Bridging PR and Affiliate Marketing for ROI Gold with Sophie Toporoff

[00:00:00] Jake Fuller: Welcome back to the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jake Fuller, the CEO here at JEBCommerce. Today’s topic, this week’s topic is one that has been a bit buzzy the last five years in the affiliate space, and that is the topic of PR, and how it’s merged into the affiliate channel.

[00:00:32] And there’s a lot of intricacies that can go around traditional PR, where it was, where it came and how it’s merged into affiliate and how it’s really expanded over the last few years and how to best utilize that. So today’s guest is a friend of mine, someone I’ve met at many conferences this year Sophie Toporoff from Linkby.

[00:00:50] Good to see you, Sophie.

[00:00:52] Sophie Toporoff: Always great to see you

[00:00:54] JF: Thanks for jumping

[00:00:55] ST: on the podcast.

[00:00:56] JF: Yes, this is the first season that I’m hosting, so it’s been a different experience, but I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit, so.

[00:01:03] ST: Yeah. Excited.

[00:01:04] JF: Glad we could have you on. So on the topic today, before we jump into that for our audience who might not have heard of you or might not know you, why don’t you give us a quick background, where you’ve been in the space and where you’re at now.

[00:01:15] ST: Yep. So background is traditional PR worked across various different roles in the PR industry for about 10 years. So I did talent PR working with celebrities and personality PR through brand PR. And mostly like fashion, lifestyle, beauty. I realized that I wanted to expand a bit more and learn more about marketing and advertising and kind of different areas of the communication ecosystem, which led me to get a quick MBA, took some time off to do that, completed it.

[00:01:54] And actually my first job out of that was, affiliate marketing and it really was an interesting time to be an affiliate. It was like peak COVID. I got into affiliate marketing right before and then everything shut down, but of course e commerce was blowing up. So it was a really good time to learn and get up to speed.

[00:02:17] And I think it was an interesting time to leverage my existing relationships and kind of knowledge about traditional PR to, leverage what every brand really wants, which is editorial coverage that’s going to drive, results and actually see an uptick in, their revenue and their e commerce strategy in general.

[00:02:40] Yeah. But I guess I should end where I am today. So after my time at this agency Klay Media that kind of gave me my start in affiliate, I was actually working with Linkby quite often, which I know you and I have worked together in an agency capacity. So I was on your side, and I really loved the product.

[00:03:03] I thought it was a sort of what every brand really needed and they were looking for a director. So I did make a jump over to Linkby and now I’m leading the North America sales team, spearheading those like brand partnerships and kind of growth within the North America market.

[00:03:20] JF: Awesome. And Linkby, we’ll dive into that a bit in a few. And I’m excited for listeners who don’t know about Linkby to hear about some of those gaps that you guys have bridged between PR and affiliate. Lot to take in there, but one thing getting your start in affiliate in 2020 must’ve been drinking from a fire hose, because I know from my perspective, having about 15 years in the digital space and mostly leaning toward affiliate 2020 was just a blast of holy crap, what’s going on right now and trying to connect dots and figure it out.

[00:03:50] And it was very much drinking from a fire hose. So that was quite the time to jump into affiliate and to go back a little bit, and I do want to, I’ll get to for the listeners soon, the evolution of PR into the affiliate space, 2020 was unique because we did see such a… a large uptick in e commerce revenue.

[00:04:09] Understandably, everybody was locked home and brands jumping in. And it was a scramble to figure out how these different channels where budgets were being cut, added, figured out how it could apply to affiliate, where things would land, et cetera. I want to back up a little though and go to your traditional PR experience.

[00:04:25] When you were working in that capacity, and this would have been prior 2020, which is really when the buzz started to pick up on affiliate and PR were not one and the same, but a lot more in unison than people once thought, unless you were a savvy digital marketer prior to that in that traditional PR experience, was affiliate in your vocabulary at all?

[00:04:46] Was it something talked about? Was it something leveraged?

[00:04:50] ST: To be honest, not really. I pretty much stayed away from anything that sounded at all pay to play. When I thought about PR coverage and editorial coverage, it was always organic coverage with editorial relationships that I had built over the years and editors that I was close with or could build relationships with that would cover us organically.

[00:05:16] I will say I think towards the end things… it was harder to get coverage like I think everyone felt that. So I think there was some sort of, maybe you could anticipate it almost but I wouldn’t say I was like really using the word affiliate or had much knowledge about the affiliate space in general until I went back and learned more about marketing, and advertising, and other strategies outside of traditional PR.

