Smart bosses know that employee appreciation programs with meaningful incentives are the best way to maintain a happy and productive workforce.  In affiliate marketing, it’s no secret that affiliates put more effort into promoting for managers and networks that show their appreciation through realistic incentives. Too often, affiliate rewards programs backfire because they were implemented with a “one size fits all” mentality. I’m here to tell you that size does matter. While offering the same incentives to all affiliates is certainly easy and convenient for the affiliate manager, some affiliates – specifically the top producers – might see the reward as an insult.  Offering a bonus to affiliates who double their sales in a given time frame sounds generous on the surface, but it will be next to impossible for your rock star sellers to achieve that level. As a result, they will pour their efforts into programs that offer more attainable goals.

Size Matters. We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule: 80% of your traffic is driven by 20% of your affiliates. The bottom line is that your top performers are essential to the success of your program, and you need to show your appreciation in a meaningful manner. When creating the perfect affiliate incentive program, ask yourself how your rewards program will impact your top-tier affiliates. Will they see it as a true incentive or a punishment?

Develop an LTIP. Consider a Long-term Incentive Plan (LTIP) for top money-makers who consistently maintain or exceed a pre-determined level of sales. Maybe that takes the form of an increasing commissions ladder where for every year an affiliate stays with you and maintains top-tier status, his or her commission automatically bumps up a rung.  You could also offer a milestone incentive program that rewards loyalty and pays out at the three- to-five year mark. The benefit of offering an LTIP is that you retain quality affiliates in exchange for, hopefully, some measure of loyalty.

Create a STIP. If an affiliate rewards program has an LTIP, it should also have a STIP. You guessed it: Short-Term Incentive Plan.  This could be something as simple as a limited-time bonus offer that encourages affiliates to bump their sales by a pre-set percentage by a certain date. Or, you could offer an increased commission on a particular product or category. This works well if you have extra inventory or a new product to promote.  Again, size matters. You should create one program for your middle- and bottom-tier partners and a separate program for your superstars.

In addition to providing a means to show your appreciation to your partners, incentive programs have the added bonus of encouraging affiliates whose sales linger in the middle-to-low range to step up their game.  Ideally, your goal is to gain more top-tier performers.  Once your mid-level affiliates realize that they can successfully convert on your products, they will likely keep up their increased performance level and recognize that size does matter.

Usually, we look to those with experience and a lot of hours on their belts for the advice that will get us on the right track. However, sometimes it seems that the people that have very little experience do actually know what they are talking about. What I am referring to is a bit of advice that was given by a brand new company, that buys and sells used smartphones, called Mobixa in an interview with The L.A. Marketing Examiner. Mobixa’s CEO, David Safai, explains that when it comes to marketing a business in today’s mobile world, aggression is most certainly not the key aspect, but instead patience and strategy will see results.

In the interview, Safai explains:

“Mobixa, LLC is a small company that began in mid 2012 from our parent company, IMC, which has been around for over 15 years. I got into the wireless industry in 1996 working from my parent’s basement buying and selling old cell phones to people in South America since many are on a waiting list to get one.”

After explaining just where his company came from, and how new to the world of big business Mobixa actually is, Safai continues on to explain how he was talked out of aggressive marketing tactics. Here is what he stated in the interview with the L.A. Marketing Examiner, as reported in their article:

“Originally I wanted to be aggressive with our marketing and play these Internet ads three times a week. However, our team advised us that we don’t want to overwhelm the consumer and eventually they’ll get to the point of hearing from them. The advice was the exact opposite of what I was expecting to hear, but I learned that if you just educate people, in time they’ll come to you.”

Now, although this company that buys and sells old smartphones is probably no big news to most readers, the advice that the CEO, David Safai received could be exponentially valuable. Mobixa is just one of many companies today that is starting to realize that by overwhelming consumers with advertising and shoving too much content in their faces, marketers are accomplishing just the opposite of what they had intended in the beginning. In the case of mobile specifically, the industry is still far too young for marketers to be bombarding mobile consumers with the amount of marketing content that is being thrown at them.

Mobile marketing should instead, according to the advice that Safai received, be approached with a patient mindset. Marketers should strategize and find the most effective way to market to mobile consumers without overwhelming them, and over time a response to these marketing efforts will be seen. To be aggressive in marketing has always been viewed as a good thing in one way or another, but according to Safai’s marketing team, the best way to see results is through patience, which may be a problem for those businesses that do not necessarily have the time to wait it out.

