Affiliate Marketing Tips for Local Businesses: Maximizing Leads and Revenue

Here’s an overview of how local businesses can use affiliate marketing tips to grow their brand and their bottom line.

No company can stand the test of time without reliable pipelines delivering sales and leads. But small businesses face the added challenge of building these pipelines with limited resources, and in the face of larger, deeper-pocketed rivals.

With its cost-efficient models, high impact potential and its ability to drive consistent results over time, affiliate marketing is used by many types of small businesses to deliver leads and increase revenue as those businesses claim market share in their local area.

The Benefits of Local Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing uses a network of partners who use their own online presence to generate mentions, recommendations and other forms of visibility for your business offerings. In exchange for this visibility, those affiliates receive a commission on sales generated from those referrals.

The biggest benefits of local affiliate marketing include:

• Targeted reach to your local audience. When affiliate partners are carefully matched to your business and your audience, you can build exposure among your most relevant consumer base, concentrating your marketing resources on your best prospects.
• Credibility through established partners. New and unfamiliar local businesses can build a positive reputation by gaining mentions and recommendations from better-known partners.
• Support for your SEO efforts. With more mentions and backlinking, affiliate marketing can improve your local SEO ranking, improving your ability to gain referrals and sales through organic search traffic.
• Affiliate marketing cost is related to performance. If you’re paying high costs for affiliate marketing, it means you’re driving a lot of revenue through those partnerships.

Which Affiliate Marketing Niches Offer the Best Value?

The cost, impact and overall value of affiliate marketing can vary from one industry to the next. In general, the best affiliate marketing niches are ones that feature a lot of demand for those services combined with low local competition.

While it’s important to perform local research to understand the affiliate marketing landscape in your particular location and industry, some of the best niches for affiliate marketing often include:

• Health and wellness
• Home and garden
• Software (B2B and B2C)
• Consumer technology
• Personal finance
• Jewelry and luxury goods

In addition, high-affiliate marketing across any industry can offer value because of the high sales generation potential, along with the fast that these higher-priced products and services often feature less competition. High-affiliate marketing typically refers to products and services where the typical sale is at least $100—but these average sales can easily climb into the thousands or tens of thousands.

Which Tools Does Your Business Need?

When setting up affiliate marketing for small business brands, you’ll need a few tools in place to make sure you’re well-positioned to manage, track, and convert the referrals delivered by your affiliates.

One of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to set up affiliate marketing is through a partner or platform that can provide you with all of the tools your business needs. Some of the more popular platforms include ClickBank and ClickFunnels affiliate marketing, all of which offer a large affiliate network across every business niche.

These platforms also make it easy to get started: if you want to know how to use ClickFunnels for affiliate marketing, for example, the platform offers easy-to-follow guides, along with informative resources and a free-trial period, to make sure your business is set up for success.

You might also choose to work with a local partner offering a network of affiliates across your target market. If the partner offers affiliates in your niche, you can hand-pick these partners to maximize the relevance and potential ROI of your affiliate efforts.

Affiliate Marketing Tips Every Local Business Should Follow

No matter how you approach creating an affiliate marketing business plan, certain best practices should be followed across every industry and niche. We always recommend the following affiliate marketing tips:

• Choose your affiliate partners carefully. From the platform you use to the individual partners promoting your brand, make sure they’re a good fit for marketing your business to your target audience.
• Offer strong incentives to encourage your partners to promote your business. This is particularly important if your niche is competitive: you need to give affiliates a reason to promote your business over your rivals. If they can earn more from a commission through your business, you’ll get better and more consistent promotion from that partner.
• Create your own banners and other marketing content for your affiliates to share. By taking control of this creative element, you can achieve brand consistency across all of your affiliate partners and other marketing campaigns—and make sure you’re putting your best foot forward with potential customers.

Whether you need help identifying affiliate partners, creating marketing materials for those partners, or optimizing your spending to maximize affiliate marketing ROI, a digital marketing consultant can help your business lay a foundation for success.

Cox Media’s experts have access to extensive affiliate partner networks, along with in-house creative teams and advanced digital marketing tracking tools, to help you realize the full potential of affiliate marketing in your local community.

Contact us today to find out how we can help.