[00:05:45] It was easy to connect those dots, though, of why rather than paying for a flat fee piece of coverage for a client when we really needed coverage about something to leverage affiliate instead. But no, at the time, I definitely wasn’t really comfortable giving commissions or paying anyone, compensating anyone for the coverage that they were writing for us.

[00:06:10] JF: I think back in, prior to 2019 2018 and looking back from a PR perspective, earned media and traditional PR for a lot of those that are listening that are, might be confused or not quite understand the PR space, there’s traditional or earned organic coverage from editorial publications, or they’re picking up your brand through relationships that you have that you mentioned Sophie or they hear about that product and they want to cover that product.

[00:06:35] Maybe it fits a certain story about a product. Maybe it fits a narrative within the piece that they’re writing, or maybe a listicle they have, whatever that case might be. That’s all earned media. There’s also paid media, which is a separate category within that PR space. And then affiliate bridges this gap where there’s always an aspect of paid media to it when it comes to commission based efforts or relationships or even upfront monetary gain of paying for kind of your spot on a gift guide, for example, or working with a commerce team. But traditionally, at least from my experience as well, PR was never a huge topic between me and a client or anybody else in the space prior to 2019 and beyond. And especially in 2020 it became this has to be something we understand and leverage, because every brand is asking us how we do that through affiliate. Prior to that, it was very simplistic, where there are publications out there that wanted to monetize the back end of that content and maybe request an affiliate link and they would be signed up with the Skimlinks or a sub affiliate network where they can grab those links and push that through.

[00:07:37] But that’s about as, as involved as we got with it. So how have you seen, over the last couple of years that merge into now affiliate and PR kind of work in unison, which is interesting. I’ve seen a lot of publications that now have commerce teams that didn’t exist in the past. And why do you think that is?

[00:07:55] ST: Yeah, I will say when I joined Klay Media, the founder at the time, Mike Pollack who hired me, saw something in me probably that’s why he hired me. He was like, Oh, she was a publicist. I think it was smart timing. I don’t think a lot of people were approaching it the same way.

[00:08:13] So I do think that’s what helped us as an agency grow quickly. From there, it did seem like right place, right time as all of those, all the networks were realizing they needed to have a content team. And I think, it was definitely right place, right time for me. But I think the evolution is really too on the brand side of what their expectations are.

[00:08:39] I think now when people hear the term affiliate and they work on the brand side, it’s not just for, brands who want to get those low hanging fruit. I think all brands, luxury brands, even are tapping into this because they’re seeing that they can get coverage like this out of very good price and a lot more of it.

[00:09:02] And it’s actually measurable because when you’re doing classic PR, of course we do our best to say here are some impressions that we can share or let’s try and measure it, but there’s no true form of measurability on how your sales have grown or what, you know, that article has actually done for you to tie to a revenue or growth in general of your business.

[00:09:27] So I think. Being able to have that reporting behind it is really why brands have leaned into it, and because brands need that and require that’s where the networks and the commerce teams at publishers and all of these different pieces fell into place.

[00:09:43] JF: And I’ve seen that throughout digital marketing. I was at a network agency… it’s hard to explain exactly what we did, but we did a lot in the paid media and programmatic space and ad buying space and back in 2010, 2012, 2013 even, brands could throw astronomical amount of budget towards branding, and I air quote that and there was no real measurable value about what that did.

[00:10:08] We’d be reporting on CPM, which is cost per mil or cost per impression, if you will for those who don’t know that term, and that didn’t really result in any valuable data that, “Hey, this cost per impression boiled down to X conversion rate, and it drove this much revenue for your brand.”

[00:10:23] But brands didn’t care back then as much. They just wanted to see that the awareness was out there, that eyeballs were on their cool creative asset or their banner ad or whatever it might be and what we’ve seen at least across, I think, any channel now is budget is far more scrutinized than it used to be, and with that, you’ve got to prove the value of what you’re putting out from a budget standpoint.

[00:10:41] So we’ve seen that as well, I think from a PR perspective as well. As affiliate, if there’s going to be budget involved, right? There’s one side of it again, going into earned media, where you naturally get picked up organically from publications and you want to leverage those, but we even in programs, we’ll find some great content out there where it’s organic earned media.

