Achievable marketing objectives? Check. Brand safe? Check. Powerful and scalable? Check. Affiliate marketing is how you can level up your advertising strategies. During this DMS Live episode, we’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing to help you learn more about the power and scalability of third-party campaigns.
Achievable marketing objectives? Check. Brand safe? Check. Powerful and scalable? Check. Affiliate marketing is how you can level up your advertising strategies. During this DMS Live episode, we’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing to help you learn more about the power and scalability of third-party campaigns.
0:00:03.0 Moderator: Hello everybody, welcome to DMS Live, a webinar series from DMS that is packed with performance advertising best practices, key insights and tips to help you achieve all your short and long-term wins. [I’m your moderator.] The DMS live series is presented by leaders across DMS, a leading provider of technology-enabled, data-driven performance advertising solutions. Today's DMS live episode; All Your Affiliate Marketing Questions Answered, is presented by Deanna Milkie, DMS Director of Strategic Partnerships and Chris Pink, SVP of Sales at DMS. Links to their bios will be shared in the Zoom chat and they'll each introduce themselves shortly. Two quick notes before we get started, closed captioning has been enabled for today's event. To turn it on, click the CC live transcript button at the bottom of your screen and when we publish the on-demand version of this webinar, we'll also publish the transcript. During today's presentation, I'll be acting as the marketer for a large brand for some of the questions. I'll pretend I'm just learning about affiliate marketing as I ask those questions. If you have additional questions as you're trying to learn about affiliate marketing, please feel free to submit them via the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. And with that, Deanna and Chris, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
0:01:31.7 Chris Pink: Thank you for having us. My name is Chris Pink, I am the SVP of Sales at Digital Media Solutions. I've been in affiliate marketing for, what is it? About 17 years now. I've worked at various networks and since this is a numbers driven business and given my math background, I really like getting in the weeds and analyzing data, I like finding the hidden keys to make me successful. And basically, I've seen and experienced it all, the good and the bad since, basically, the inception of affiliate marketing. There's me. Deanna?
0:02:08.5 Deanna Milkie: Yes, Chris. I have seen you in the office experiencing all ranges [and] aspects of what we do and it's exciting to see. My name is Deanna Milkie. I too have been within this industry for quite some time, not as long as Chris, but almost a decade now. I am the Director of Strategic Partnerships at DMS and I started out in this industry in my early 20s as an entry level sales coordinator and what started out as something that was a great way to pay my bills turned out to be something that I realized I really loved to do. I've been a coordinator, I've worked on the affiliate side and within operations and I landed in sales and realized that working with the clients is something that I do have a passion for and one of the reasons I have a passion for this is because this industry is always evolving and always changing. And, that is why we are talking with you today, to talk about all of the multifaceted ways that affiliate marketing can help your company and also all the ways it's evolved. Affiliate marketing specifically has evolved in the past decade and there are still lingering misconceptions about what it is. What it isn't, it's no longer a black box of information that brands should be wary of in any way, it really is a tool to drive highly targeted traffic compliantly and creatively and expand your reach to an audience.
0:03:39.6 CP: Yeah and in fact, affiliate marketing is incredibly targeted and can then be very compliant because of campaign structures and we'll get into those details in a bit. Basically the objective of today is to get everyone listening and comfortable with the idea of affiliate marketing. Deliver the information you need to understand how affiliate marketing works and what you [should] consider when choosing the right partner for launching your campaigns.
0:04:06.6 Moderator: Thank you, Deanna and Chris. I'm so excited to learn more about affiliate marketing and how it can help me. So I wanna start with the basics. Deanna, can you help me understand why I should add affiliate marketing into my marketing mix? With a second question tied to that, I've got a lot of other marketing initiatives out there, so will affiliate marketing compete with them or interfere with my other marketing efforts?