—–

Sponsored by Ad4Game
The Industry’s Largest Cost Per Download Company

Twitter may not be as popularly used as Facebook is, but it is still among the top networks in social media marketing. As one of the most used networks by users, Twitter has a lot of importance to the digital marketing community. Whenever marketers start a new campaign on a new social network, the ultimate goal is to drive sales, after everything else. With a time of enormous amounts of shopping quickly approaching, it is important for marketers to know whether their social media marketing efforts are going to lead consumers to the sales that they desire. Twitter recently conducted some research to find out just how their network has been and will in the future, impact consumer purchasing decisions.

Over the course of a few weeks, Twitter partnered with Compete, a market research and analytics company, to conduct a study of 2,600 US internet consumers that would help to determine the impact that Twitter marketing has on internet shopping. The study was based on those consumers who saw the Tweets from over 700 popular brands, while condensing the study to desktop activity and excluding mobile and tablet activity.

Here are the two major facts that came of the results of this survey, from Compete’s reporting:

• Twitter users who see Tweets from retailers are more likely to visit retail sites

Key takeaway: Twitter users are big online shoppers, but big brands aren’t the only retailers that benefit. Twitter brings people closer to a wide range of interests so niche retailers who engage the highly engaged audience on Twitter often see stronger results than mass retailers.

• Twitter users who see retailer Tweets are more likely to make online purchases

Key Takeaway: People who see a retailer’s Tweets are even more likely to make an online retail purchase than they are to visit retailer websites. This means Twitter users arrive on a retail website with a higher intent to buy.

The everyday internet user, who does not necessarily see a Tweet from the company beforehand, visit retail websites at a rate of 90%, while those internet users who do see the Tweets from retail businesses visit retailers at a 95% rate. Of the entire report, that fact may be the most important. The 5% difference between the rates of visiting clearly shows an impact from Tweets by companies. Also, these general internet users made purchases from retail sites at a rate of 27%, and Twitter users being impacted by brand Tweets made purchases at a rate of 33%.

The idea behind the survey was to prove that Twitter had an impact in online sales, and it has done just that. With a 5% difference in visitation rates and a 6% difference in purchase rates between general internet users and Twitter users, there is a clear and defined impact from Twitter on the decisions of internet shoppers. Twitter has made a great move putting out information like this, especially during the time of year where internet shopping really counts.

It appears that content marketing has been growing rapidly in popularity, especially in business to business marketing. It has become one of the more prominent forms of marketing amongst the many, and it has become very important to keep tabs on the state of content marketing on the web. A recent eMarketer article details the recent challenges that have begun appearing in the content marketing world, referring to data from a content curation platform called Curata. The company’s “B2B Marketing Trends 2012 Report” shows information that points to originality arising as the biggest challenge that content marketers are facing today, closely followed by time management.

To get a better sense of how popular content marketing has actually become, the information from Curata shows that 87% of all business to business marketers are now using content marketing as part of their marketing campaigns this year. In 2011, the percentage was at 82%. So, with an already high level of interest in content marketing, 5% is quite a significant increase. This year, content marketing was the highest of all tactics that were studied. Just behind it with 62% was search marketing, which seems to get more attention that content marketing does.

To avoid the challenges that come with content marketing, some marketers chose to have their marketing curated, according to the study.

But doing it well is another story. Among those using content marketing, 57% used content curation specifically as part of their strategy. And just 43% of those respondents said their content curation programs had been successful by the standards they had chosen to measure them. On the other hand, another 43% said they didn’t even attempt to measure their programs’ success.

For content marketers who take on the challenge, the biggest issue according to the study was creating original content in their marketing campaigns. A total of 69% of the respondents in the study said that originality was their largest issue in creating a successful content marketing campaign. After that, 65% of the respondents said that finding the time to create content for marketing was the largest issue they experienced. Another 43% of content marketers, who could not create original content, said that their biggest issue was finding high-quality content. Other issues that content marketers faced included difficulty measuring results (40%), allocating staff to market with content (34%), finding ways to share content (24%), organizing content (22%), securing senior level buy-ins (15%), and finding how content marketing fits into the marketing strategy (12%).

Clearly, content marketing has become very popular amongst marketers of all types, and it will continue to grow in popularity. Therefore, marketers need to seek solutions to creating original content, through research and creative thinking. Creating original content clearly is not easy, but it is necessary in order to see the results that all marketers want. It takes time, which is another popular issue, but when original content is created, it usually proves to create great results, therefore it is worthwhile.