[00:11:01] And let our brands know, “Hey, they’ve got a commerce team. Now, if we offer an affiliate link for that article, they might refresh that, or they might do another spin up on that article because now we’re giving them monetary reason to pick that up and continue pushing that out for you, and getting that article some more attention.”

[00:11:17] And that’s something brands want to pay attention to, especially if you can track it which is a big part of that. Yeah. So going into the next question, do you feel like a lot of brands still have misconceptions around where affiliate and PR kind of play. And if they’re utilizing affiliate, are a lot of brands still going about it the wrong way, trying to reach out and get maybe access to these editorial teams and publications directly?

[00:11:39] ST: Yes, I think there is confusion. I think it’s also impossible to keep track if you’re not heads down in the space all the time about what’s going on because it’s changing so rapidly. I can’t even tell you how many changes are going on in the affiliate space just from my perspective on a daily basis.

[00:12:00] It’s crazy the things I’m hearing all the time, it changes. So you really have to be on your feet about it. And I think if you’re not living and breathing it, then it’s really hard to keep track of. I’m sure you would agree. Every time I go to a conference and I go to one of the, talks or hear the speakers, there’s a new topic I didn’t even know existed and that’s like the topic of the conference and if you’re not constantly attending things like that and getting yourself like in the know, then I just don’t know how any brand would stay on top of it when they have a million other things on their plate.

[00:12:37] That’s where I think having an expert agencies are working with a Linkby to help you guide through those, changes in the ecosystem. It’s really important.

[00:12:48] JF: Affiliate is an ever evolving landscape and any digital channel you can say has evolved year over year based on consumer behavior, technology updates, new technologies that we have available to us.

[00:12:58] Obviously, things like open AI and Chat GPT over the last year and a half has really changed what tools are available, how efficient you can be. So there’s always changes that affect the entire digital landscape PR included. Google can come up with a new algorithmic update and it changes a whole lot of results on how publications get seen, how your stuff gets seen as a brand, what kind of results you show up on.

[00:13:22] And it’s very hard to stay on top of that. I think it’s important that you try to stay on top of it, but again, even as an agency where our job is to do this on behalf of our brands, we look for ways to be efficient and to do that, you work with different technology partners and partners that can be efficient and taking, for example, an influencer space, or in this case, the PR world and boiling it down to a much more simplistic opportunity to start leveraging.

[00:13:47] Because when you start saying, “great, I’ve got a list of 45, 50 publications, I would love to be on that one on one outreach is going to take forever.” And there’s no guarantee you’re going to find placement. And even when you do, it might be only paid opportunities that have no real data tied behind it. So you’re not quite sure if it’s going to perform.

[00:14:05] It’s kind of a spray and pray. And we’ve seen that in the past when we’ve had PR budgets we’ll go out and spend $50,000 for a brand. We’ll spread it across five or six or eight different publications, and one of them kills it and drives a ton of traffic and a ton of results. And the six other ones may just drive some trickle and clicks, and it was almost a waste of money and trying to discern that and not have a performance aspect tied to it’s very difficult.

[00:14:29] It is confusing. I think especially for brands that don’t understand affiliate and where it plays into the PR world.

[00:14:35] ST: It’s very confusing and there’s so many moving parts. I think a lot of brands also confuse the difference between PR, affiliate, and influencer collaborations. It’s all tied up in one at this point. And I think what you were saying about. You know how they can navigate through it by spreading PR budgets out and they’re throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, right.

[00:15:02] I would say, you explained why Linkby was born the founders of Linkby were working at Pedestrian TV. Chris, our CEO, he founded Pedestrian TV in Australia, and that was literally where the idea came from. Of course brands were just throwing budgets, right? And there’s no data tied to it to see performance.

[00:15:26] And there’s no checks and balances, “hey, what happens if this doesn’t actually perform well, or do anything good for us?” And I think that was the idea that kind of made them say, “Okay, we need to go out and make this happen.” And I will say that when you’re going out and you’re pitching Linkby people’s eyes get really wide and they get really excited because it’s a solution that everyone needs.

[00:15:49] Whether it’s “Oh, my priority is SEO or I want brand awareness.” Everybody wants it on a performance basis. You want some sort of, checks and balances again “okay, I’m going to give you this budget. I have, a cap that I can give you, but if you’re not going to be able to give me valuable results, then why should I have to pay you this full budget?”