0:04:29.7 DM: I am so glad that you're starting off with this question because it truly is one of the most common questions I get from new partners. And to your first question, why should you add affiliate marketing into your current mix? And the short answer to that is, with affiliate marketing, we are creating a demand, we are not just meeting it. With your traditional online marketing efforts such as organic search or very targeted social media, you are reaching an audience that you know is interested in your specific products, highly targeted marketing is incredible and extremely high intent and we love that type of marketing as well but with affiliate marketing, you are expanding your reach to audiences that you may not have reached otherwise. For example, if you're an insurance company and someone goes and they wake up in the morning, they realize they wanna explore insurance options, they're gonna sit down on their computer and Google insurance companies. What we provide to our clients is finding a consumer that may be a perfect fit for exploring those options, but didn't really realize that they needed it until they saw one of our ads and so that's really one of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is so special within the marketing ecosphere.
0:05:53.5 DM: And, to answer your second question, a good affiliate marketing partner is going to make sure that they are not competing with your internal marketing efforts. That goes against what your objective is and therefore our objective, we want a long-standing partnership with you and so we're going to make sure that we obtain all of the necessary information before we go live, such as blacklisting terms that you're already utilizing, suppressing any existing customers, or any other type of data and making sure we're not marketing on competing websites, if that's what you need. Again, we're looking to develop long-term partnerships, so if you realize upon working with us that you are competing, then that wouldn't be beneficial to either parties. So, I hope that answers your question.
0:06:44.9 Moderator: Absolutely, it did. Thank you, Deanna. What I understand is affiliate marketing can really help me go broader than I'm going currently, talking to people who I might not otherwise talk to. So quickly going a little bit deeper, Chris, what channels are included in affiliate marketing?
0:07:04.2 CP: Well, funny you ask that. [The answer is] all of them. What I mean by that is that basically every digital channel can be involved in affiliate marketing. The main thing that you wanna look at though, before you're starting a campaign is try to take a targeted approach to the placements of your ads, basically find out based on what's being sold, like your product, there's different traffic sources for different types of products. There's different types of metrics involved with a lot of different products and another thing is the demographics of the audience being targeted. So basically what it comes down to is all these different digital channels such as email, search and display, can be included in the affiliate marketing mix. You just need to do your due diligence and really mesh your product and your offering to the specific channels that are available, which is most of them.
0:08:00.6 Moderator: Got it. So affiliate marketing lets me be everywhere I need to be, but you also help me figure out where I actually do need to be. So Deanna, going back to you, how are affiliate marketing campaigns built? Do advertisers pay for impressions, clicks or something else?
0:08:20.4 DM: Yeah, this is a great question, too. What we are getting paid on is just the cost per action. When we talk with a new client, we essentially determine what are you looking for? Are you looking to generate new sales? Are you looking for new customers? Are you looking for an application on your service provided? Once we establish what exactly you are looking for in terms of incremental growth that you are talking to us about, that's how we will establish what that payable action will be. That could be a lead, it could be a click, if that... If you're looking for new eyeballs on your website. It could also be the application or a sale. And, once you do that, it is up to us to create that marketing angle, that creative and work with you on developing a very strong direct response-type marketing campaign to render that action and the great news is you're only paying on that action, you're not... That is what the true benefit is of working with affiliate marketing, so we're going to really wanna get a line on your objectives, your target KPIs, talk about your conversion rates and learn a little bit more about what's already been working with you in the past, so we can really, really focus in on that.
0:09:41.6 Moderator: This sounds absolutely amazing. I pay for only what I want. But how do I know what's the right price to pay for the action I'm generating?
0:09:52.5 CP: Alright and this is kind of a more complicated question, mostly because you're dealing with a lot of different facets of the affiliate marketing world. You are basically right now, you are competing against other people in the affiliate marketing landscape, you need to be competitive because essentially what you're doing now since it is all action-oriented, the publishers are who are taking the initial investment to prove that your offer will work with our inventory. So you gotta look at a couple of different things, you have to base it on traffic channel and intent of the channel, not all traffic is created equal. Which, if you're running an email campaign, you might have to pay a little bit more, if you're running a social campaign, you could pay a little bit less. It really comes down to it, but it does come down to the intent of the channel and how it works for you. So basically what our job is to do is to find and match those traffic sources competitively with the proper payouts with the advertisers. So I know there's a couple of things you should notice are the... You're competing with offers in the same vertical, so what a good affiliate marketing company would do is they have historical performance data and it helps determine the competitive rates.
