 by providing incentives for the consumers by banking, telecom, and retail sectors. The emotional response to product/service performance and related incentives evoke WOM directly. The activation starts with WOM generators – knowledgeable innovators, who enjoy to advise friends (and wider community) using their product-related expertise, which gives a power to them. Followers are actually open to seek and receive information from them. So this is definitely a Win-Win relationship between them.

However the second point (first was negative WOM) that is related to WOM and current global marketplace is the reaction and willingness to generate and to be influenced by WOM within different cultures and countries. We know good examples in Europe and North America, but what about Asia, Africa, and South America?