[00:16:10] Like I’m giving you the opportunity, but if you can’t drive that traffic and that performance for me, then I’m just going to pay you for what you do. And Every other service is like that, right? Except for a lot of the sponsored content. Like, why should you have to pay for something that you didn’t receive?

[00:16:30] Yeah, I think that’s one of the main benefits of Linkby. There’s so many.

[00:16:36] JF: so let’s dive into Linkby cause I can back out of that and talk about the other options when you don’t utilize Linkby and other options that we’ve pursued for clients, even as an agency, when it comes to sponsored content with publications and and different sites that people want awareness plays with that are not performance based.

[00:16:52] So tell me a little bit about exactly how Linkby takes the mindset of, I want to be in front of editorials. I want to be on listicles or on certain online publications, whether it’s a Buzzfeed or, Forbes or, there’s so many different publications. We could probably go through 300 right now, if you wanted to go through the whole list.

[00:17:09] But we can just send a link after this for those listeners, but there’s a lot out there. So how does Linkby specifically bridge that gap and why is it beneficial for brands?

[00:17:19] ST: Yeah we kind of act like a marketplace. I would say that’s the best way to think of it. For us, the publisher and the brand are equally as important in my mind, at least like our relationships with these publishers are really strong. They use our platform to source brands, figure out what’s going to slot into their strategy for the commerce team and how they can optimize this content in a way that’s like kind of predictable because at the end of the day, a CPA, you don’t really know you can drive traffic and you don’t know if people are going to click or once they get to the site, are they going to convert.

[00:17:56] So it’s giving them predictability. And then on the other side, it gives brands access to these publishers at scale in five to ten minutes of work to be able to tell them what they want that content to be about, what they’re willing to pay as a budget cap and get content quickly and on the timeline and on their terms as well.

[00:18:17] Like typically, as you probably know, in affiliate or PR, you’re pitching it out. You’re at their will. You’re going to see how they want to cover you or how they slot you into content. It’s just whatever you get, you’re happy with at the end of the day. But with Linkby you take all of that control and you can actually steer the conversation around a specific sale, or if you have a product to launch that you want to talk about.

[00:18:43] So taking the control back and actually securing the content that you need at the time that you need it. So I think that’s a key component. It’s really just a connector, right? So we’re that platform that allows brands and publishers to connect. And we also have flipped the script completely in the past month because now we offer publisher pitches, which has been huge.

[00:19:10] And I think it’s blowing up now because at the end of the day, there’s a lot of brands that just don’t have the bandwidth to log into another dashboard, fill out a brief, even though it takes two minutes, I think it is like a slow for certain brands. Everyone has a lot going on. So in that case, they can literally just sign up for free.

[00:19:31] Our site is completely free to sign up. You only pay for clicks once someone picks up a campaign. So they can literally log on and get pitched to, and just see in advance where that publisher wants to feature them, which is as someone who was a publicist for a really long time, really unheard of, like imagine waking up and logging onto your email and you’ve been pitched by three different publishers and you know up front how they want to cover you.

[00:20:01] That’s how Linkby works right now. It’s a two way marketplace for pitching and I would say the key benefits are really just scalability, and the fact that you have a clear view on reporting and how all of this is working towards your goals. I could go on forever, but I’ll stop there before I go too far.

[00:20:23] JF: Well, and I think there’s such a marketplace for a tool like this. You talked about how things seem to get harder and harder in your traditional PR days when it came to, even with the relationships you had, getting that organic coverage and getting earned media for some of the brands you might represent.

[00:20:39] And I find that part of that’s probably due to saturation. Our market now is very heavily saturated and you have a lot stiffer competition when it comes to marketplaces like Amazon that you’re competing against as a brand compared to your own site that you’re trying to drive traffic to, and then you have publications where they want to see success and they want to get eyeballs.

[00:21:00] And if they are going to work on an affiliate space, you have to determine where is that consumer going to want to go and convert to? Do I drive them to Amazon or do I drive them to, to my online site? So there’s a lot of different factors that go into that which makes sense. And traditionally without a tool like this for those listening, when a brand comes to us as an agency and say, “Hey, we want to do a big push to get,” and maybe they don’t have a PR team and maybe they have very limited efforts on what earned media has been picked up for them and what organic placements they’ve seen just naturally through, products and releases and et cetera, but they’re not putting a lot of effort into that.

[00:21:33] So they ask us, “Hey, can we go out and find men’s health magazine? And can we find all these different publications to write about us?” And I said “we can but that’s a full time job on its own just to go out and manage relationships and start pitching your brand to them.” And like you said, We’re really at their will.

