What are the major trends that are affecting the affiliate marketing industry?
There have been major changes to the industry over the past five years. Advertisers
today are less interested in courting shopping aggregate sites. Instead, they are
focusing on their connection with online influencers and content-heavy publications like
BuzzFeed and others. Automation and AI are another important trend. Affiliate strategy
has always been somewhat limited by the enormous amount of data that needs to be
analyzed to establish a successful path. Although data analysis and suggestion tools
are available within most agencies and networks, they have not traditionally been
available directly to brands without high costs and long contract management services.
AI and automation can change that.
Can you tell us why you launched Mosaic Digital Systems?
Data analysis and suggestion tools have always been used in affiliate marketing, but
they have only been available to companies with the largest budgets. Mosaic Digital
Systems is the industry’s first do-it-yourself, SaaS partnership marketing platform, and
we launched the company to empower small brands to target their campaigns with a
precision that was impossible in the past. In 2012 I founded an affiliate advertising
company called Advertise Purple, and we enabled premium SMB & enterprise
companies affiliate management agency services. Eventually, we came out with a SaaS
version of Advertise Purple, and that evolved into Mosaic. The whole idea is to offer
small SMBs & microbrands the same sophisticated marketing tools that were previously
only used by larger companies. This is something that can change the face of the
industry.
How will the marketing industry change when SMBs and microbrands use SaaS tools
to find target audiences?
SaaS tools and automation will put way more marketing power into the hands of
businesses of all sizes, removing the time and cost restrictions of third-party affiliate
management. Smaller brands will finally harness far more knowledge about affiliate
growth and strategy, and with this boost their marketing IQ. From there, the options are
limitless to expedite onboarding, optimization, and return on ad spend (ROAS)
initiatives. Overall, what we will see is much better targeting of marketing campaigns
across the board. Less noise, more actual impact.
What advice do you have for smaller businesses/retailers looking to use
affiliate marketing programs to drive product growth?
I have several pieces of advice.
First off, remember that digital marketing is all about demand. The foundation for any
product strategy needs to be ensuring the well of demand is deep enough. Some
people think that competition is a bad thing, but I think this notion is wrong. Without
competition, you will have to do the entire job of convincing customers that they need
your product or service. That’s a lot of work.
Also, micro-conversions are way more important than people realize. With your
conversion funnel, think in terms of taking baby steps, which makes eventual sales
much easier.
I also advise marketers to find their “forever channel,” which means their favorite venue
for digital marketing. You might experiment with many, but one is likely to consistently
return the best results. Once you find that channel, you optimize it.
And remember to always aim for third-party validation of your product, which you can
achieve with traditional PR or with affiliate marketing tools like Mosaic.
How else do you see AI affecting the affiliate marketing industry?
Large language models can be an excellent tool for data collection, and in some cases,
basic to intermediate analysis. Startups and smaller companies continuously need to
monitor their competitive landscape for pricing and value changes. Using a tool like
ChatGPT enables these companies to quickly build a foundation of research, which can
save them many hours of manual data entry and analysis.
When you ask a large language model to conduct complex analyses that could allow bias, things get a bit more tricky. In our experience with our affiliate marketing
CRM, ChatGPT assists in bringing together global content for customer vertical
performance, general digital marketing benchmarks, past seasonal performance, and
possible future trends. Although we still comb accuracy against our own learnings to
ensure accuracy, this is a much more cost-effective and less time-consuming option
than hiring a team to scrape pebibytes of data off the internet.
