Affiliate Marketing and Influencer Marketing are both effective strategies to help grow your business.

However, it is important to note their differences as not understanding how they function and how each strategy works can result in you missing out on opportunities to increase your reach and grow your brand.

Let’s dive into how both forms of marketing work;

Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate marketing is described as a performance-based marketing where a company pays the affiliate for each customer they bring in. It provides an opportunity for you to promote your services product on websites other than your own.

Here, companies pay the affiliate per referral and also earn a commission on each purchase made.

One of the advantages of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to waste time searching for affiliates that match the types of sites your target audience visits. There are several affiliate marketing service providers, like AffilBase that connect you with affiliates, agents, tools, and much more.

Some things require your attention to know if your affiliate marketing strategy is working well. They include; 

• Sales volume: Pay attention to the products you are promoting through your affiliates to see if your sales volume has increased.
• Site traffic: Check to see if more people are visiting your websites.
• Average order value: Take note of the products the leads and whether they buy the minimum or go above and beyond and buy multiple products.

Influencer Marketing 

This is a marketing technique that allows companies to collaborate with influencers to promote their products and services.

Mostly because of how social media has been used by everyone in the last years, influencer marketing has become one of the most powerful and quickest ways to get brand exposure in a short period.

The main idea behind an influencer marketing campaign is to facilitate brand exposure.

To know if your influencer marketing campaign is successful, you can measure your success by the number of new followers on social media, engagements on social media, email signups and website traffic.

When choosing influencers, you should observe to see whether they have a strong online presence, be able to communicate a strong brand affinity, build trust with their audience and have a substantial social media footprint. 

Despite the differences between these two online marketing strategies, they can contribute to a brand’s growth significantly. However, care should be taken when selecting both affiliates and influencers as they can ruin a brand if care is not taken.

It is also important to carry out research before choosing any marketing strategy as a particular strategy might not work for your brand.