0:11:06.2 CP: What that means is that if they've been running traffic for a long time, they're able to give you a general ballpark of where you need to be. And with that being said, as I mentioned, how publishers are taking the initial investment in this, the competitive rates help gain traction. If you come in kind of a lowball rate, there's a chance that it wouldn't be compelling enough to get a publisher to risk their advertising dollars on it. So this is what we kinda do, we work with you back and forth, specifically at DMS, when we launch a campaign, it's being offered to the world's top publishers and one of the largest networks. But again, your account executive will guide you on where you need to be based on the vertical conversion points CPL/CPA and the anticipated performance, meaning has a network done well with that in the past. And we're gonna propose rates set in order to deliver the advertiser, you, a positive ROI. We work with you to understand your objectives and set appropriate prices and with that being said, rates can be adjusted. They can be adjusted over time. In order to scale a campaign, you might have to raise a payout, lower a payout, but here's the thing, we work with you on that. And because there's a lot of competition, we'll be pretty, necessarily a marketing company would be, pretty transparent and forthright on what needs to be successful.
0:12:26.7 Moderator: It sounds like what I'm understanding is it's really important to have the right person that you're working with. Someone who you can really trust to give you good advice. And going into the next section of this, Chris, you talked a lot about publishers and getting the right publishers on, so I'm gonna flip over to Deanna. Can you tell me how you choose the right publishers for an affiliate marketing campaign and I guess to go along with that, are there right publishers and wrong publishers?
0:13:00.0 DM: Yeah. Also, I love the image that you use for this. It's a little magnifying glass. It's similar to that. [chuckle] The benefit of working with an affiliate network is that you are working with a team of account executives and affiliate managers utilizing their digital magnifying glass, so to speak, to find the publishers that are going to work with your specific needs. Not every single publisher is going to be right for your campaign and that's what we are here to do for you. So once you... Once an affiliate network establishes exactly what you're looking for in terms of the branding, your backend KPIs, the types of channels that you've already tested, maybe they've worked really well, maybe they didn't work so well, that is when our team goes to work in selecting publishers that they know have had success within a similar arena, whether that's a target demographic or vertical specific and that's our job, that's what we're here to do for you. And so yes, we... There are right and wrong publishers and we have our entire network... Affiliate networks have their entire database to pull from historically to see which partners we should be pulling, in order to work with you specifically.
0:14:21.3 DM: So truthfully to me, the biggest benefit of working with affiliate networks is that history of success and failures, particularly success. We know what publishing partners will work with your campaign. We know which ones maybe we will test down the line, or we know which ones that we do not want to engage with this particular vertical or cost per action structure. So at this stage, when you're speaking with an affiliate network or an affiliate marketer, hopefully they should have already asked you all of this information, your target KPIs, what type of marketing you can and cannot use, those copy guidelines. And then once we establish that, we're going to make sure that you're sending us disposition reports so we can continue to optimize based on that and see which publishing partners are rendering the strongest performance. And we'll focus on those ones.
0:15:18.3 Moderator: Once again, it is just absolutely clear that having the right team on my side makes all the difference in terms of making sure my campaign is competitive, making sure it will perform, but also making sure that I don't spin my wheels wasting time on something that was never going to work. So, Chris, how do I know that I'm working with the right affiliate network and with a strong account executive who's going to steer me in the right direction.
