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PR on Steroids

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

By Rob Key, Converseon

Affiliate marketing can be much more than a virtual sales force.

Affiliate marketing programs create and leverage a network of complementary Web sites -- targeting the same demographic -- to generate customer leads or sales on a commission basis. Companies from financial services to retail to healthcare are finding affiliate programs to be a highly effective customer acquisition channel. But is that enough?

Affiliate programs can do more than just act as a virtual sales force. Carefully planned and managed, they can be used to carry an editorial message to educate a target audience, generate visibility for a product or company, inform, persuade, and even help manage a company's reputation.

If this sounds like the province of public relations, it's for a good reason. Affiliate network technologies and participants can complement traditional public relations, because they offer a cost-effective channel to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands of visitors clustered around Web sites users have elected to visit. On the other hand, sites in affiliate networks often need new and compelling content -- and the majority of Weblog (blog) publishers are open to receiving relevant editorial, but not advertising. For both Web sites and blogs, offers presented contextually, with articles, drive higher sales conversion than do typical banner ads.

It stands to reason: A diet product combined with an advisory article on eating tips, authored by a nutritionist, with a text link to an offer is much more compelling than a typical banner with an unconvincing offer to "lose up to 30 pounds in 30 days." A cosmetics product site can grab attention by providing beauty tips from famous experts, as opposed to just banners and buttons. An office product company can provide ongoing advice to small businesses to improve their productivity.

In the online world, an informed consumer is a better customer, which gets back to the basics of marketing communications. Positioning your company as a solution -- and not just a package of products -- can help differentiate you in an otherwise crowded marketplace. It also can help substantially raise your conversion rates.

If PR and affiliate marketing fusion is such a win/win, why is it so rare?

All too often, public relations efforts focus on major media and overlook the opportunity to infuse editorial into an affiliate program with potentially thousands of sites that, in aggregate, can deliver greater reach and a larger audience. For their part, affiliate sites often focus on utilizing standard banners and buttons. Many merchants tend to treat the affiliate program like a stepchild to an online media program, and don’t take advantage of the opportunity to test new, creative approaches that transcend banners and buttons.

The practice of syndicating content to a wide range of community or niche publications is actually a widely accepted one in the offline public relations world. Syndicated services, like NAPS, distribute company-authored advisory or tips articles to thousands of offline community newspapers with great success. Fusing PR with an affiliate program is a powerful yet underleveraged online version of an established offline practice. Unlike top publishers with well-defined creative standards, most affiliate sites provide a wide-ranging opportunity to test and utilize "beyond the banner" creative approaches, like articles.

The opportunity doesn’t stop with editorial, though. Word-of-mouth -- or mouse -- remains a primary way for individuals online to learn about new offers. Many companies maintain a database of satisfied customers generated by an affiliate program. This group is a potentially powerful online sales force. By turning satisfied online customers into evangelists -- and by providing them with a tracking code and basic rules of conduct -- companies can create effiliates: an online legion of satisfied customers spreading the word virally to friends and family, and being compensated for it.

Users who've pre-elected to view specific content are much more valuable than anonymous users. They're potential allies around whom a company can build grassroots support for a corporate initiative, or buzz for a new product. For example, pharmaceutical firms could syndicate editorial vignettes to thousands of motherhood sites and earn long-term loyalty (not just a quick sale) by providing childcare education. Distribution companies could syndicate employment offers to recruit short-term labor for holiday rush periods (we'd wager that this is much more cost-effective than using headhunters). We call this the "editorial sale."

Envisage the editorial sale as a form of content syndication. It shouldn't be hard for corporate communications professionals to think beyond just sales ROI and into the realm of disseminating corporate information. Affiliate programs can be powerful in the persuasion business, because they target Web users who've elected to visit a site out of personal interest -- and sites with a broad reaching, more generous editorial filter. These visitors have made a conscious effort to go to a specific location on the Web. Why not present them with relevant information right at the point of maximum interest? In this regard, presenting editorial is little different than paid product placement on a Web page or an advertorial.

How to make your affiliate program work as a PR tool

Unfortunately, affiliate program agreements tend to be treated like software licenses: no-one reads them. There are too many programs and offers for the average site to wade through. However, some basic tactical controls combined with a strategic perspective can leverage new opportunities:

• Check out every potential affiliates' sites, manually approve each, and avoid the temptation to recruit too many.
• Create new compelling content every month or quarter. Think like a journalist, not like a corporate communications advertorial writer. Content is appreciated if it avoids propaganda-sounding verbiage. Utilize a well-known third person or industry expert for additional credibility.
• Learn which affiliates accept content like article or video, review their sites carefully, and make sensible suggestions to improve them.
• If you're an affiliate manager, tap into your company's PR team to see what corporate content is available. If there isn't a PR group, consider the type of content your target audience finds useful and hire a PR agency or third party experts to produce it.
• If you're a PR manager, engage your affiliate team to review those active affiliates you might approach from the PR perspective.
• Think about potential affiliates, such as blogs, in the broadest possible terms -- and from a PR perspective rather than a paid-media perspective.
• Enforce the agreement and eject affiliates -- and efilliates -- who break the rules.
• Communicate regularly with affiliates. Ask what content they’d like to add to their site, and what their audiences are looking for.
• Repackage your editorial, position papers and other corporate materials into a user-centric format like a vignette or a Webette, and use a chatty local newspaper tone instead of corporate-speak.
• Build hybrid offers where the affiliate payout scales along with the depth of interaction with a visitor.
• Understand your ROI -- in this case, Return on Information. You may already have metrics for the value of an educated stakeholder. If not, your affiliate marketing partner should be able to help you develop them.

In an era of proliferating affiliate programs, there is a clear need for new, creative approaches. Infusing your affiliate marketing program with some powerful PR techniques is one proven area for opportunity. It’s a clear enough truism that an educated consumer is often your best customer. Follow that wisdom with your affiliate program, and you’ll soon benefit from higher conversion rates and more valuable, loyal customers.

Rob Key founded Converseon in 2001 to help companies meet their business objectives in the digital environment. Prior to Converseon, Key was head of the Innovations Group at a division of Young & Rubicam, and was a member of the WPP.com board. Key's 20 years of experience span public relations, reputation management, search and affiliate marketing, and online media/advertising. He believes fully that today’s markets are conversations that require new ways of communicating that transcend traditional marketing labels, structures and strategies. Rob speaks at industry conferences and writes for industry publications to help evangelize his message of creative communications innovation. He can be reached at rkey@converseon.com.