A Brand’s Guide to Influencer Affiliate Marketing

July 22, 2024

2 10 minutes read

Over the past 15 years, the explosion of social media has introduced a critical marketing tool for brands:

Influencer affiliates

With their extensive and engaged audiences, influencers offer a unique opportunity to amplify your brand’s reach and drive high-quality leads, clicks, and sales. This article explores the benefits of influencer affiliate marketing and provides actionable tips for integrating influencers into your affiliate program.

Ready to boost your brand with influencer affiliates? Start your 14-day free trial today and experience the power of Tapfiliate! 👉 Sign up here

Introduction to Influencer Affiliate Marketing

Influencer affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages individual influencers (sometimes called affiliates or affiliate marketers) on any social network to promote your brand in exchange for a commission on sales, lead signups, or clicks.

Tapfiliate can help with tracking those sales, and with a free 14-day trial, you can see if it would be a good fit for your business.

👉 Learn more about commission rates for influencers and affiliates.

Benefits of Influencer Affiliate Marketing

infographic on why you should use influencer affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing overlap in many ways. Both strategies involve using brand advocates to promote your products and services. Given these similarities, influencers can seamlessly fit into your affiliate marketing program and start promoting your brand.

Here are some top reasons you should include influencers in your affiliate marketing program.

Unlock a New Marketing Channel

Influencers have transformed their social media presence into powerful marketing engines. With built-in followings, influencers can place your brand directly in front of targeted audiences on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more.

Consumers trust influencers. So much so that eight out of every ten people purchase something after seeing a recommendation from an influencer. This kind of social proof can skyrocket your sales.

Create Engaging Content

In a world where traditional ads often fall flat, influencers bring your products to life with authentic content like how-to guides, product reviews, and personal stories. This type of content resonates more deeply with audiences.

Forge Genuine Connections

Influencers use social media to share their lives, creating a sense of friendship and trust with their followers. By partnering with influencers, you tap into these genuine connections, making your brand feel more like a friend than a business.

Want to start an influencer affiliate program? Try all the features: 👉 get a 14-day free trial here

Things to Consider When Partnering With Influencer Affiliates

Automate Influencer Sales Tracking

Tracking the results of your influencer marketing campaigns can be automated to save time and resources.
Tools like Tapfiliate make tracking influencer and content creator sales and campaigns easy without manual effort. With an integrated dashboard, you can access a wealth of sales, commissions, and campaign performance data, helping you examine individual affiliate campaigns or view your program’s overall performance.

Compensation Models for Influencer Affiliates

While traditional affiliate marketing uses a pay-for-performance model, influencer affiliates may require different payment structures. Common models include:

No upfront fee, and pay-for-results only, making it a low-risk investment.
A small fee combined with your usual commission rate.
A higher fee with a lower commission rate.

The flexibility to choose or create hybrid models allows you to tailor compensation to the influencer’s reach and engagement.

Discover more about how you can track your influencer sales

Affiliates and influencers use content to share thoughts, trends, and advice within specific niches. For instance:

Travel affiliates might have a blog detailing trip itineraries, while travel influencers post Instagram photos from their adventures.
Fitness affiliates might run a website with workout guides, while fitness influencers share YouTube workout videos.

Typically, influencers use social media as their primary channel, whereas affiliates may use social media as an extension of their blogs or websites.

Optimizing Ad Types for Your Brand

Match your brand and ad types to the most effective social media platforms:

E-commerce brands thrive on visually appealing images. Collaborate with Instagram influencers who can showcase your products beautifully.

SaaS brands are best demonstrated through video content. Partner with YouTubers to create tutorials that highlight your software’s features and benefits.

If you want to start an influencer affiliate program, Tapfiliate can help you – we have a free 14-day trial, so you can see if er are the right solution for your business.

Read more about choosing the best social media platform for affiliate marketing here.

Steps to Engage Influencers

This growing industry offers incredible opportunities for affiliate marketing, making now the perfect time to find influencer affiliate partners. Here’s how to get started:

Seek Out Influencers That Fit Your Niche

Influencers range from social media personalities to industry experts, thought leaders, and niche bloggers. Whether you’re targeting celebrity influencers with millions of followers or micro-influencers with niche audiences, find those who align with your brand and target audience.

Unless you plan to partner with celebrity-level influencers, finding influencers that fit your brand and share the same target audience is best.

One way to ensure this is by pitching your affiliate program to any influencer who has ever submitted user-generated content. If they already mention you on social media, they may want to become affiliates and earn commissions for what they share.

Fern & Petal promotes its products by partnering with wellness influencers in Vancouver. By combining local influencers with large followings and community connections, it effectively reaches its target audience.

Begin your search by exploring hashtags related to your brand’s niche. For instance, #travelgram or #wanderlust for travel-related content. Here are some tips:

Industry-centric hashtags: Start with broad hashtags like #tech, #beauty, #fashion.
Product hashtags: Use hashtags specific to your products, like #eyeshadow for makeup brands.
Brand hashtags: Search for your brand’s hashtags, like #nikon or #nikon750.
Competitor hashtags: Look at hashtags your competitors use.
Location-based hashtags: Find influencers popular in specific regions to target local markets.

Tools like Hashtagify can help identify the most popular hashtags for your niche.

What to Look for When Searching for Influencers

While social media algorithms highlight popular content, popularity alone doesn’t guarantee a good fit. Look for:

Platforms they actively use.
Quality of their content.
Number of followers.
Engagement levels.

Make Sure There Is a ‘Fit’ With Your Brand

Lifestyle influencer and blogger @maduhlyn_ stresses the importance of aligning brand messaging with creator content for genuine partnerships. Her advice:

“Look for creators whose messaging aligns with your own to ensure a natural fit. I turn down brands that just want affiliates to shill products because it’s not an effective strategy.”

