How to Grow Your Business Through Increased Affiliate Support

Your affiliates play a crucial role in your brand’s success, bridging the gap between you and your customers. However, while your channel partners are skilled at running their businesses, they’re not as well-versed at promoting your products and services — marketing doesn’t run in their blood like it does yours. Luckily, there are many things you can do to equip your channel partners for local affiliate marketing success.

By providing greater channel partner support to your affiliates, you can better elevate their marketing execution and, in turn, your brand. Learn how to grow your business through your local partners using the following affiliate support tactics.

1. Provide Marketing Guidance

Your affiliates don’t have an innate understanding of marketing, so how can you expect them to promote your brand effectively using their knowledge alone? You can make marketing easier for your channel partners by supplementing their expertise with the resources they need to succeed.

Consider supporting your affiliates by providing them with marketing guidance through:

• Marketing execution solutions.
• Educational resources.
• Automated tools.
• Training sessions and videos.
• Marketing recommendations.

When affiliates have the right tools at their disposal, they can achieve greater marketing success for your brand.

2. Leverage Artificial Intelligence

You can enhance the local affiliate marketing experience by connecting your channel partners with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that provide immediate marketing execution guidance. AI-powered virtual assistants increase local affiliate program participation by helping partners solve their unique marketing challenges through informed recommendations and do-it-for-me execution. As a result, affiliates who don’t have the time or expertise to execute local marketing tactics can do so accurately and effortlessly.

3. Track Affiliate Marketing Performance

It’s difficult for affiliates to improve their marketing execution if they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. You can help your affiliates pinpoint where their local marketing falls short and adjust accordingly by providing them with performance-tracking solutions.

These technologies enable your channel partners to measure and monitor their marketing success while receiving valuable insights and analytics they can use to modify their strategies for the best results. That way, they can better determine where to direct their marketing dollars and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI).

4. Encourage Co-Op Spending

You likely give your affiliates co-op funds to put toward their marketing efforts. And while this is a great practice, studies show that 46% of these dollars go unused. That’s because many channel partners find their co-op programs confusing and difficult to employ. As a result, they neglect to spend their marketing funds and miss out on significant revenue growth opportunities for your brand.

To encourage your affiliates to invest their co-op funds, you must first improve your co-op program. An effective co-op program should encompass the following characteristics:

• User-friendliness: Intuitive, user-friendly co-op programs make fund utilization seamless with streamlined claims submission, approval, and reimbursement processes. The easier their marketing dollars are to use, the more motivated your affiliates will be to use them.
• Accessibility: Your affiliates should be able to easily access your co-op funds. If they don’t know what funds are available to them, they won’t invest them.
• Simplicity: The rules of your co-op program should be simple. Having too many complex rules in place can discourage your affiliates from using your co-op funds.
• Supportive: Your co-op program should provide affiliates with marketing recommendations so they know which tactics they should put their co-op funds toward.

5. Provide Brand-Compliant Materials

Your channel partners need to ensure that their marketing tactics, messaging, and materials adhere to brand and legal guidelines. You can make your affiliates’ jobs easier by providing them with corporate-approved marketing materials they can use for campaign execution. With brand-compliant templates, images, print materials, and other marketing assets at their fingertips, your partners can ensure their marketing is always within the proper parameters.

6. Incentivize Marketing Activities

Your brand may not be the only one your partners sell in their stores. So, how do you encourage them to promote your products and services over competitors? Incentivizing marketing activities is an excellent solution. By offering incentives for activating promotions and pushing your offerings over other brands’, you and your affiliates both win.

7. Engage Channel Partners

When you introduce new marketing tactics to your channel partners, there’s no guarantee they’ll embrace them. However, there are various ways to better engage your channel partners and encourage them to get with the program:

• Emails: Try presenting new marketing programs to affiliates through email campaigns, sending out introductions, reminders, and success stories to keep them informed.
• SMS notifications: If your partners receive company SMS notifications, send out information about your marketing program through text.
• Internal site promotions: If you have an internal website, you can use it to promote your marketing program and update it with new information and tactics.
• Company channels: Company social media pages and communication channels like Teams and Slack are great outlets for spreading the word about your program.
• Webinars: Consider hosting a webinar to introduce your marketing program to affiliates and answer their most pressing questions in the process.
• Phone calls: There’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned phone call when it comes to distributing information. Try giving your partners a ring to explain your marketing program.

8. Secure a User-Friendly Channel Marketing Platform

Local marketing platforms serve as a centralized hub for affiliates to secure marketing resources and information while connecting with brands. However, it isn’t enough to simply have a channel partner portal — this platform must deliver a positive user experience to empower your affiliates to streamline local marketing for your brand.

Channel partners get the most out of channel marketing platforms that are:

• Easy to use: A user-friendly platform ensures that your local partners can perform marketing operations seamlessly and efficiently. That means the tool should be intuitive, easy to navigate, flexible, and accessible.
• Actionable: Your local marketing platform should provide your affiliates with actionable, data-driven insights they can use to gauge their performance and adjust accordingly.
• Easy to integrate: Integrating your partner portal into existing systems and platforms should be fast and simple, requiring little time and effort from your affiliates.
• Unified: Your affiliates should be able to find all the tools and information they need within a single location.
• Relevant: All resources within your partner portal should be relevant and up-to-date to ensure accurate information use.

9. Choose a Stable Solutions Provider

You and your affiliates should work with a trustworthy solutions partner who has the knowledge and stability to help you reach your long-term goals. Not every provider has the solid finances or experience under their belts to make it through economic hardships. That’s why you and your channel partner ecosystem require support from a partner with the proven attributes of a stable provider, such as:

• A history of long-term partnerships.
• Strong financial backing.
• Long-standing industry expertise.
• Innovative services and solutions.
• Advanced skills and capabilities.

Leverage the Best Local Marketing Platform for Affiliate Support

You can achieve maximum channel partner marketing support for your affiliates with the BrandMuscle Intelligent Local Marketing Platform. Partnering with BrandMuscle means bolstering your local channel marketing and transforming your business for the better.

Contact us to learn more about our innovative local marketing solutions!