Technology keeps evolving with time, and it is introducing some valuable advancements that automate several processes and reduce human error. From the last couple of years, words like big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud technology, etc., have become the talk of the town as they enable businesses to make smart moves based on the data collected. Along with the technology marketing landscape also has been changing from its roots.
Earlier, entrepreneurs had limited options to promote their businesses. But now, you can see marketers harnessing the power of the internet and implementing powerful techniques such as email marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, etc., to generate sales opportunities and increase brand awareness. Earlier, word of mouth was a powerful marketing technique to get the revenue going. As technological advancements, affiliate marketing became an important aspect of revenue generation.
Today, Artificial Intelligence is being used effectively for various marketing strategies. Because AI has the capacity to predict consumer behavior in real-time. Lots of data is generated in a day, and sorting those data to make smart moves can be a quite laborious activity, but AI and its algorithm sort data quickly and reduce the chances of error. In the end, this will allow marketers to craft an accurate marketing campaign for their audience.
Experts have projected on affiliate marketing that the use of AI and ML will soon cross $40 billion by 2022. Brands that are leveraging AI in their marketing campaign have already observed a significant rise in sales and revenue. In order to automate offer promotion, marketers and affiliates are now using AI technologies. Before jumping to how AI changes affiliate marketing, let’s go through the meaning of affiliate marketing.
What does Affiliate Marketing Mean?
Affiliate marketing is also called performance-based marketing, in which you recommend other people’s products or services to buyers, and you will get a piece of profit from each sale that occurred.
Affiliate marketing is getting a popular form of marketing and was first launched in 1996 by Amazon. “ Associate Program” was the first affiliate program that is now known as “Amazon Associates.”
Read: 10 Tips to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing
Why Use AI in Marketing?
AI has grown in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years. The key usage of AI is to help marketers to deliver an excellent customer experience. It understands customer’s preferences and delivers customized experiences.
Now let’s dig in detail and explore why marketers use AI in their marketing campaigns.
1. AI helps marketers to understand the demographics and predict their behavior and buying decisions of your target market.
2. Delivers top-notch customer experience by delivering the content that the customer actually finds interesting and engaging
3. With the help of AI, marketers can automate several tasks; this will help you increase productivity and save you both time and bucks.
4. AI makes the decision-making process rational and helps you create better-performing content
5. Help you deliver a personalized user experience for your audience and increase sales.
6. It can also help you drive more traffic, acquire new customers, increase sales and entertain existing customers.
In simple words, AI is revolutionizing the marketer’s role. Today, if any marketer wants to build a robust marketing plan, they need to analyze tons of data, but AI fills the gap between data and results, eases the workload, and increases creativity.
Why Affiliate Marketing is Growing in Popularity?
In this internet world, no one can deny the fact that affiliate marketing has become one of the popular advertising forms in the last couple of years. Affiliate marketing is impressive because it gives optimal results for your products and services. Moreover, you have to consider plenty of steps while stepping into the new business, but advertising and promoting another company’s product consumes less risk and effort.
Read: Looking For An Additional Source Of Income In This Pandemic?
Why more and more brands harnessing the power of affiliate marketing these days because Some benefits are associated with this, such as
- Affiliate marketing is performance-based
- It increases your user base
- Affiliates can boost your reputation
- It’s cost-effective
- Affiliates can quickly scale your sales and drive traffic
From SEO to branding to paid advertisements, affiliates play a pivotal role and allow you to optimize your marketing campaign and reduce your operational cost. Today more and more brands are diving into this sector as the pandemic has impacted the way modern consumers engage with content online.
Affiliate marketing is growing so fast because more and more brands are coming online today, and they want to increase their sales, so they invite affiliates and take advantage of their skills and expertise.
Impact of AI on Affiliate Marketing
According to the research, US affiliate marketing spends approx $5B, and this amount continues to increase because more than 38% of marketers use this method to acquire new customers. With such tremendous growth in a few years, affiliate marketers come up with emerging technologies to power up their game. And one such way to do achieve this is by leveraging AI and Machine learning.
AI is being utilized for improving business operations in various ways rather than just robots we see in Hollywood movies. As far as AI and affiliate marketing, it offers plenty of benefits to marketers as well as affiliate networks. Here we have put a list of such ways through which AI is redefining affiliate marketing. Keep reading to explore more.
