Not enough marketing in affiliate marketing

When you hear the words ‘affiliate marketing’, it sounds obvious of what it is. The word ‘affiliate’ implies a partnership and ‘marketing’ is that generic keyword. I wonder how many people that work in affiliate marketing would have an accurate description of what marketing is. Or at least what it should be. 

Let’s look at the definition of marketing on Wikipedia. It looks something like this.

I’m instantly feeling a disconnect from most of the affiliate managers after reading this. 

I was listening to the Revenue Vitals Podcast with Chris Walker, RV203 B2B Essential Mindset and it got me thinking about his lessons in this episode and how they are relevant in the affiliate marketing space. 

Affiliate managers and affiliate programs I think often have the wrong priorities and when I think of affiliate marketing today, here is my ranking of those priorities.

1. Sales

2. Marketing

I feel like in today’s world of affiliate marketing, most of the affiliate managers are pushing sales and not really the affiliate partnership or the marketing component.

Why do we have a sales first mentality?

CRM tools in affiliate marketing

I’m going to blame CRM tools that I think focus on the sales part and not the relationship or retention part of the business.

We know it is easy to track the conversion funnels, but when affiliate and B2B contract values are a bigger part of the equation, I find these CRM tools fall flat.

I'm not talking about CRM tools for operators to manage players, we know there are great companies doing that like Fast Track and Optimove. I'm talking about CRM tools beyond Salesforce and Hubspot for affiliate managers to stay on top of their affiliates and partner with them.

It isn't the affiliate manager's job to ensure the operation has the best retention possible but these are things affiliates are starting to want to know.

It is no wonder why our affiliate managers today struggle with getting deals done because I don’t think today’s CRM tools are really built for relationships. They can work for relationships but it takes work into making these tools work for you. 

Conversion and retention attribution in affiliate marketing

I think the sales or CRM component is really the conversion component of affiliate marketing and the retention part is really product. 

That is, the sales part is very easy to attribute. Well, most of the time.

The retention part is tough to attribute for many reasons and I think it is because it is the hidden part of the business that not enough people talk about. Thankfully we do have companies like Greco and WarriorLab that are bringing these topics to light but I think too many operators care about FTDs more than they do about player value.

You rarely see any dashboards on player value and that is something I know I’d like to work on for StatsDrone and I don’t think these things are easy to model either. 

You can check out the weekly newsletter called Gali's Guide which talks about VIP in iGaming.

Understanding the business objectives

Chris talks about how in an organization, you don’t always get to the real business objectives in a company. 

When it comes to running an affiliate department, sadly the top 2 metrics that seem to be rewarded the most are number of affiliate accounts signed up and number of FTDs generated. Absolutely nothing to do with retention.

I can’t tell you how many times an affiliate manager has tried to get me using or signing up to a 2nd affiliate account when I have no problems with the original one. Sometimes they’ve gone ahead and done that registration for me which has only pissed me off. 

Let me get back to our sales problem.

How do you get in top positions?

Most affiliate managers don’t know what it is like to be an affiliate and the ways in which affiliates are ‘sold’ these deals from affiliate managers. It looks something like this.

Now multiple this cold aggressive outreach by about 50 times per month and you’ll see this email probably does slightly more harm than any good that can come out of it.

Sales and marketing misalignment

In the B2B space, it almost seems like a common problem that the sales teams and marketing departments usually don’t work together. 

The way I think it should work is that great marketing will not only provide leads to the sales team, but provide quality leads that can close better. 

I think one of the reasons these 2 departments usually fight with each other is who takes the credit for the value brought to the company?

Sales teams are usually acknowledged to get commissions but what about marketing? What about the product people that contribute to the overall quality? What about the person detecting wide scale bonus abuse costing 6 figures a month? Or the VIP managers that can really determine if a business will sink or swim. 

Talk to your customers, know your product

In that episode I listened to, Chris says he was fortunate to work at a company early in his career that made him do customer calls. 

I think this issue in iGaming is twofold!

1. Not enough affiliate managers talk to their customers (affiliates)

2. Not enough iGaming operators talk to their customers (players)

In the past 5 years, it is rare for an affiliate manager to call to say let me learn more about you and your business. Actually the last time this happened to me was with WildTornado Partners.

Most are just hitting me up as high volume chats and emails. 

When I used to run B2C sites, I would sometimes tell affiliate managers the pages when I get more FTDs and see interesting player values that were NOT the homepage. This also included a newsletter which was the easiest way to generate more FTDs. 

Despite that, it would be rare for an affiliate manager to even get to the stage where I trusted to share this info because they were so busy trying to push me into giving up that #1 homepage toplist position.

When it comes to point 2, I really believe that most operators don’t understand today’s player. They don’t do any market research, they don’t ask questions and they don’t really talk to their customers. 

I think one reason why no company wants to spend this time understanding their player to see how they can learn and increase the player value, is that it is hard to measure the value of this activity.

The ones that do understand this activity, are maybe 2% of the industry that care about marketing, product, branding and have a BI and analytics team that will look at any data point to improve player values. 

Chris Walker finishes this episode by saying there’s never been a better time to be a B2B marketer. I say as well, there’s never been a better time to become an affiliate manager. 

His other tips for these marketing people are to always be learning and upgrade your skills when you can.

If you’re in the fortunate position to be able to choose the company you work for, try to find a forward thinking company that encourages you to do uncomfortable work where you learn.

So what can be done about the situation?

I think more programs need to hire affiliate managers that can build more relationships with affiliates. This is why I think companies like TAG Media are as successful as they are because they know how the job should be done and they deliver results. 

Revenue Leak

There are a lot of ways in which operations can leak revenue. Greco is the perfect example of a company that addresses it. 

Increasing player value

In a future article, I’m going to talk about more products and services that exist in the iGaming space that more companies should be aware of. These are products and services that aim to increase player value and in some cases, stop revenue leak as well. 

Increasing revenue

Profitable operations are simply better for everyone. Companies like FTDx bridge the gap for operators to find new revenue.

There are definitely more opportunities for companies to partner together beyond the traditional affiliate to operator relationship.

Why should affiliates care?

Because if you’re sending any players to any brand, you’ll want to know that the operator has done everything to optimize their business so they can continue paying your revenue share commission. Not only will you not have to worry about losing that recurring revenue, but imagine if they were to not only keep that revenue share going for you but to increase the value. Think about what that would do for you.