[00:21:52] And a lot of the times if we get responses, it’s great. We can do sponsored posts at this price point, and you’re given a media kit. And so then you’re presenting the client, “great. Here’s the 12 responses we got. Each one’s a $5k minimum, a $10k minimum, a $20,000 minimum to get these sponsored posts completed. There’s no guarantee for results here. And so there’s a huge expenditure and budget. And if your only goal is awareness, that might be okay for a brand, but it’s a lot of time and resources to get that done.”

[00:22:21] I think that’s one misconception some brands have on where affiliate comes in. They’ll see the affiliate space and an affiliate agency and go, “great. You can pitch all of these publications and let them know we’re going to give them a 5 percent or a 10 percent commission. We’ll be good to go. They’ll write about us, right?” No, not exactly. There are some relationships where we might be able to leverage that, but it’s few and far between.

[00:22:42] There’s still a big pay to play aspect and there’s no guaranteed performance metric tied behind that. So at least for me, I can see that value benefit really for both the publication as well as the brand, because also, like any affiliate, this goes outside of even the PR space, the publications that we’re talking about, the different websites, any affiliate we’re talking about, if they’re a preferred affiliate in any category, they’re receiving emails, sometimes hundreds by the day, and they have to decipher where those emails are coming from.

[00:23:13] Is it a brand that’s going to be a fit for their, their audience? Is it something they can fit into their category pages? How’s that going to look? But you’re creating a marketplace where both parties have active interest in identifying those fits. And what I like about that is you can say, “great, here’s 200 publications that I’m going to open this campaign to. And there might be a few in there that I’m a fit for that I didn’t even think of, right? Forbes might have turned it down, but I got picked up here instead. And they have a more unique demographic that actually fits my brand.”

[00:23:44] I think that’s pretty fantastic.

[00:23:45] ST: It’s reducing the risk on both sides to be honest because I think it is frustrating for a lot of brands when they’re not getting the coverage that they want through their affiliate program or their agency. Like I’ve definitely been on that side of the conversation where you’re reaching out, you’re following up seven times for this piece of content with this key publisher that the brand really wants.

[00:24:09] And they’re like, why haven’t you secured? And it’s do you know how many vitamins are…

[00:24:13] JF: Yeah.

[00:24:14] ST: Reaching out to this publisher about this specific list because of course it’s the first on Google like it’s competitive. So, what’s really stands out from the rest for Linkby to me when people really want to push listicle coverage is publishers have figured out, of course, that the first brand on that list is going to get clicked on the most, right.

[00:24:38] So if they have a CPC budget, it’s minimizing their risk as well. We know that it minimizes the risk for brands to do things on a performance basis, but allowing the publisher to also reduce their risk of, “okay, I’m going to put you first on this high performing article,” which is potentially one of their biggest generating pieces of content every month that, helps them pay their own costs and stuff and their writers and all of that.

[00:25:05] But being able to say, “I know that if I leverage this Linkby click budget because that’s something I can guarantee people are going to click on, then that’s how I minimize my own risk.” Everyone is aligned in kind of their goals at the end of the day like we all want everyone to click on our content and engage with it.

[00:25:27] Yeah, makes it pretty easy on both sides.

[00:25:29] JF: And I think that concept to it puts skin in the game on both sides. A lot of the times, again, with those direct relationships, it might be great. The brand’s got to put all the skin in the game and put the money up front to secure a sponsored post if they want to get written about or added to a listicle or an article.

[00:25:45] And that helps the publisher ensure we got paid whether it performs or not is no longer our problem. Even with the CPC budget, they want it to perform because they’re not going to see that revenue unless they create content that is compelling to click on and that allows consumers drive, and there’s still a performance aspect to that because you can track “great. We saw this much net new traffic to our site.”

[00:26:08] And if you have a general idea of what your conversion and site analytics look like, you can discern what that budget’s going to turn into. Now, all of that said, this kind of bridges some gap between purely performance and then purely paid or sponsored PR, but I still find, at least in my experience, I’m curious what you deal with and what your perspective on the space is for brands that come in and they want to test even this more, I would call it mutual model. To leverage the PR space and different editorials on the concept they have on where these consumers fall in the funnel, because a lot of the times I have to remind brands, we’re still looking at more of a mid to upper funnel play here.

