Learn about how affiliate marketing can drive sales and why the right mix of affiliate marketing and influencer marketing solutions is the key to success.
In case you missed it, Mavrck recently announced a new partnership with Rakuten Advertising – a leading affiliate marketing service provider. While affiliate marketing is different from influencer marketing, both strategies can help you get your product or service in front of interested audiences – more importantly, the ones who are ready to buy.
Affiliate marketing allows brands to identify and work with affiliates and publishers who are best at moving the bottom line for brands, where sales and conversions are most critical and the quality of content is less important. Marketers must be able to connect engagement with influencer content to business performance and affiliate marketing programs provide a straightforward way to connect engagement to revenue.
Let’s dig into affiliate marketing a bit more, and show how this new partnership with Mavrck and Rakuten Advertising provides some lucrative opportunities for brands to cash in on the value of an affiliate marketing program at scale.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a strategy where brands allow individuals outside their organization to apply to promote their products and services. These individuals, aka the affiliates, could be brand consumers, content creators, or influencers.
Affiliates have one job: refer the brand’s product or service to their followers on social media.
Typically, the brand provides the affiliate with a specialized link or code that helps the brand track social media interactions driven by the affiliate’s content. When a shopper purchases a product or service after clicking the affiliate’s trackable link, the affiliate earns a commission for their sales contribution.
Why Affiliate Marketing Works
Think of affiliate marketing as a sales team’s natural extension. This strategy helps brands effectively get their product or service in front of a relevant, interested audience.
Content creators and influencers are natural fits for a brand’s affiliate marketing program because of their high social media activity levels – but you don’t need to be a content creator to become a brand’s affiliate partner. Though some brands have benchmarks for affiliates to reach to stay in the program, success is up to the individual.
One of the best ways Mavrck see influencer and affiliate marketing work together is through brands managing a separate affiliate program and providing affiliate links to the influencers they partner with. By doing this, brands can use influencer marketing to spread awareness and bolster their affiliate programs in tandem.
What Is The Rakuten Advertising Partnership With Mavrck All About?
How will the leading influencer marketing solution for enterprise brands work with a leading affiliate marketing service provider?
This partnership provides an opportunity for Rakuten Advertising to expand its influencer marketing services, thus creating holistic program oversight that brings in optimization and measurement for its affiliate advertisers.
This partnership will harmoniously incorporate influencer marketing into Rakuten Advertising’s managed affiliate campaign strategies. Additionally, it now enables Rakuten Advertising to provide a fully integrated self-service influencer solution.
Enterprise consumer brands managing large-scale and targeted influencer campaigns with Rakuten Advertising will receive immediate benefits from more sophisticated influencer discovery and curation tools thanks to the power of Mavrck’s Influencer Index and advanced audience search capabilities.
Leveraging the Mavrck platform also enables streamlined onboarding, communication, and reporting. Dashboards will offer a complete view of affiliate and influencer campaigns, empowering brands with a holistic vision of their full-funnel affiliate marketing strategy.
Why The Right Affiliate Marketing And Influencer Marketing Solutions Are Critical For Success
Measurement, time savings, and access to the right tools can make all the difference.
Jeff Wender, chief revenue officer of Rakuten Advertising, shared his thoughts on the partnership:
“Influencers have become more essential than ever, as brands seek to drive consideration and purchase activity through their affiliate marketing strategies,” said Wender.
“Partnering with an industry leader like Mavrck expands and enhances our influencer management capabilities and empowers brands to achieve their goals from awareness to activation while delivering breakthrough performance objectives and results.”
– Jeff Wender, Rakuten Advertising Rhief Revenue Officer
By partnering with Mavrck, Rakuten Advertising can deliver a differentiated, robust suite of influencer marketing solutions that provides the integration, insight, and control brands need to be successful with influencer marketing.
More than 5,000 marketing professionals and more than 500 global consumer brands rely on Mavrck’s all-in-one influencer marketing platform to more effectively activate and manage relationships with content creators — and measure campaign performance to make optimizations in real-time.
Applying these powerful features to an affiliate marketing program provides an opportunity for brands to achieve profitable, scalable results.
Lyle Stevens, CEO and co-founder of Mavrck, also shared his perspective and excitement about the partnership and the opportunities ahead for brands and creators:
“Rakuten Advertising is a proven leader and innovator in the affiliate marketing industry, and we are excited to launch this partnership with them,” said Stevens. “Affiliate marketing is a leading monetization strategy for creators, and by partnering with Rakuten, we can improve our offering while expanding our reach, diversifying our insights, and advancing measurement and sales attribution.”
– Lyle Stevns, Mavrck Co-Founder and CEO
He added, “Together, we are strongly positioned to drive better business outcomes for both brands and creators with affiliate marketing.”
Stevens highlights a critical point of importance for the growing creator economy: affiliate marketing helps creators by adding a passive income stream to their book of business.
Some creators have reportedly earned thousands of dollars per month by participating in a variety of affiliate programs. While this may not be the case for every affiliate, it’s still a valuable addition to any content creator’s workflow.
If leading solution providers continue to join forces with complementary features that provide a better experience for brand and creator partnerships, creators will win, too.
To learn more about the Rakuten Advertising and Mavrck partnership read the official press release here.
Learn More About Affiliate Programs & Influencer Marketing:
