How To Boost Product Launches With Affiliates
Whether you’re a famous brand or an up-and-coming company, launching a new product or service is both exciting and stressful. After all, the potential failure rate is quite high: Up to 95% of 30,000 products launched each year fail.
Your marketing strategy is key to a successful product launch, and affiliate marketing can be a major part of that. Affiliates know the suitable channels to advertise your product, and they also have a lot of influence over their followers. An affiliate can promote your new product to a whole new group of potential customers—many of whom you may not have been able to reach via traditional marketing methods.
Why You Need Affiliates to Boost Product Launches
Using affiliates to boost your product launch comes with many benefits, including reduced costs and greater exposure.
Reduced Costs
Launching a new product requires a good deal of time, money, and energy. Say you want to launch an app featuring a specialty product. Your app is fast, easy to use, and allows exclusive access to that specific product. Your marketing team’s goal is to translate that into a promotional strategy that will catch the eye of anyone potentially interested in that product. They need to convince users that your app is worth checking out.
Traditionally, marketing teams have turned to costly ads to spread the word. But affiliates can do a lot of your promotion for you. They will use their existing audience to promote your brand. There’s no cost to you unless the affiliate brings you customers. Depending on your arrangement, they may get a percentage of each sale they bring in or some other incentive.
Bigger Audience
Affiliates have loyal followers that trust them to promote high-quality products. That built-up trust often translates into sales.
Affiliates will help you advertise through a number of channels, whether that’s a blog, their social media accounts, or a high-quality video production. They can recommend your product to their audience by relating it to their own lives in an authentic way. The more affiliates you have that can do this effectively, the bigger your audience and greater chance of success.
Tips for Using Affiliates To Boost a Product Launch
An affiliate program can only be successful with a solid strategy that involves high-quality content, incentivizing, and engaging relevant affiliates for your product launch.
Engage Relevant Affiliates
Affiliates have influence over their audiences because of the authority they have in a specific niche or industry. Do some initial research to attract affiliates that align with your company’s mission and have loyal followers that trust them to recommend great products.
Recruit affiliates that represent your target audience, and make sure they have direct connections with your ideal customers.
Create High-Quality Content
Affiliates need to understand what your product is all about before they can effectively promote it. You can help them do this by creating high-quality content that they can share with their audience. The sky’s the limit when it comes to content creation. Put together articles, photo essays, infographics, or video content that’s engaging and easily shareable.
You can also create podcasts or conduct interviews that discuss your product launch or encourage others to review your new product. Your affiliates can easily share this content on their platforms.
Incentivize Your Affiliates
Why should affiliates help promote your new product launch? You need to offer them incentives, whether that’s discounts on your services or products, free gifts or merchandise, or a percentage of sales that they bring in.
In return, affiliates will lead their followers to you. They can do this by including a call-to-action that sends potential customers directly to your new product or to a page where they can sign up to your email list. This is a great way to build your email marketing for current and future product launches.
Take Advantage of Seasons and Holidays
Timing is essential and you’ll want to be strategic about when you unveil your new product. Take advantage of seasons or holidays by relating your new product to the time of year. Be sure to pass this information on to your affiliates.
For example, if your new product launch involves an app that helps buyers find gifts for their loved ones, consider launching it right before the holidays so that you can frame your content to match the season. If you wait to launch that app after New Year’s, you’ll be missing out on the biggest gifting time of the year.
Use the Right Affiliate Software
With the right affiliate software, affiliate programs can be easy to create and maintain. Software like LeadDyno can help you put together and organize content to help your affiliates create and manage engaging campaigns and ads to help you launch your product with the buzz it deserves.
You can monitor your sales, keep track of your affiliates’ reach, and manage incentives and commissions for your affiliates all in one place. With this type of software, you’ll be able to track the success of each campaign so that you can work with affiliates to fine-tune your future marketing strategies.
Boost Your Product Launch the Right Way
So, you’ve created a new product, now it’s time for the hardest part—launching it. You’re going to need a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes an affiliate program to help you spread the word fast and effectively.
The right affiliates can reach your target audience and convince them of the need for your product. This validation will drive their followers to your site and your new product.
By coming up with engaging content that’s easy to share and offering incentives to your affiliates, your product launch has the potential to be bigger than you ever imagined.
The right software is also key. LeadDyno is an affiliate tracking software that manages affiliate activities and shows you which marketing strategies are working so that you can continue to boost your products.