0:15:45.5 CP: Okay. So Deanna mentioned a couple points on there that you really have to look for when determining a proper affiliate network to work with, but just to kinda give you sort of a broad idea, just going down a list, I mean, you wanna make sure that your network has a rigorous publisher approvals process. What that means, you're not just allowing anybody on there, they're actually going through and doing due diligence on the publishers that will be driving traffic to the campaign. Another thing is operational-wide compliance. What that means as well is that there's a lot of things that can happen and as long as you're being proactive about it and being able to see it before... Or as it happens, or get a general understanding of whether it may happen in certain verticals, that sort of thing. So compliance is huge. And it's one of the things that, being I've done this for so long, I've seen all sorts of things happen. So I know that compliance is one of the biggest things. When it comes to success of a campaign, the success of your campaign, historical data [on] publishers is great, experience in the vertical or products.
0:17:00.0 CP: So there's some... There's networks out there that might really focus on a specific vertical or specific product. You make sure that the network that you're gonna choose does have some history in your vertical or selling your product, because that will just kind of ensure success. And it'll be more expediently done than with someone who has not really had any experience with that. Another thing is dedicated sales reps, there's some exchanges and networks out there that are more of a self-serve environment, but dedicated sales reps really help you build your campaign. They work closely with you on that. And another one is kind of a little red flag is lowest price guarantees. You're not gonna get a lowest price guarantee. You're gonna get the price that is needed to be successful. So if they're coming in and offering super discounts or something like that, it's just... You're competing against your peers. You're competing against a landscape and that's something that should be kind of a little red flag there. As far as a good account executive, showing interest in your brand is huge. And the success of your campaign, willing to work with you on, you know, finding out what your campaign and your business is like, they'll ask the appropriate questions, like where is the money made? At what point do you, as a company, become successful?
0:18:23.0 CP: Maybe that's not the action that we decided on at the beginning, but it's the action that we're going to get to, because you wanna have longevity with your account. What are your KPIs? And another thing is a little bit more granular, since it is an affiliate network, you will have various sub sources running your campaign. You wanna make sure that you are able to determine the quality of your source. So you don't want to do all traffic as one thing when working with an affiliate network, you want to be able to separate your ability to track success based on sources. So that's a big thing right there. And there's some other things, but those are a lot of the main ones that you really wanna do. And ask questions, make sure you're asking questions, ask questions about the history, ask questions... You know, don't be afraid to ask anything about an affiliate network, because they shouldn't have anything to hide.
0:19:20.3 Moderator: I am so excited. What I've heard so far is you're gonna help me get bigger, because I'm gonna go broader than I otherwise would. You're gonna have somebody do all the work for me, right? When I do affiliate marketing, there's gonna be an account executive that does it all, figures out my pricing, who I should work with and then on top of that I only pay when it works, I am ready to go. Deanna, what do advertisers need to provide to the affiliate network in order to successfully launch a campaign?
0:19:50.3 DM: Yes, this is a great question, and this is really where you roll up your sleeves and get to work with your affiliate network or your affiliate marketing partner, because a good affiliate marketing partner is going to want to know all of these details before a launch to make sure that you start off on the best foot and you're just setting yourself up for success down the line as things scale, because ultimately a good campaign is going to convert well for these publishers as well, these publishers are experts in making money promoting ads. So if your campaign is a strong converter which we have a strong confidence that it will be once we look at your landing page or look at the rate, as Chris mentioned, we wanna make sure that the end goal is also going to be success for you too, so the first thing that we would wanna ask is, what are your target KPIs? What is your back-end metric in order for you to have a positive ROI? What do you want your cost per sale to be? What type of filters are you looking for?
