Big thanks to Jitendra Vaswani who helped us prepare this publication.
Jitendra Vaswani is a Digital Marketing Practitioner & international keynote
with 6+yrs of experience
and is always up to date with the latest affiliate marketing trends.
Main individual projects:
– the founder of www.bloggersIdeas.com
– the author of “Inside A Hustler’s Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom”
Will there be any significant changes in 2020?
2020 came just recently but has already brought us many surprises. So far, largely shocking ones. And yes, you guessed it right, we mean COVID-19. Whether we want it or not, it has had a significant impact not only on people’s lives but on brands’ cost structure and ad spendings. In China, for example, 47% of businesses reported that their sales had been significantly or severely impacted by the outbreak of the pandemic, and 7% of them had stopped their advertising activities completely.
While the whole world is living in uncertainty, the challenges are emerging: supply chain issues, cash gaps, changeable consumer confidence, drop in demand, purchasing power loss and so on and so forth. We are not going to turn this post into a list of advice on what vertical you should choose. Just make sure you don’t put all the eggs in travel, luxury, real estate niches. If you’re a beginner, try necessity good first. At least in the near future.
Big brands, in their turn, reduced their marketing spend by at least 30% (80% for some subsidiaries), shifting Q1 budgets to Q2 and consider to increase marketing contents associated with positive energy and mainstream tonality. The good news is that there are quite a lot of chances everything will be more or less stabilized by the 2nd half of the year. At least, that’s what optimistic analysts say. Anyway, affiliate marketers should find ways to improve their efficiency. Let’s see what are the affiliate marketing trends that will help us overcome all the difficulties of 2020.
Bonus Section: To learn more about how to win the race in the affiliate marketing industry in 2020, read our new 80+ pages guide to the main Affiliate Marketing Verticals.
Over 100 tips and hacks on driving traffic and increasing the conversion rate in each affiliate marketing vertical, interviews with Top managers of the Top Affiliate Networks and Traffic Sources, case studies, nice bonuses from partners 👇
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is getting widely used in eCommerce, and the same is going to happen in affiliate marketing. The thing is that in 2020 celebrities, or so-called macro-influencers (500K – 1M followers), will start losing their popularity and become less relevant due to rising costs and declining engagement rates. Yes, they have millions of followers, but it has nothing with their ability to influence. The audience’s relevance and the engagement rate are the first things you should think about as a marketer.
Micro-influencers’ (10K-50K) typical followers base size may not seem huge, but they are usually more affordable, on the other hand. Micro-influencers have a super-power to tap into defined micro-communities and establish meaningful and productive relationships with their members.
Nano-influencers usually have less than 10K followers. But it’s not the case. On top of their relatively low pricing rates and high EG, an ideal nano-influencer has a very specialized fan base that can spread the word around your offer with no additional investments.
Just a quick stats from Rakuten’s 2019 Influencer Marketing Global Survey, if you’re still in doubts on whether to try this affiliate marketing trend or not:
- 65% of consumers discover a new brand or product through an influencer at least once a week,
- 87% were inspired by an influencer to make a purchase,
- 56% of women who follow influencers follow beauty, fashion and entertainment influencers,
- 54% of men who follow influencers follow gaming, tech and celebrity influencers,
- 70% of women prefer Instagram influencers,
- 53% of people find new influencers through social media recommendations,
- 31% of consumers recommend an influencer to friends and family at least once a week.
Voice Search Optimization
Analysts say that voice search is going to take 50% of the total search volume in 2020, while 30% of all the searches will be done on the devices without a screen. If voice search isn’t a part of your strategy today – then make sure you know how to implement this affiliate marketing trend when the time comes.
The rise of voice search popularity has been caused by the increasing number of people, installing smart speakers to their phones, homes, and workplaces. If the forecasts come true, the rise of this affiliate marketing trend popularity will have a strong impact on the brand’s content strategy playbooks, which will have to be optimized for audio queries. By the way, this also applies to you.
Today, most of the speakers are made by Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri or Alexa. And it seems like there are just a few chances this market structure will change. It is interesting that users of 65+ years old use these devices more than others:
- 50% of them use them 1-3 times/day,
- 45% find them reliable and are able to answer their voice queries in 2 to 3 tries.
