How to decide which Partners or Affiliates to work with?
Tags: Affiliate Marketing Tips, Affiliate Marketing, Partnerships

This article provides in-depth advice on how to decide which partners or affiliates to work with.

Partners are third party sites or brands your site or brand could work with to benefit your organisation via either a monetary benefit, providing a revenue stream, or attracting awareness through brand campaigns.

‘Partners’ is a general term used across many marketing techniques. When talking about partnership marketing, affiliation, influencers, SaaS platforms and service providers, we often refer to companies that we work with in collaboration as partners.

This guide aims to explain how your business can decide which partners to work with to have the largest impact on your business objectives.

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Intro: What this article will cover

We’ll explore…

The 5 considerations to deciding your partners

The key is often audience size and engagement

Consider competitors and partner mix

The importance of forging strong relationships

What can you offer a partner or affiliate?

Chapter 1: The 5 considerations to deciding your partners

Deciding which partners and affiliates to work with comes with many considerations. Not all partners and affiliates will be suitable to promote your brand. This is why the first consideration, before even going out to attract partners or affiliates, is to know which brands, sites, publishers or influencers would be the right fit for you.

1. You need to know your own brand

Firstly, how can you know if a partner or affiliate is the right one to work with if you don’t truly understand and know your own brand?

By that we mean, do you know what your brand stands for? Do you know your core product proposition? And do you know who your customers are?

These are vital questions to have a clear understanding of so that you can work with partners that resonate with your brand. Deciding which partners and affiliates to work with, really does start with knowing who you are as a brand.

2. Having brand recognition

This brings us on to brand recognition and resonation. When it comes to partnerships, where both brands mutually promote each other, you want to work with brands that are both recognisable, as well as resonate with your audience.

A recognisable brand doesn’t necessarily mean a big brand name, as long as it’s recognisable with your audience. By resonation we mean, will your audience understand their proposition easily and vice versa?

The same applies for affiliate relationships, publishers want to promote the most recognisable brands and the ones that they think their users are more likely to click through to and engage with. I.e. the ones with the highest conversion rates and therefore earnings in return.

3. There should be ‘Target Audience Similarity’

Another hugely important consideration is ‘Target Audience Similarity’. For partnerships, it’s logical that a brand you want to promote will be one with as large and as relevant an audience as possible. As well as one containing customers of a similar profile to your own.

As a partnership marketing example, a brand that offers a savings app for millennials to get on the housing ladder will have a matching audience to a brand that offers a simplified online and in-app mortgage service tailored to first-time buyers. And the two apps would look at a syncing their products, either via a joint campaign or in-app integration.

As an affiliate marketing scenario, the millennial savings app will want to promote their brand on a publisher site that offers tips and advice for first-time buyers. Here the audiences match, as there is a user-base orientation and similarity.

4. Ensuring objective alignment

Any brand that has a similar objective to your own is definitely one to work with. By objective, we can mean two things.

Either their general business proposition, i.e. what is their purpose or reason they exist?

Or their marketing objective such as attracting new customers or increasing life-time value (LTV).

If brands have similar goals and a similar company purpose, then they’re more likely to work together and far more likely to be the perfect fit.

Try to understand what the partner wants out of the partnership. What are their goals, expectations and forecasts? Consider all of these and see whether they fit with your own. They don’t have to be the same, they don’t have to be both acquisitions or earning commissions, but it’s about creating a campaign that will suit both parties.

5. There’s also location, growth and size to consider

Together with the above are the slightly less important but still relevant considerations…

What about the location of a partner? For small business partnerships, often locality will be a deciding factor.

How about company history and growth patterns? Brands with a similar history of growth can often see common ground.

Company size can also be a factor, this is similar to brand recognition. Brands like to work with others of a similar size and structure.

And lastly, having similar processes, sign-off procedures and schedules, will also make it a whole lot easier.

‘Partner Friendly’ Brands

To wrap this up, we like to use a collective term we call ‘Partner-Friendly Brands‘. These are brands that tick the two most important areas of ‘brand resonation’ and ‘target audience similarity’. Brands should seek partners that match these two fundamental areas and can offer an audience that will grow the other’s business.

Example of ‘Partner-Friendly Brands’ — Uber & Citymapper complement each other with their ‘target audience similarity’.

Chapter 2: The key is often audience size and engagement

There’s something hugely important we’ve in fact failed to talk about so far. It can in a way fit under objective alignment mentioned above, and that is…audience size and engagement.

If a brand or affiliate has a large enough audience who are receptive to third party offers, then they are one to work with. Size is often such an important factor because often with the uptake of your products via third-party sites, you need enough traffic volume flowing through for there to be decent conversion rates. Take MoneySavingExpert’s newsletter for example, this has 15+ million recipients, which means each partner represented on there will attract several hundred thousand click through’s each.

We should note with the above, it’s not necessarily about volume. It’s more about volume quality. Because you want the right customers clicking through, rather than hundreds of thousands of wasted leads. So often a partner with 10k quality customers who will convert at a higher rate or of higher basket size, are far more valuable than 1m customers who convert at a far lower percentage.

Secondly, if you can offer a product that fulfils a desire or need from that third party audience, or as mentioned, you can supply an attractive offer or discount that they’ll uptake, then a partnership will be a success. Look for partners that are receptive to third party offers. Perhaps they have an offers area, or loyalty club, where your brand will fit in nicely.