0:20:54.9 DM: Is there an age filter? Are there any geo-filters you need to be cognizant of? Are you looking for consumers that are homeowners? Are you looking for consumers with excellent credit? Let us know this on the very front end, so we can make sure that this is clear to our publishing partners [from the start], because that is how they are going to determine what data they market to. The landing page that I mentioned, we want this offer to perform for you, but it also has to perform well for our publishing partners, that means taking a really close look at your landing page, does it evoke a very strong response from the consumer? And if it doesn't, that's okay because a good affiliate marketing network is going to help you build a landing page that is going to evoke that direct response. Creative elements, we've all seen them, we see them every single day when we're online, they're impossible to ignore, we want to make sure that those assets are going to be compelling to the consumer, we wanna make sure that they're compliant. We wanna talk with you about your copy guidelines so that if we want to build some assets for you specifically, then we know exactly what is approved, what isn't and what has worked and what hasn't.
0:22:07.4 DM: And then lastly, technical specifications, obviously, we want to make sure that we're passing back to you all of the very detailed information that's going to help us optimize down the line and that's gonna get a little more into the weeds, we don't have to go into that very much right now, but just so you know, we'll wanna make sure that you can uniquely identify the publisher like Chris mentioned but also we wanna track other sources to help you optimize down the road. Publishers can track the type of data they're using, publishers have the ability to track which assets they're using and so later when we look at quality, we can pinpoint what worked the best. And so, yeah, that's really what I would wanna make sure I would have, those would be the brass tacks of what I'd wanna make sure we had before we launched.
0:22:58.9 Moderator: Thank you, Deanna. That was incredibly thorough and so helpful to understand exactly how it's gonna work to get started, though it feels like a list of stuff, it's really all stuff that I have already for the most part, so not overwhelming, just a good list of stuff I would expect to need. So going back to where we started this time with a question for Chris, if I'm running branding campaigns like TV or radio, I know that they're not gonna compete because we talked about that but how do you factor in the lift that comes from those other brand awareness efforts?
0:23:33.3 CP: Okay, I like this question cause it comes up every once in a while and it's a pretty interesting answer, you wouldn't really think about it but TV and other awareness efforts will only help your affiliate marketing. In many cases you'll be able to scale faster, because of strong brand awareness and since you are paying on an action, you will end up probably being more successful because the people already know your brand. One thing that comes up sometimes is overlap, but sometimes overlap is good. What most affiliate networks are able to do is pick the channels and sources to complement your current branding efforts and if you're already doing search, let's try a couple other things, we don't have to do all of the traffic channels, we don't have to do all of the distribution methods in order to run a campaign, we can pick and choose. You're able to pick and choose and again, you're paying for the guaranteed result with affiliate marketing and it uniquely tracks to tracking links that separate the traffic from other branding versus direct response and the thing I always say when I even talk about this is that affiliate marketing is essentially free branding…
0:24:48.3 Moderator: Gotta love free branding. Alright, so important question, going to you Deanna. How do I know my information will be kept confidential within your network?
0:25:01.6 DM: I'm really glad that this question is in here because this too is a very common question that I get from larger companies that may have competitors within the space. The good news is that, well, first of all, our publishers are driving traffic directly to your site, we are not capturing that data within our network, it doesn't exist within what we are doing, so that personally identifiable information is going straight from the consumer to you. We do not capture that information whatsoever. Also, I want to point out that a trustworthy affiliate marketing partner is going to keep your information extremely confidential. We don't want to share proprietary information with anybody else because obviously we wouldn't be such a long-standing company... Affiliate networks that you work with wouldn't be long-standing if they had a reputation for sharing proprietary information, so that's absolutely not a concern, it's in our best interest to make sure that all of your company information, all of your secret sauce is kept safe with you. What you can harness however working with a network, are the successes that we have seen and that's what we really love to tap into is, here's what worked, here's what hasn't, without ever sharing any of your personal information or any other company's information, but we have that wealth of knowledge to tap into for sure.
0:26:34.9 Moderator: Awesome, that feels good. So we're down to the last question, we're also down to the last three minutes. If people stay on, we'll do some questions afterwards, but otherwise we'll make sure we publish answers to questions that were submitted beforehand and during this webinar. Feel free to submit questions at the Q&A down below. So Chris, the last question, everything's going great, lined up everything, it's going perfect, I want bigger, what is the best way to safely scale an affiliate marketing campaign?