[00:26:47] And if that’s what our goal is, at least we’re able to track performance on that. We can see, actually, what happens in the back end. Is it performing? Is it converting? Are we seeing revenue being produced by this? Are you seeing an ROI? There’s no guarantee of that. And a lot of the times when you bucket affiliate into a space like PR, affiliate is almost known traditionally to be this bottom funnel lever to help close sales with the use of loyalty sites or coupon and deal partners or providing exclusive codes to content creators to help that audience jump in and try a new product. It all kind of leverages more of a mid to bottom funnel play. But in the PR space, do you experience the same thing where a brand expects more of this is affiliate, we expect conversions as the main result and they’re not looking at it as still being an awareness kind of top funnel play with that budget.

[00:27:37] ST: Yeah, I definitely explain it as a full funnel approach because you can really tie I’ll give an example, a brand has, a beautiful piece of content go live with Daily Mail, and they all of a sudden see like their Amazon traffic pop off and they have gotten more sales than they’ve ever gotten in a day, the day that article is posted.

[00:28:02] And those are the types of stories we hear all the time. So yes, the affiliate tracking doesn’t always paint the full picture. Like you said, someone could discover you from our article. They could hop over and Honey could end up getting, the sale or whatever it is at that lower funnel.

[00:28:20] You definitely have to go into a campaign understanding when you’re dealing with content that you are educating about your brand and you’re reaching new customers. When people click on the links in the Linkby content, they’ve read a piece of content. So they’re not, it’s not a pop up banner and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even mean to click on that.”

[00:28:42] These are really valuable clicks. Someone read a review or they’re looking at a listicle because they want to know the best whitening toothpaste out there and they click on it, right? It’s a primed person who’s going to potentially buy. If they’re going to buy on that spot, who knows? It is upper funnel. I think price component is really big when you have an expensive product.

[00:29:08] That life cycle is obviously a lot longer, but it is certainly a full funnel approach. It’s not bottom of the funnel, of course you can ask the publisher to add a coupon code or whatever it is to help drive results and conversions, and that always helps. But at the end of the day, we are doing our best with commerce content.

[00:29:29] But it is very beautiful visual content, editorial coverage. So yeah, there definitely has to be a different understanding. You don’t expect a 10 time ROAS every single time on every single article. I would say as long as on that piece of content you’re ROI positive, that’s a success because you’ve reached a whole new audience maybe that you haven’t reached before and these are primed excited users they’re not people who are just, you know, purchasing your brand with a coupon that potentially were already in your funnel already.

[00:30:06] So yeah, there’s definitely differences to understand and there’s nuances. So we do our best with that, but it is a conversation that comes up all the time.

[00:30:14] JF: And I think that’s, that again, highlights the benefit of playing some of that PR and top funnel awareness play through the affiliate channel where you’re now trackable. But not only that, If you have a mature affiliate program and you have someone who knows what they’re doing and managing that program, they should be looking at some of those analytics and saying, great, these articles went live.

[00:30:32] And in that specific period, these other partners increased by 20 percent over their normal day to day run rate on activity. And if you have a diverse affiliate program, now you’re leveraging the channel and the funnel, I should say, for that consumer across the board. So now you’re utilizing this budget where you have high quality clicks coming to your site and introducing new consumers that may not have known about your brand or considered your brand in the past.

[00:30:59] Now, consumer behavior is a tricky one to track these days online because people jump all over the place. And depending on what analytic system you’re looking at, that attribution can skew wildly on, on who gets the attribution for that revenue that is produced. And that could be that’s an entire other podcast topic but you want to connect some dots.

[00:31:19] And so it’s not uncommon when you have a quality piece of content go out editorial wise, where we see those brands and we look at the whole picture and say, great over the next 30 days, We now saw these consumers bounce around and then go and log into their Rakuten rewards to see if “great. I read this great article. I checked out this website. Now I want to go check in and see if there’s cash back that I can receive if I try this product out.”

[00:31:42] The benefit is that you’re driving new consumers at the end of the day, and if you have other affiliate partnerships established, you can capture that consumer along that funnel to keep reintroducing that brand and then drive more brand loyalty which some brands want to see that immediate ROI.

[00:31:58] But every new consumer you get, you now have to look at what’s our lifetime value of that consumer. Are they going to purchase that one time or on average, are they purchasing three, five, 10 times? And that was all driven because of that original article that you pushed out to gain that awareness. And that gets lost in the noise.

