Here’s the twist about B2B affiliate marketing: despite having a conversion rate 0.8% lower than B2C’s, it consistently brings better profit.
So what’s the catch?
Under a lens, it all boils down to B2B higher-value transactions, long-term relationships, and predictable sales cycles, which add complexity and reward. So it’s no surprise that B2B affiliate strategies aim for quality, not quantity, focusing on well-thought-out conversion funnels that yield fewer but more premium leads.
Keep reading to compare B2B with B2C affiliate marketing, access an all-encompassing B2B affiliate marketing setup guide, and explore leading B2B affiliate programs.
What Is B2B Affiliate Marketing?
Here’s a quick refresher for unfamiliar readers: B2B affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing where you promote business solutions in exchange for a commission.
Affiliate marketing for B2B targets:
- C-level executives
- Department heads
- Team leads
- Marketing managers
- Agencies serving businesses
Differences Between B2B & B2C Niches
| B2B | B2C | |
| Audience | Businesses | Individual customers |
| Sales cycle | Longer due to the involvement of several decision-makers | Usually short and impulsive |
| Content strategy | Funnels for building trust and long-term relations | Emotional content to drive fast action |
| Marketing avenues | B2B-focused social media like LinkedIn, webinars, blogs | Any social media, blogs |
| Tone and style | Professional and data-driven | Conversational and emotion-evoking |
B2B Affiliate Marketing Benefits
- Incentivizing publishers: B2B products are expensive and often follow a subscription model, resulting in recurring revenues.
- Precise targeting: B2B focuses on a specific audience, prompting the tone, visual style, unique selling points, channel selection, and brand positioning.
- Brand partnership: Selling B2B products bridges companies and opens possibilities for future collaborations.
How to Become a B2B Affiliate
1. Research the B2B Landscape
If you’re new to B2B affiliate marketing, you need time to get accustomed. Do it by watching entrepreneur videos, reading relevant articles, or, if possible, communicating with business executives. It immerses you in the B2B niche, revealing its common industries and how stakeholders approach decision-making, including their motivations and pain points.
2. Choose Your Niche
Once you’re initiated into B2B, it’s time to choose your niche.
Consider these three points:
- Your interests: By running an affiliate business in a niche that you genuinely understand, you establish yourself as an expert and inspire trust. It helps you engage your audience and drive it to action more effectively.
- Market competition: The least competitive B2B niches are easiest to monetize. However, keep your peripheral sight on the traffic volume – if it’s insufficient, you might have to tap into a more competitive niche.
- Profit opportunities: Research niche offers and determine the average income per lead.
3. Define Your Audience
Create your ideal customer profile (ICP) by analyzing your prospects’ age, location, income, pain points, and other relevant factors. Identify whether you are addressing business start-ups, large enterprises, or other relevant audiences, and tailor the message accordingly.
4. Select Marketing Channels
Here’s how four primary B2B marketing channels align with a specific audience and niche:
| Website & Blog | Ideal for niches where users require much information before making a purchase |
| YouTube | Best suited for software walkthroughs, product demonstrations, or testimonials |
| Social media | Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok are best for targeting aspiring specialists from fresh niches. If you aim for more conservative users, consider LinkedIn, which, unlike casual socials, is dominated by businesses. |
| Emails | Potent when paired with other channels. For example, you can raise awareness of your offering through a blog, collect email addresses, and strike already warmed-up users with resonating messages. |
5. Establish Authority
It’s time to spread your content across marketing channels. Create multiple content clusters and fill them with useful pages supported by reputable case studies. To establish authority on social media or YouTube, focus on high-quality content that follows trends.
6. Find and Verify for Affiliate Programs
Submit for affiliate programs or networks whose niches align with your content. Shortly after, managers contact you to examine the quality of your content, which should be satisfactory if you’ve followed the tips from step five.
7. Generate Leads
During onboarding, your partners provide you with a unique affiliate link and promotional assets, including banners and submission forms. Embed them into your promotional content to generate leads and earn commissions, typically on a monthly or weekly basis.
8. Optimize Your Content
Don’t overlook optimizing your channel even when affiliates are flowing. Track your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as impressions, clicks, or conversions, to identify and eliminate the blind spots of your campaign.
The most common marketing optimization practices are:
- SEO: Research and apply keywords, create a linking structure, provide useful content, produce meta tags, etc.
- CRO: Address friction points that prevent users from going down the funnel and test the results.
Read also: How to Make Affiliate Links Benefit Your SEO, not Hurt It
How to Become a B2B Advertiser
Now, let’s examine the B2B marketing process from the advertiser’s perspective to gain a comprehensive understanding of the niche.
1. Develop the Program
Begin by strategically planning which offers you want to sell and how.