0:27:08.1 CP: Right, that's the fun part as you mentioned. I love this part, I love looking into different numbers and metrics and everything in order to see who does well at what and that sort of thing. So the key to scaling a campaign is basically: Get as much diversification as possible. Try a few sources to determine quality of specific traffic channels, but do it in a low risk environment. Most networks will be able to offer you caps on specific publishers, on specific traffic channels, on specific anything. Where if someone's gonna try to force large volumes of traffic to you, then that's not safe. That's more of a kind of smash and grab mentality as opposed to a long-term focusing relationship.
0:27:55.0 CP: So basically, one of the things we try to do and since all traffic is not created equal, as I mentioned before, we like to track quality at a sub-source level. We right price and adjust sub-sources and caps as we go. What that means is that, as I mentioned earlier, say, if you're paying a... This particular source is worth a certain amount to you, but another source might be worth more, you can pay more for the source that is more qualitative to you and you could probably pay less, as long as it works with the publishers metrics, in order to get the best ROI. And you're able to do that on a test basis usually where you're capping, you're kinda going from there. But right pricing and adjusting the sub-source caps as you go. And again, it could be a fairly low-risk environment, but I would stress diversifying your traffic channels in order to get what works for each specific traffic channel and just scale as long as you're comfortable.
0:29:00.0 Moderator: Awesome, thank you, Chris. Alright, Deanna, back to you, take us home. Can you summarize, what is your favorite thing about affiliate marketing?
0:29:11.1 DM: Oh my gosh, only one? I'm just kidding. Well, by working with... My favorite thing about working with trusted affiliate partners is that you are tapping into the expertise of not only hundreds of publishers, but also award-winning marketers, you have people that are well-versed in compliance, you have data experts. It's honestly just like a magic genie of information and knowledge that you can tap into at any moment. At DMS, for example, every publisher has a dedicated affiliate manager who knows their book of business inside and out. Already you're putting yourself a foot forward in terms of finding the right publishers. Then you have your account executives and your account managers who know exactly how to make a campaign not only succeed, but to have a long-lasting effect and scale. So I think my favorite part about working with affiliate marketing experts is you're tapping into those best practices, you're making sure things are compliant, you are looking at... You're looking back at decades of historical experience. It's almost just like tapping into the matrix, you have all of that knowledge just at your fingertips and I think it's really the best way to take a next step in terms of incremental growth.
0:30:33.3 Moderator: I love that imagery. I've got a magic genie layered with the matrix, it's perfect.
0:30:38.3 DM: Yeah, exactly.
0:30:41.1 Moderator: So now that... Chris and Deanna, now that you've got everyone excited about launching or scaling their affiliate marketing campaigns, let's talk about how DMS can help. The DMS toolset, including our first party data asset, proprietary technology and expansive media reach is the foundation of how we connect advertisers with consumers. And affiliate marketing is one of the many digital performance advertising solutions we offer. Chris, what should our listeners do if they're ready to get started with affiliate marketing with DMS right now?
0:31:17.8 CP: I'm on mute.
0:31:21.8 Moderator: [laughter] Cause it's you.
0:31:23.4 CP: I almost made it the whole thing without having some technical blunder, but I did it. I was gonna say, you can call me or Deanna, we're ready to work with you. And if you know anybody else at DMS, just reach out and talk to them about the things we talked about. If you don't currently have a contact at DMS, you can go to our website digitalmediasolutions.com and click Contact DMS and a form will come up with a couple of questions that will ask about your business. And you will be redirected to the appropriate department. So yeah, there's a lot of different options for getting started with us.
0:31:56.8 Moderator: Awesome, thank you. Thank you to everyone for joining today's episode of DMS live. If you have any questions about affiliate marketing or any form of digital performance advertising, please email connect@dmsgroup.com and we'll get you connected with Deanna, Chris or someone else on the DMS team.