Affiliates play a crucial role in keeping players up to date with the latest news, games and offers. However, crafting compelling marketing material is not just about promoting your sign up offers and waiting for the sales from affiliates to roll in. Successful affiliate programs are built on platforms that deliver both accurate data and granular reports, so that affiliates can optimise their content marketing efforts and drive the right players to the right products and places – at the right times!
It’s about engaging an audience and building lasting connections. In this guide, we’ll delve into the art of creating captivating content that will not only have your affiliates converting at a higher rate but also willing to promote more of your offers.
1. Understand Your Affiliate Audience:
Before you dive into marketing your offers to affiliates, it’s important to understand your affiliate audience. The online gambling community is diverse, ranging from seasoned SEO players seeking expert insights to give to newcomers exploring the world of online casinos for the first time through to tech savvy entrepreneurs who are able to build and scale their promotions reaching niche audience segments super fast!
Tailoring your marketing content to cater to these different partnership needs and knowledge levels is key.
2. Why Affiliate Segmentation Matters:
Identify distinct segments within your affiliate audience, such as beginners, experienced players, or those interested in specific game genres or geographical locations. Cellxpert enables affiliate managers to tag and categorise partners in groups and that makes it easy to see which segments of partners are performing well and enables affiliate managers to double down on recruitment efforts to help increase campaign performances driving incremental sales. Crafting just the right content that addresses the unique interests and concerns of each segment can help managers increase program profit margins at scale. Making program administration a lot easier and faster with integrated reporting and tag management means affiliate program managers can spend time more efficiently building relationships with new partners entering their programs. Segmentation becomes a lot easier as well to manage relevant communications to partners in newsletters where specific platforms will allow you to group users by the content that they open or links that they click. Be sure to take advantage of this so that you can offer more personalised content to your partners in the future.
3. Addressing Common Pain Points:
Affiliates are busy.
They’re only going to spend some time reading content that is going to help them solve a particular problem for their customers or help them earn more revenue and get better conversion results. So, understand the pain points of your affiliate audience. What problem are you trying to solve for them? Perhaps they are struggling with choosing the promotion to promote or understanding game rules and KYC criteria, or navigating payment options in your site. Make their learning journey with your product and infrastructure easier by creating a simplistic onboarding process.
Offer transparent granular reporting. Cellxpert offers a variety of reports and API access for affiliates to create and pull their data directly from the platform and into their own reporting suites. Tailor your content to provide solutions, convince your affiliates about the merit of your team and program offering and you’ll be establishing yourself as a credible and reliable source of information that they will keep returning to.
4. Learn to Speak their Language:
As we’ve established, your affiliate audience is likely to be diverse: they might be seasoned referrers or beginners just starting out. Tailor your marketing campaigns , onboarding content and services to cater to both. Avoid jargon that might alienate newcomers, while still providing value for the experienced ones.
One simple rule for all content, though, should be to write as you would talk. Use the language you would use when talking to a colleague in the office – meaning, use simple words and sentences that are no longer than they need to be. Many affiliates you work with may not speak the same language as you and learning to communicate simply is one of the fastest ways you can help your affiliates get what they want and start promoting the right offers to their audiences.
5. Build Trust through Personal Narratives
When it comes to creating connections with your affiliate audience, it is done much more easily at a personal level. People connect with other people much more quickly than they do brands or companies so don’t hide behind your website or social media account. Put yourself out there, tell your affiliates a bit about who you are and share personal narratives related to your experiences working in affiliate marketing and online. This not only humanises your program but also creates relatable content that affiliates can resonate with and build up trust – a lot quicker!
6. Always be Responsive & Transparent
One easy way of connecting with your affiliates at a personal level is to respond to any comments you might get over email or social media in relation to your affiliate program. Engaging your affiliate community in forums, chat and other online channels promotes your program as being responsive and ready to serve.
Respond to queries or concerns promptly, whether to provide positive feedback, general comments or solve any concerns that crop up. A quick response shows that you’re a real person who values other people’s time and opinions. Responsive communication builds a sense of community, which in turn encourages players to come back to your network time and time again.
Be transparent about your data and reporting, giving affiliates real time reporting can help improve your affiliate program performance and give partners the data they need to optimise and scale your campaigns a lot faster. Cellxpert offers granular real time reporting to affiliates and accurate quality tracking on attribution and post back tracking data. Our product team is constantly pushing the needle to discover how to solve challenges that affiliate managers face in our fast paced industry.
7. Offer up Social Proof
If possible, aim to get some feedback from your affiliate partners and share positive experiences with your affiliate community. At a base level, we all want to be reassured that we’re making the right choices, so if someone benefited from your advice or recommendation, encourage them to share their story. Not only will that add authenticity and credibility to your content, but it will allow other readers to justify clicking through and taking your advice, themselves. Testimonials offer a great way for affiliates to earn recognition in the community and for your team to build better outbound relationships to recruit new partners in!
8. Be Data Driven in Your Approach
Give your affiliates exactly what they need to be successful promoting your brand. It sounds simple but often affiliates are taking promotions and offers that they have no idea about how they may perform.
When you use granular reporting data to provide feedback to your partners about the value and KPI their players are displaying this not only helps affiliates to improve their performance but will help you make targets as they can focus their efforts in all the right places saving a lot of time on testing to gain success.
For example you can tell them:
- Which games are getting the most deposits
- Which geo’s are growing fastest
- Which promotions have the longest retention times
- Which offers are getting more user engagement or conversion on average
Consistency is the key to a data-driven content approach, though. You have to treat each piece of content as a data point – and the more you put out into the online universe, the more data that you’ll get back. Some campaigns may perform well, others won’t. Helping your affiliates to understand what’s working for them as quickly as possible is a big part of your role as a successful affiliate program manager and that’s where you’ll need a tracking solution that enables you to do that!
Conclusion
Crafting compelling offers and incentives that keep affiliates active and loyal to your program is paramount when it comes to succeeding in the iGaming industry. Trust is the cornerstone of lasting success in this business. So, roll the dice, create captivating content, offers and service models and let your affiliate program be a trusted guide in what is one of the most rewarding niches in affiliate marketing.
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