What are the best ways to get voice search traffic? The best ways are typically considered to be guides, FAQ and blog section. Work on the content that keeps the conversation going rather than puts a stop to it. Use long-tail keywords and make sure it answers a query or a question.
Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing is going to play a key role in 2020 affiliate marketing. Data has become one of the most important factors when it comes to improving your marketing and ad efficiency with little effort on your part.
1. Use quality reports and analytics to make the right decisions
Only a quality non-sampling data can tell you exactly what’s works and what’s not. Good news, RedTrack gives has all the tools you can use to get the latest data about your campaigns in a customized way. You can easily check it into your RedTrack Reports dashboard that provides you with all the detailed information for effective in-depth tracking across 30+ metrics. Read more RedTrack Reports here.
2. Use automation to save time and increase ROI
According to VentureBeat, companies that use marketing automation tools reported an 80% increase in leads and a 77 % increase in conversions. RedTrack with its automation features ( Auto-Rules) gives you a unique opportunity to set rules for your traffic at campaigns and creatives level and get alerts if KPIs are not met. The advantages are clear: you save your time, money and mental energy.
- Personalized marketing
The 2020 personalization isn’t about inserting customers’ names into emails. It’s about delivering them the right message at the right time. 91% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that deliver relevant personalized offers and recommendations. The only thing to know what’s relevant to them and what’s not is to use a quality ad tracker to gather important information about them.
Audio and Video Content
In 2020, video has become one of the top high-performing types of content marketing. It has achieved 135% more organic reach than images, status, and link posts. As to consumers, they spend 3x more time on watching live videos than other forms of content. Facebook executives themselves predict that the platform will be all video by 2021.
Along with smart speakers, Streaming audio (AM/FM radio) and pure-play music services are the biggest outlets for brand advertisers today. Podcasts have become one of the key channels for many direct-to-consumer brands. They are not only useful in advertising for products and services but are also a great addition to a classic content marketing mix. Like videos, audio content also performs better than text posts. So, why not follow this affiliate marketing trend? Even though podcasts culture is now only under development stage, now over 51% of the population say they have listened to one of the 700,000 active podcasts in the United States.
Native Advertising
What should you know about Native advertising:
- It’s the number one digital advertising format of the 2020s and be worth $400bn by 2025 (eMarketer)
- Native ads receive 53 % more views than traditional display ads. (Sharethrough)
- This ad format increases purchase intent by 18 %. (Forbes)
But wait for a second. Some of you may have a question on what does a native advertisement actually means? The idea behind this ad format is to match an ad with the surrounding context. It integrates into the environment and typically looks like a regular social media post or Google search result. Why is it so effective? Due to its seamless integration with the surroundings, it shows better engagement and interacts with users on a deeper level. Read more about this affiliate marketing trend and its main features in our blog post – What are the best ad formats in affiliate marketing?
Mobile Phone Marketing
The global mobile marketing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 25% in the 2018 – 2023 period. With it, some optimistic experts believe that mobile is going to take up 80% of all the online traffic in the upcoming few years.
How to achieve better performance?
There is no single miraculous recipe but there are some basic recommendations that will help you become better in mobile affiliate marketing:
– make sure your landing pages are mobile-friendly to avoid click loss. If possible, check how it works on different devices – Android, iOS and on different OS versions,
– choose the offers that have carrier billing to make it easy to convert,
– segment your customer base properly to identify customer needs better and provide personalized offers,
– use analytics and attribution,
– know when it’s the best time to reach out to your audience.
Mobile media use varies throughout the day. While desktop is more commonly used during the day, the content consumption from Tablet and Smartphone dominates in the evening:
Conclusion:
Using the abovementioned affiliate marketing trends, don’t be afraid of experimenting. Experiment with your target audiences, niches of content creators, commission rate, creatives, tone of voice and strategies.
Also, don’t forget to look at your competitors and check how they are promoting their products with the help of spy tools. Though we won’t advise you to copy their strategies, you can always look up to them for inspiration and come up with your own techniques.
So, those were some of the new affiliate marketing trends in 2020 to check out. If you’d like to try something new, just look around and see what kind of technologies are being used and then try to come up with your own strategies to target your audience, and you will be good to go.
Happy tracking!