[00:32:14] Think there’s, I think there’s a lot of benefit in how much brands are beginning to better scrutinize their budgets across all channels, but if you have your head down in data too often, you forget what the big picture looks like and what consumer behavior looks like and what value each part of that funnel drives for the brand specifically.

[00:32:33] And it’s a hard balance to have.

[00:32:35] ST: Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I agree. I think that was well put. I am a believer in that. It all works together, right? I have brands that I know are very savvy and right before a big sale that they’re running, they actually just run a lengthy campaign through a newsletter partner of ours, capture a bunch of leads and then retarget them later when they’re driving their Black Friday sale.

[00:33:00] And it’s part of a longer term strategy. I think if you are a creative marketer or you want to flex some of those creativity levers there’s a lot of interesting ways that you can leverage like a CPC campaign or a Linkby campaign outside of just here’s a piece of content and what are we going to see from it tomorrow?

[00:33:22] So completely agree that it’s a long term game and that you have to look at it from every single angle, and where you’ve seen spikes across the way, not just on your affiliate, dashboard.

[00:33:34] JF: That’s a good point. And I will say the brands that we see the highest success rates with are the brands that, are not only a bit more savvy within that marketing realm, but they’re a little bit more open to testing new ideas or trying to connect dots on how everything does work together.

[00:33:49] And at the end of the day, we want a user experience for your brand to be congruent across any channel that they’re exploring. And so we’ve worked with brands before that we knew they had a giant product release coming out. They were putting a lot of money behind PR and we knew that was going to drive a huge traffic spike to their site.

[00:34:07] So prior let’s make sure we have through the affiliate space, some of the partners that we use from a technology standpoint, for example, set up on your site, if you don’t already have this capability to capture those that are coming in, looking at products, maybe saving carts and leaving your site, how can we then retarget that because now you’re going to get such an influx when that happens, you’ll also see during those months, a lot of the times conversion rate might drop and bounce rate might increase because a lot of people are just clicking through, checking out the site, they’re bouncing off or they’re not quite ready to commit to purchasing. So how do you retarget that?

[00:34:40] So again, it’s when you’re savvy you get ahead of knowing what that result’s going to be from a traffic standpoint and how to use different types of partners to capitalize on it, and then the entire thing is a win. Starting with the article down to how you converted them, down the line, if it’s a long tail purchase.

[00:34:56] So a lot of intricacies. One thing that I’ve mentioned on more than one podcast recording now is that there’s a lot more complexity to the channel and every aspect or category within the affiliate channel, than most people realize, and the more you dig into it, the more you uncover. I don’t consider myself an expert because I’m learning every day.

[00:35:17] And I don’t think you can ever be an expert and stop learning within this space. It evolves too quickly and it moves too fast.

[00:35:23] ST: Yeah, I agree. I mentioned that earlier, I just feel like every day there’s something new that I am learning about or hear about, and that’s what keeps it exciting. I like it. Have it any other way. I think I really liked my day to day in traditional PR, but it is definitely it, it doesn’t evolve as quickly as this.

[00:35:44] I think even traditional publicists had a really hard time and are still trying to wrap their heads around how to leverage affiliate and how it’s probably needed if you work in brand PR to learn about it and to offer it and be set up at least on ShareASale or whatever it is that you can offer to editors.

[00:36:09] Otherwise, you’re just not going to get the coverage that your brand wants, right? Affiliate marketers definitely have learned to pivot quickly, but I think in traditional PR, there is like a way of doing things. And so it is hard to break that…

[00:36:25] JF: That mold.

[00:36:26] ST: Mold. Yeah, 100%

[00:36:27] JF: And I think we’ve both ran into that. There’s plenty of times with brands, even today, where, you talk to their PR team, whether it’s outsourced or internal and they’ve been doing this for a decade, for two decades, and affiliate is almost a dirty word. And you can tell by that, the way it’s perceived on a phone call sometimes. “What do you mean work together on this, right? We stay in our lane, you stay in your lane.”

[00:36:50] And I think for a time that might’ve made sense. We’re in a place where as a brand, if you’re not leveraging affiliate and amplifying your PR efforts alongside your affiliate efforts together, you’re truly missing the boat, you’re missing consumers and you’re giving the competitive edge to the brands that you compete with directly.

[00:37:09] ST: Yeah. I think if everyone else is doing it and you’re not, agreed, you’re sleeping on something very important. And I think that’s a huge question that comes into play all the time on calls. PR teams are a little protective sometimes when they hear about Linkby.

