Tips to Find Your Focus in Partner and Affiliate Marketing

Performance Horizon, the global leader in digital partner marketing, and behavioral marketing solutions leader SaleCycle were both recently listed on The Sunday Time’s Hiscox Tech Track 100 — a list of Britain’s fastest-growing tech firms.
We grabbed, Mira, Marketing Manager at Performance Horizon, to run us through some tips on how to find focus with your partner and affiliate marketing strategies.

Despite a long-standing debate over the effective frequency of advertising, there’s a general consensus among advertisers that the more well-targeted marketing messaging someone receives, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
It is no surprise that data collected across multiple touchpoints, channels, and devices open up enticing new opportunities for marketers to glean actionable insights and create memorable customer experiences. As exciting as these new insights and opportunities are, however, making the most of them comes with some serious challenges.
[one_half]This is especially true when it comes to partner and affiliate marketing, where managing data from touchpoints across a variety of partners ranging from non-traditional marketing partners to meta search engines to loyalty affiliates can be particularly difficult.
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Since marketing partners drive different levels of business impact, it’s up to the savvy marketer to harness data from these touchpoints to identify which partners provide the most value. This should be the real focus of your partner and affiliate marketing program.

1 Streamline your systems to efficiently assess your current partners.

Historically, brands used disparate systems across the various types and locations of their marketing partners and affiliates. But measuring partner performance across different systems renders it difficult and time-consuming to extract insights you can actually use. In addition to generally being a pain, manually generating comparison reports increases the odds of reporting errors and may lead to suboptimal optimization efforts.
Measuring all partner activity and the associated data streams on a single platform makes it much easier to understand how well each of your partners drives sales for certain products or product categories relative to each other. Streamlining all partner performance on one system should also save you time and simplify payment reconciliation and settlement.
Knowing your key partners is the first step to building closer, mutually-beneficial relationships. It can be tremendously helpful to understand how these partners successfully drive traffic to you. You may even be able to apply some of their learnings to your other marketing initiatives.

2 Narrow your audience to maximize impact.

Once you’ve identified your profitable products and key partners, you must also determine which customers you want to focus on.
Prioritizing customer retention, for example, means focusing your optimization efforts on a single stream of traffic. This should ultimately help you develop good customer experiences, which you can share with your partners to further maximize impact.
Streamlining your marketing processes doesn’t necessarily mean simplifying them. But it does make execution much smarter and easier.
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Find Out More About Performance Horizon

Performance Horizon is the global leader in partner marketing technology, enabling large enterprises to drive significant sales through their online marketing partners and affiliates. Top digital content, retail, travel and financial services companies rely on Performance Horizon’s highly scalable platform to generate over $3 billion in sales across 185,000 marketing partners in over 180 countries.

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Mira Khanna Marketing Manager – Performance Horizon