For years the affiliate community has pushed and asked for a seat at the greater marketing table and we are now getting it! With that comes change, new trends, and new opportunities. The current trend in affiliate marketing, and the one that is getting a ton of press (no pun intended, ok it was intended), is the merging of public relations (PR) into the affiliate community. In fact it’s everywhere. At Affiliate Summit East. At Martech Record’s event, it is slated to be a huge topic in the remaining events in 2022 and all of 2023.
This trend isn’t going away.
Public Relations and Affiliates are merging in unique ways.
Affiliate Marketing Recruitment & PR Pitches – Together in Harmony
Everyone should be excited about this trend; these two channels have quite a bit in common. One of the largest similarities is in how we recruit, activate, and optimize affiliates and how the PR teams pitch their brands to publishers, authors, and content creators.
Let’s talk about the pitch process and how similar it is to the affiliate outreach process. It all begins with relationships. Affiliate managers and PR professionals spend their entire careers networking, identifying new publishing partners for their content, building strong relationships over time, and leveraging those relationships for their clients. It’s nearly an identical process. Both identify potential partners, develop campaigns and strategies to reach them, and work with them over years to form successful, mutually beneficial relationships.
Successful managers in each channel spend significant time in their day building their digital rolodex. They follow contacts through their careers and are always on the lookout for how they can work together. Affiliates and PR do the same thing here.
Affiliate managers and agencies understand the need to protect and nurture their relationships. I can show you thousands of blog posts, awards, articles, and whitepapers that showcase this attribute. For over two decades those of us in the affiliate community have been saying “it’s all about relationships,” and it’s true. I’ve been in affiliate marketing since 1999 and I can still provide examples of relationships I cultivated back then that we leverage for our clients to this day. That network and those rolodexes are super important.
The affiliate channel brings something else to PR teams, agencies, and campaigns: reach. PR teams have been historically tied to certain channels and distributions, but affiliates have not. Always at the tip of the spear for all things marketing, and always in emerging markets and trends, affiliate marketing provides opportunity to garner real estate not previously available to the PR teams. And it is super easy to track!
Learn how affiliate marketing can track just about any KPI you need with some pretty amazing technology.
Affiliate Relationships Can Amplify a PR Campaign
Affiliate marketing brings a robustness and opportunity for innovation that hasn’t been available. Not only is the reach more broad, but the ways in which you can engage the community, and your audience, are deeper. From email inclusions and newsletters – which PR is familiar with – to shopping, social, and more. Affiliate provides a huge opportunity for these campaigns.
And JEBCommerce knows the partners, has the relationships and speaks the language of both worlds. So if you need help figuring all this out, let us know. We’d love to help you forge a path forward whether you are an advertiser or a PR agency. It’s a brave new world and everyone needs a little help getting started.