[00:37:24] We work with a lot of PR firms and they usually come around. But I think in the first conversations, when a brand loops in their PR team, you can feel it like they, they really don’t want to be there for this conversation sometimes. And you really have to break it down, and I think at the end of the day, it all works together and they end up being like, wow, this is great.

[00:37:44] And why haven’t I used this before? But there are definitely conversations like that. I’ve had that with certain, marketing teams or paid media teams, affiliate teams even sometimes. You want to be a little bit protective and it’s ” okay, how is this technology going to potentially take away from what I’m doing,” but really it’s going to support every single person in the communication ecosystem if they want results for their brands, when it comes to content.

[00:38:14] JF: Yeah. Part of that’s human nature, right? You’ve got, you want to protect your channel and what value you bring to the table, and if it starts getting muddied by potentially that budget being pushed over or that value prop being pushed over somewhere else, that can be a bit scary.

[00:38:29] I know when AI came out, not came out, but when it was more openly accessible to use things like Chat GPT or any other AI, it’s ” great. This is going to replace jobs.” I don’t think it’s really done that, but it’s created efficiencies and those that adopt it have found how does this better create efficiencies operationally what I’m doing, how I’m pushing out content, whatever it might be, and that’s a different topic.

[00:38:49] But when it goes to the ones still dragging their feet, or they’re really apprehensive about speaking to Linkby or speaking to even us as an affiliate agency about how we can utilize techniques with our channel to amplify their efforts, there’s a lot of barrier to entry with some of those folks still, and frankly, I don’t think it’s a matter of we’re trying to replace you because by no means do I want to fully replace a PR agency. But at the same time, my only goal is to advocate for the brand and the consumer experience. And so many aspects of how consumers behave online, what tools they have available to them, how they discover brands, the loyalty they have with brands has changed so rapidly over the years that if you’re not leveraging everything that’s at your fingertips and doing it in unison, you’re really missing out, and it doesn’t replace any one or given channel. It just helps you better amplify and understand where to put time, effort, and resource.

[00:39:46] ST: Yeah, I think with technology and especially social media, anyone can make their brand blow up. There’s too much competition out there. Every single brand needs to leverage everything they can and it gets expensive. So I think being able to leverage things in a cost effective way is just the key factor and that’s where performance comes into play, right? So, I’m fully aligned. If you’re not using everything that you can to leverage your brand, then someone else is going to swoop in and take that consumer. For sure.

[00:40:22] JF: That is the dog eat dog world of competitive digital marketing, the whole space we’re in.

[00:40:28] I think this has been great. Before we jump off here, for any listeners that are interested in reaching out to Linkby or reaching out to you, what’s the best way for them to get started? What’s the best way for them to contact Linkby and get their feet wet?

[00:40:42] ST: Yeah, of course. So they can actually reach out to me directly: sophie@linkby.com. They can also just go to linkby.com and sign up as an advertiser. We’ll reach out once we get your sign up. I also have a code PPM for anyone listening. They can sign up and get $250 off their first campaign with us. So definitely would love to have you guys check us out, start a conversation.

[00:41:08] My team is open and ready to work with any brands. I think our network is expanding super rapidly in terms of what publishers we’re adding. We have new publishers on the dashboard, feels like daily. There’s no shortage of opportunities and really we can help any brand in pretty much any vertical.

[00:41:28] So yeah, definitely reach out. If you’re buddies with Jake, he can also put you in touch with me and we’ll treat you like family for sure.

[00:41:35] JF: That I can and appreciate the discount code too. That’s really excellent, a $250 credit. For those who want access to that too when we post this out, we’ll add a link for you as well and include that so check out for that link.

[00:41:50] But past that I really appreciate you being here. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.

[00:41:54] ST: Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you, and this was such a fun chat. I enjoyed it.

[00:42:00] JF: Agreed and I think this topic could probably go on for another hour, but it might get too in the weeds.

[00:42:06] ST: Unfortunately.

[00:42:07] JF: Yeah, but that’s okay. We got a good we got a good starting point on that. And for anybody listening, if you have a topic that you want to share that you think would be great to have on the podcast or a guest that you think we should have, you can also email me at ppm@jebcommerce.com.

[00:42:21] com and that’ll go to our podcast team and we’ll reach out and try to have you on an episode. So, thank you for listening and Sophie until next time.

[00:42:31] ST: Thank you so much.