This article continues our education series on affiliate social media marketing. Check out our guides on generating insurance and solar affiliate leads on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and less-known platforms.
With Facebook alone having over 3 billion active users per month, using the power of social media influencers to generate leads, whether as an advertiser or affiliate, is a strategy you cannot ignore. Each of these users can be considered a potential client of one or another company, and it should be your business that catches them.
Source: Statista
But that’s only possible if you understand the intricacies of influencer affiliate marketing: how to partner with social media influencers, get traffic to your affiliate links, and convert this traffic into profits.
Read on to learn everything you should know about influencer affiliate marketing on social media.
Affiliate Influencer Marketing Basics
Influencer affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where brands pay influencers – celebrities, niche experts, or simply users with a large following – to promote their products or services to their subscribers.
Size-wise, there are several types of affiliate marketing influencers:
- Nanofluencers – up to 10,000 subscribers
- Microinfluencers – 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers
- Macroinfluencers – 100,000 to 1 million subscribers
- Megainfluencers – over 1 million subscribers
It’s worth noting that smaller influencers can promote your products and services quite effectively if they are experts in their niche and have loyal followers who are interested in the advertised product. Moreover, in niches like solar and insurance, cooperation with mega-influencers may not be as effective as cooperating with those who know what they are talking about.
Are Influencer Affiliate Programs Effective?
First things first: unless you are an experienced affiliate who wants to partner with advertisers directly, you have to enroll in an affiliate marketing program to find a fitting product to promote with your solar and insurance leads.
When searching for an affiliate marketing program, consider the social media it caters to (some programs may not accept social media traffic). The best traffic sources for affiliate marketing are Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with 69% of consumers trusting affiliate influencers rather than information about a product or service received directly from a brand.
Source: eMarketer
How To Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Step 1 – Define the Goal of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Even though the end goal of increasing affiliate marketing traffic is sales, some campaigns may only be geared toward increasing your brand awareness. And these campaigns should be executed in a different way.
Long story short, define your goals in the first place so you know what you want to pay your partner influencers for: sales, clicks, impressions, or else.
Step 2 – Research Your Target Audience
Research your affiliate leads through and through before taking action: who they are, where they typically come from, how they interact along their journey, and what triggers and hinders conversions.
For example, Millennials (50%) and Generation Z (44%) are the most likely to purchase a life insurance policy. So, if your company specializes in this type of insurance service, pay attention to the age of the influencer and their subscribers.
Once the portrait of your ideal potential is compiled, you can move on to finding a suitable influencer.
Step 3 – Choose an Influencer to Generate Traffic for Affiliate Marketing
The best way to get traffic for affiliate marketing is to entrust this task to the best influencers.
Here’s how you can evaluate potential candidates:
| Content Relevance | Examine what each influencer publishes on their page. The content posted should not only be business-specific but also resonate with your brand’s values and mission. |
| Type of Publications | If a potential partner prefers to generate paid traffic for affiliate marketing – this can be a kind of red flag. Trust in an Influencer who publishes only paid posts may decrease. Therefore, give preference to bloggers who generate free traffic for affiliate marketing. |
| Audience Reach | Estimate the number of subscribers of each potential affiliate. Do not chase numbers blindly, however – focus on quality. |
| Past Performance | Research the influencer’s performance history: how many leads they were able to generate for similar companies. This may predict the performance of your campaign. |
Step 4 – Negotiate the Deal
How you structure your communication with affiliate influencers will determine whether they will agree to partner with you. For a successful negotiation, go in from afar. Subscribe to their page, comment, and like their posts.
Then, suggest cooperating. However, there is a trick here, too. Never send your affiliate offers to all candidates as a mass mailing. Only personalized letters or direct messages will bring the desired result.
Step 5 – Work on Generating Affiliate Traffic Together With Influencer
Be directly involved in the creation of promotional content. You can unobtrusively recommend to the influencer what you would like to see in the next publication. You can also emphasize the preferred format or style of posts.
However, don’t micromanage or try to manage the entire campaign. Learn to trust the person you’ve decided to partner with with your brand.
Step 6 – Disclose Your Partnership
Affiliate marketing on social media is governed by specific regulations. They vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but have a common disclosure requirement.
- In videos, the disclosure must be provided in written and verbal form
- In posts, the disclosure must be provided via an appropriate hashtag – for example, #ad or #sponsored
- All distinguishing marks of sponsored content must be clearly visible to users
Step 7 – Track Campaign Performance
Make a list of metrics that you will track as you conduct your influencer marketing strategy. You need to understand whether affiliate marketing social media is effective or not.
You can measure the number of reactions and comments on the advertising post, the number of clicks on the affiliate link, the number of successful transactions, etc. Luckily, there are many free and paid tools that can facilitate a marketer’s efforts.
Buy and Sell Your Leads at the Best Price at Profitise
Whether you’re an advertiser searching for high-intent insurance or solar leads or an affiliate willing to sell leads at a competitive price, Profitise is where you can grow your bottom line exponentially while keeping customer satisfaction rates high.
Profitise unites thousands of reputable insurance and sales affiliates and advertisers so everyone can get what they came for: purchase-prone leads or due revenues for their lead generation efforts. As a publisher, you also get ready-to-use lead generation forms that you can put on your website in seconds.
Register as an affiliate or an advertiser to buy or sell qualified insurance or solar leads.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are social media free traffic sources for affiliate marketing?
Yes, but not when it comes to promotion through influencers. All influencers charge a fee for their work, with the amount depending primarily on the number of subscribers.
How to get traffic to my affiliate link?
First, create high-quality, engaging content where you can put your affiliate link. Next, promote this content to your audience while emphasizing the value of the advertiser’s product.
How to get traffic for affiliate marketing in the solar and insurance niche?
Influencer affiliate marketing is one of the many ways to acquire solar and insurance traffic. The other ways include SEO, paid advertising, referral marketing, etc.