One way to ensure this is by pitching your affiliate program to any influencer who has ever submitted user-generated content. If they are already mentioning social media, they may want to become affiliates and begin earning commissions for what they share.

You can automate commission payments with Trolley.

This growing industry provides an excellent opportunity for affiliate marketing, so there’s no better time to start finding influencer affiliate partners. Here’s how you can get started.

Unlock the Power of Micro-Influencers

While most large-scale influencers are not likely to participate in a pay-for-performance model, micro-influencers are more open to this type of compensation, making them ideal affiliates for your program.

Micro-influencers are social media influencers on a smaller scale, with around 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They tend to be more niche-focused, with expertise in cooking, traveling, gaming, and makeup.

A bonus of micro-influencers is the level of engagement they generate. Impact found that an increase in followers results in a decrease in engagement, and influencers with 1,000 followers had engagement as high as 85%.

How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Product Using Affiliate Marketing

Once you have completed your research and have a target list of influencers and micro-influencers, the next step is to ask them to promote your product as affiliates.

How do you do that?

By sending them a slightly different version of your company brand pitch email. Your email should be personalized to the influencer and include:

A good subject line
A compliment about one of their social media posts or their social media in general and why you like it – be specific
An introduction to your company – they might not be familiar with your brand
How you would like to work with them and an explanation of affiliate marketing
What to do if they are interested in working with you
A call to action – include a link to your affiliate marketing

Learn more about how to optimize your affiliate recruitment using Tapfiliate.

Strategies for Adding Influencers to Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Screenshot of a youtube review by David Manning — *Image source: David Manning*

Provide a Comprehensive Brief

From the beginning, you and your influencer should clearly understand your expectations so that nobody is disappointed. You can provide influencers with a full brief with your expectations and guidelines.

Influencer marketing expert and CREAM Founder Lauren Brown recommends including the following in your brief

Campaign overviews
Deliverables
Set deadlines
Product information
Key promotional messages
Visual references
Branding do’s

This way, you are both aligned, and there is clarity about what your brand is looking for. This decreases the chance of reshoots, which are a waste of time for both parties.

Work Closely to Create Unique Content

One of the best parts about partnering with influencers for affiliate marketing is the opportunity for unique content to connect authentically with audiences. Work together on the creative process to provide worthwhile material to their audience and better promotions for your brand.

Lauren from CREAM says:

The most successful partnerships adopt a collaborative approach between the influencer and brand. The best way to work is to brief an influencer then hand over creative control to them, as they know what will perform best for their audience.

Provide Influencers With Marketing Materials

Start by providing influencers with all the essentials they need to promote you. The more materials you equip influencers with, the more opportunities there are to create something unique and aligned with your brand.

You can help influencers be successful by providing:

A branding kit
Color scheme
Your brand’s ad copy
Product descriptions
Pricing lists
Press mentions or awards

Hashtags

One critical marketing material to provide influencers is your branded hashtag. You’ll want to ensure that your hashtag is consistent across all channels and that your messaging is apparent regardless of who promotes it.

For example, Frank Body promoted its brand through hashtags, influencers, and user-generated content. The brand actively encouraged its fans to use the hashtags #letsbefrank and #thefrankeffect on Instagram.

Their customers have uploaded over 100,000 images happily covered in the brand’s signature coffee scrub.

Use Coupon Codes for Affiliate Influencer Promotions

Generally, affiliates will use affiliate links in their blog posts that will take customers to your site.

Because most social media posts aren’t designed to share links, one way to make this work with influencers is by creating content accompanied by coupon codes or links in bios.

For example, a YouTube video could focus on how you use a product with a demo. Then, the video caption would have a link to that product. You can learn more about using YouTube to promote your brand here.

An Instagram affiliate post could show your brand, with a caption and a coupon code as a way to track referrals from that promotion. Make sure the coupon code is short, simple & easy to remember.
With Tapfiliate, coupon codes are quick and easy to set up, so you can quickly start tracking coupon sales from influencers.

Consider Giving Free Samples and Product Previews

Consider giving your affiliate previews of new products, services, or launches if possible.

Influencers can provide “insider” details about the launch, giving their audiences a sneak peek. Giving your influencers a “first look” is a great way to generate excitement and create FOMO so customers are ready and waiting when your new products go live.

The sneak peek tactic is especially useful during the holiday season for content like wish lists or holiday guides. Your affiliate influencers can give a sneak peek into holiday specials or must-have buys.

Plan Ahead

Planning is essential for any marketing campaign. This is especially true for influencer marketing, as you’ll want to ensure that influencers have enough time to create valuable content.Lauren from CREAM says:

Lauren from CREAM says:

Influencers often work on multiple campaigns at once, so the longer they have to create the content, the better. Additionally, a long lead time allows the influencer enough time to get the best result possible and gives contingency for any delays with shipping or reshoots. Allow influencers to trial products ahead of the collaboration to familiarize themselves with the brand, enhance their product knowledge, and see whether they like your product.

Find more tips about influencer marketing management on @creamcreators Instagram page.

Get Started

With likes, shares, and influencers continuing to multiply, affiliate marketing programs have the opportunity for broader exposure, more leads, and potentially higher conversion rates and sales.

And with influencers as part of your affiliate marketing strategy, you are positioning your brand to gain more exposure and your site to be clicked on by a new, engaged audience.

Ready to boost your brand with influencer affiliates? Start your 14-day free trial today and experience the power of Tapfiliate! 👉 Sign Up Here

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A Brand’s Guide to Influencer Affiliate Marketing

Introduction to Influencer Affiliate Marketing