Many brands have such an area now, Santander have a link from the users dashboard to an offers area, Tesco have their Clubcard, PayPal have a special discounts section, and British Gas have their rewards. Exclusive offers are perfect for high engagement and certainly one to utilise with the right partners.

Example of Partnership Exclusivity

The Guardian and Audible Offer Listeners Exclusive Content

Founded in 1821, Guardian News & Media publishes guardian.co.uk, guardiannews.com and the Guardian and Observer newspapers. The newspaper’s combined print and online editions reach nearly 9 million readers.

Audible Inc. is an Amazon company, a leading provider of digital spoken audio entertainment. Audible’s content includes more than 100,000 programs from more than 1,800 providers that include leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazines and newspaper providers.

The Guardian and Audible partnered together to form The Guardian Audio Edition, an hour-long weekly audio digest. Each edition aimed to showcase the very best news, culture and opinion pieces published in the Guardian that week. The Guardian Audio Edition forms part of a wider partnership between the Guardian and Audible that includes sponsorship of the Guardian books homepage, their weekly podcast and their book review pages.

All activity is supported by co-branded advertising across the Guardian, including digital ads on their site and print ads in their main paper. In conclusion, this partnership is a great example of utilising exclusivity to offer consumers something that truly adds value.

Chapter 3: Consider competitors and partner mix

Also, look at your competitors. If they are affiliated with a third party site, then can you displace them? It’s also a telling sign that that type of partnership works. So if you can’t displace them, why not approach similar third party sites to them and set up a replica affiliation arrangement.

Another important factor to review is whether a partner will contribute to your existing channel mix. In affiliate marketing, you can often segment your types of third party sites into; content, cashback, voucher, freebie, loyalty etc. Therefore if you locate a partner site and wish to determine whether to work with it or not, then ask yourself does it fit into my current mix?

If you already have plenty of content affiliates, will another overcrowd that one segment so that you are now overlying on it. You never want to weigh your affiliate mix too heavily on one affiliate type.

The same applies for size of affiliates within your mix. Will your new publisher site contribute to this mix? Is it worth adding another long-tail? Or will another super-affiliate help balance the reliance on other large partners?

This shows a typical affiliate channel mix, with super to long-tail affiliates.

It’s all about finding a balance, so judge whether this new partner you’re considering will actually help balance your existing mix. While of course, contributing to growth and bringing in new customers.

Chapter 4: The importance of forging strong relationships

When it comes to recruiting new partners, the reputation from your existing partners says a lot. Not only do testimonials and recommendations work wonderfully, but the connections existing partners also have is extremely powerful – after all, word spreads – so it goes without saying, treat your existing affiliates well and others will come flocking.

Imagine a scenario where you take a small one-man publisher out on a VIP occasion, they enjoy themselves, value the advice you gave them over a beer or two, and highly appreciated your hospitality. Back at the desk, you answer their emails within 24 hours, you respond politely answering all their needs – you even go as far as making friends with them. Well, this reputation will spread. The one-man band will know others, and soon he has referred 3 or 4 more sites to you.

Take this a step further and he introduces you to a former colleague at one of the largest industry players who, via his recommendation, is keen to work with you.

As you can see, it soon escalates – value each relationship and your unbeatable reputation can reap its rewards.

Chapter 5: What can you offer a Partner or Affiliate?

It’s not all about what they can offer you, but…what can you offer a partner or affiliate in return?

A key to this is to understand their objectives – knowing what they want to achieve by working with you. An affiliate will often be purely commission focused, but partner brands might be looking for more than that.

1. Offer them commission or exchange

The number one consideration for any brand or publisher promoting you is, what reward will they get in return?

For most this will be monetary. Therefore, what commission rates are you providing for each referred customer? Is it revenue share, CPA or CPC? Is it the most competitive rate in the market? What conditions will you be paying out, is it based on last click?

From a partnership perspective, it’s not always monetary, it can often be what exposure will they receive on your site in return. Is this exposure of the same value to what they’re offering you? What is the audience reach in return? What’s the brand visibility? And do these correlate to an equal return for each party?

2. They might also want brand exposure

Partners aren’t just considering a monetary or value return, they might want brand exposure instead. From a partnership perspective this can often be the case.

Like-minded partners will want to seek mutual return of exposure on your site purely aiming at a branded return. If the exposure is not on your site, but rather a mutual event or joint product, then again the branding received will be important.

3. Or they want access to your customers

Aside from branding or commissions, partner brands and publisher sites might be looking for customers in return.

Often this weighs towards the partnership marketing side of things, where brands want to see how many new customers they might receive in return – if they promote you and you promote them.

Overall, we hope all of the above has given you food for thought on how to decide which partners to work with. As you can see there isn’t really one answer, but many areas to consider. In summary though, choose partners based on what will contribute to your objectives.

Thank you for reading this article & I hope you found it useful!

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Disclaimer

The author takes no responsibility for any misuse of information contained in this article. All information has been taken from actual events and imagery or screenshots from free sources. If any owner or brand wishes to have any information removed, they may get in touch. He is not responsible for any copyright infringement as this is used purely for educational purposes and is happy to edit if required.