Digital marketing contemplates different methods for the promotion of products and services. One of the techniques that works great is an affiliate marketing strategy.
You may have heard that businesses pay other actors or publishers to talk about their products. Some can confuse it with influencer marketing, yet, affiliate marketing online is different. Moreover, when combined with LinkedIn marketing, it can offer certain benefits.
Read on to know more about LinkedIn affiliate marketing and get some tips on developing affiliate programs on this platform.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique under which the company or brand pays the affiliates to market their product. In particular, an affiliate (a blogger, a company, website, or content creator) shows the ad or link leading to the product website for which they get a commission if the audience buys this product.
Some B2B affiliate marketing guides underline that brands can pay up to 30% of the commission from the purchase depending on the type of the affiliate actor.
Notably, the insertion of an affiliate marketing link depends on the partnership and involves the usage of third-party platforms to track the customers’ activity. In this regard, networking and seeking partners become crucial for affiliates and brands that apply affiliate marketing.
That’s where LinkedIn’s affiliate marketing strategy comes into play.
Why does LinkedIn matter?
The importance of LinkedIn for doing affiliate marketing online lies in the opportunities the platform provides for the affiliates. What are they about? Networking, the abundance of experts, and the ability to build relationships.
More than 80% of B2B content marketers consider LinkedIn effective to market the products and use it to share valuable content. Simultaneously, LinkedIn is full of professionals and experts that share their insights, problems, and solutions.
As a result, for affiliate marketing specialists, the platform offers both the way to find new audiences and affect decision-makers and find new brands to cooperate with the services. Notably, the same applies to the brands that want to present their goods and generate more leads via affiliate programs.
Leading Techniques for Affiliate Marketing on LinkedIn
It is clear now that LinkedIn affiliate marketing is helpful for promotion via insights and targeting decision-makers or experts. However, the best affiliate marketing strategy would be the one that suits your goals and needs. Let’s consider the most common techniques that specialists use on LinkedIn:
Presenting your services and products via content
The most obvious tactic is developing the LinkedIn page to promote the products by filling it with the content. The brand can post interesting cases and valuable info to be visible, while the affiliates should do it to position themselves as experts and be attractive to the audience.
For the first group, presenting such info allows attracting leads and affiliates. For the latter, it contemplates finding a target audience and attracting new partners.
Advancing networking
Also, the marketing with LinkedIn puts networking in the center. The more extensive your network, the better lead generation opportunities you have. Firstly, it directly affects the visibility of your content. Secondly, when you add someone to your network, you get access to the pages of that person.
The greater the list of your connections, the more profile pages you can view. In terms of lead generation and partnerships creation, you get more credibility and more space for reaching out to set an agreement.
Connecting to share information
Lastly, the last technique contemplates finding partners based solely on outreach. In this case, an affiliate specialist can use LinkedIn invitations to contact affiliates or partners directly. It is a restricted option as there are limitations on the number of invitations and words within messages a user can send. However, it can give you some good contacts if done as a targeted outreach.
Besides, many specialists use LinkedIn for B2B affiliate marketing research. When they see a person’s page, they apply special email finder tools and extract corporate emails from the LinkedIn search or a profile page.
LinkedIn offers excellent filters that help segment the audience, while a LinkedIn email finder will allow you to get emails and approach the person with a personalized email. Here is an example of such software: https://getprospect.com/linkedIn-email-finder-chrome-extension.
As a result, by applying this technique, an affiliate specialist can target marketing managers of the companies. Besides, the companies can use this method to find and contact bloggers and experts to offer affiliate programs.
Key Steps to Do LinkedIn Affiliate Marketing
Usually, digital marketers use all these techniques under one LinkedIn affiliate marketing strategy to maximize their efforts. The particular section will highlight important tips that can contribute to your operation.
Set your page right
Your page, whether you are a company representative or an expert looking for affiliate programs, lays the ground for your future growth. Thus, make sure you clearly state who you are and what you do. Besides, consider inserting a good photo, developing a content plan, and designing a visually pleasing profile.
It is essential to structure the information you provide and underline the line of your operation. For instance, create an appealing and concise summary so that people can get an idea of your persona in a few minutes. Importantly, it is a good idea to use a personal page, as it will give you more flexibility in terms of cooperation with people.
Elaborate on your expertise
Simultaneously, you should be an expert to do affiliate marketing on LinkedIn. It is one of the main principles for marketing with LinkedIn as people go there for advice and growth tips. Being an expert means that your content will be in demand.
Thus, be sure to show your expertise and develop a specific image. A good tactic is to fill all the skills and job experience sections. Also, it would help if you considered posting exciting facts, cases, stories, and insights to support the image you are projecting.
At the same time, you can participate in different events and collaborate with other experts to provide valuable content.
Apply social selling principles
Moreover, when applying LinkedIn affiliate marketing, it is crucial to remember about social selling. In particular, you should build relationships first before promoting something. The explanation is simple. LinkedIn is full of business people who know what marketing is.
Besides, they come to this digital place for the solutions and are likely to proceed with the link only if they trust you. Therefore, consider providing value to your prospects first and considering long-term relations unless you have an aggressive outreach approach.
Post online and start discussions to be visible
Another technique that can contribute to expertise, visibility, and the image is starting the discussion. In this regard, you, as the affiliate marketing expert, have many options:
- You can use your posts to share exciting information.
- You have your feed where you can comment on other people’s posts and give helpful advice.
- Use different groups as the places for many experts to discuss their issues.
You can use your page, feed, and various groups to start discussions, exert your expertise and share solutions for more excellent affiliate marketing on LinkedIn.
That way, you will be visible and able to attract other users, resulting in collaborations and adding to the networking. Moreover, providing a solution in the posts is an ideal occasion to share a link for the target audience to proceed with it.
Approach the potential collaborators in various ways
Lastly, you have different ways to approach the customers. The most common is to send invitations and ask for collaboration. However, you can also use sponsored posts to promote your publications and interest the target audience. Besides, LinkedIn offers an InMail function allowing sending your message to your prospects’ inbox. The only downturn is this function has certain limitations.
Importantly, you can use email outreach and contact people if they tend to ignore your messages on LinkedIn. For instance, this email finder tool can extract the corporate emails of users straight from LinkedIn with the help of the Chrome extension. That way, you can improve your chances of getting good affiliate programs. However, you should be cautious as some people may find the email from an unknown person annoying.
As a result, you have diverse options to contact people having LinkedIn at your disposal. Yet, remember to provide value and not to be pushy.
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