Have solutions for a specific business segment? Arrange them into a package and drive sales through discounts, or scatter the offers across multiple programs – the choice is yours.
Choose a Commission Model
You want to assign one of the following commission models to each of your programs:
| Format | You pay when leads | Best if you |
| Pay-per-lead | Submit forms, create accounts, or complete other selected actions | Prefer lower-quality leads at lower prices |
| Pay-per-sale | Make a purchase | Prioritize high-intent leads and can afford higher payouts |
| Pay-per-call | Qualify based on predetermined parameters or a call length | Have prospects who are inclined to consult before purchasing |
| Recurring commission | Lead renews a subscription | Promote subscription-based products |
Select Affiliate Software
Dedicated affiliate software handles your lead management from top to bottom, streamlining tracking, nurturing, and attributing leads. All the operations occur within a dashboard that serves as both a data hub and a control panel for seamless lead routing.
For pay-per-call B2B affiliate programs, the software is rather a necessity than an option. It provides tracking numbers for accurate attributions, alongside these features:
- Call scoring and recording to assess and improve the effectiveness of call agents
- Interactive voice response (IVR) systems to power AI-driven conversations
- Advanced routing to connect high-intent leads with human agents
Just as importantly, consider link tracking software, which has an edge over dated UTM tags. Software gathers the geographical, device, and click data, prevents duplicate leads, and provides centralized management – all within a single system.
2. Create Promotional Content
Determine the content your target audience consumes to reveal effective marketing touchpoints. For instance, if you’re selling SMM automation software for Instagram, your prospects likely scroll through social media and business blogs – develop banners for those channels.
For universal marketing channels, email marketing remains a go-to choice for B2B. While producing emails is on your publishers, you can help them achieve higher conversions by developing templates for both initial and follow-up letters.
3. Recruit and Onboard Affiliates
A significant portion of B2B affiliates arrive organically, which makes an SEO-optimized landing page essential. It must present your promoted products, commission models, and payment tools, also outlining qualification criteria for publishers:
- Traffic volume
- Number of subscribers
- Content quality
- Geographical focus
- Ethical and legal standards
However, leaving affiliates only with a welcome speech and a pack of promotional materials may seem unprofessional and reduce engagement.
Instead, onboard beginners mindfully:
- Walk your publishers through your programs, tracking software, commission models, etc.
- Educate them on your product/service through guides, videos, and testimonials that clearly expose the essence of your offer.
- Provide email templates, post samples, banners, CTAs, and other relevant materials.
- Teach publishers to generate and use tracking links, submit leads, and understand attribution logic.
Create a comprehensive knowledge hub with tutorials, swipe files, payout information, and info tools for quicker publisher adaptation. Help them monitor clicks, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other key metrics to enable continuous improvement.
B2B Affiliate Marketing Examples
First, the spotlight falls on HubSpot, a digital company that offers a CRM system for analytics, customer connections, and more. Its affiliate programs pay up to 30% recurring commissions for 12 months, alongside offering custom rewards for publishers who bring in 100+ monthly sign-ups.
Next is Shopify, the platform that powers businesses by launching their websites, managing products, handling payments, etc. Shopify supports over 2.49 million merchants, a significant portion of which comes from affiliate programs that pay flat commissions ranging from $10 to $500 per referral.
Finally, there’s Kinsta, which enables robust servers, software updates, and security management for WordPress websites. By selling Kinsta’s packages, publishers receive one-time commissions of $50 to $500, plus 10% recurring monthly commissions.
Buy & Sell Insurance & Solar Leads with Profitise
The Profitise affiliate network might become your best place to monetize insurance and solar leads or – if you’re an advertiser – purchase high-intent leads for your business.
Here’s what Profitise offers:
- Selling or buying insurance and solar leads at the best price
- Connecting to the biggest pool of insurance and solar advertisers and affiliates
- Customizable lead generation forms
- Around-the-clock support from an affiliate manager
Sign up as an affiliate or advertiser to start selling or buying leads with Profitise. For questions, contact us at info@profitise.com or call 888-400-4868.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does affiliate marketing work for B2B?
Yes, but slightly differently than for B2C. While the latter focuses on emotion-driven leads, the B2B model caters to executives who are mindful of every cent they spend and are driven by business scaling.
What are the top B2B affiliate marketing platforms?
If you want to enhance your affiliate B2B marketing with high-end tools for efficient lead tracking and distribution, consider using PartnerStack, Phonexa, ShareASale, or RakutenAdvertising.
What does a B2B affiliate marketing agency do?
Affiliate marketing B2B agencies are specialized organizations that assist both publishers and advertisers in the B2B niche. They can help you create better promotional content, adjust conversion funnels, find more relevant partners, or even generate leads.