Speed of Innovation
Data plays a core part when it comes to curating a perfect marketing strategy. A typical marketing campaign might generate tons of data as customers click through various links. Now, after a certain period of time, this can amount to millions of data, and this is a challenging task for marketers to analyze and sort data for campaign success.
Here AI comes to the rescue; marketers can collect this messy data about consumers and almost sort and identify patterns of consumers. From consumer’s ages to preferences to their payment options, AI makes it easy for marketers to create a solid marketing campaign to reach the target audience. AI can also predict the human behavior that is most likely to end up in sales. Overall, AI and its algorithms allow marketing to match people to the products they want in a more quick and efficient manner.
The speed of innovation in this subject is phenomenal, with affiliate marketing solutions developed with the help of IBM Watson, for instance, helping online retailers display their ads across a range of digital publishing partners. These AI-enabled insights display the right content to the right consumer at the right time and ensure that consumers are shown with the right content they want to see, and affiliates make the most of their digital campaign.
Voice and Visual Search
Earlier, people had limited search options; either they searched using keywords, or they were finding products based on automated suggestions. But fast forward, there are lots of technological advancements taking place in this area. Emerging technologies making the overall search process smooth and comfortable, voice-activated, and image search are impacting the way we find products and content online.
One of the researches has shown that 50% of the Google search queries come from voice, and this number is increasing rapidly, so affiliates and marketers cannot overlook this trend and have to come up with the strategy that meets these customer’s needs. People also use images and screenshots to find information. Here you can consider how one of the popular eCommerce apps, Myntra, allows users to search products by uploading images.
In order to make the most out of the digital campaign, affiliate marketers should keep an eye on these trends because people are blindly following this trend, and they expect the same thing from brands too. Not only eCommerce but the restaurant industry is not behind; with the increasing trend of online ordering and delivery, entrepreneurs are inspired to make an app like uber eats with a voice search feature because research has shown that more than 75% of people searching through voice to find nearby restaurants and entertainment venues.
Some popular brands, such as Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza, have already integrated voice search features, which lets consumers enjoy voice food ordering with Alexa and Siri. In the same way, affiliates also need to make sure that their content is voice and visual optimized and delivers the best value to them.
Improve the Effectiveness of Ad Campaign
When it comes to enhancing the effectiveness of any ad campaign, data plays an important role. Any marketer has tons of data collected from different sources, links, and user feedback, but of course, it is difficult to keep a track record of this huge data. Here AI smartly sorts the data and helps marketers to make an effective ad campaign.
The way some AI tools go through different campaigns can be quite exciting for marketers trying to do split testing to know which of their campaigns works best and which not. Try to approach in a strategic manner so that you can accurately track your results. Affiliate marketers have some benefits as they can improve ad effectiveness, get a qualified audience, and deliver the right content at the right time.
Enhancing Mobile Experience
Living in this constantly connected world, you can not overlook the mobile experience. Smartphone devices currently generate the maximum traffic from various sources; hence it is difficult to monitor and track mobile user behavior. Here AI collects public data and accumulates it in such a manner that only interested users enjoy the content.
Mobile marketing is already challenging for many marketers, but it is the best option to reach out to the potential audience, boost brand awareness and brand engagement. And proper execution of it reduces unnecessary marketing spend. Brands have wrestled with the difficulty of monetizing mobile strategies through in-app purchases, push notifications, SMS messages, etc., without spoiling the user experience. Here AI immediately addresses the issue and shows the right amount of content to the right user at the right time.
In the end, personalization and relevance are the keys to ensuring that consumers will not get disappointed by any advertisement. AI helps affiliates decide when the consumer should be displayed ads, with what kind of order, and their preferred communication channel.
Improved Data Quality
Digital marketing techniques keep evolving, but the value of quality content remains the same. Even Google also prioritizes quality content in their SERP results. Still, some marketers overlook content quality to attract readers to the affiliate links. AI now is a great tool that helps writers and markets to produce quality and fresh content.
AI helps writers to find the best and relevant sources in the creation of dynamic content. AI also helps to craft eye-catchy subject lines and social media topics. There are endless free tools and techniques that content writers and affiliate marketers can use to create quality content that actually converts and engages users.
AI in the Affiliate Space
The race to adopt AI and ML into affiliate marketing has already begun as more and more brands want to reap benefits from it. Marketers are in a dilemma, but they hope that modern technology solutions will prove beneficial to the affiliate marketing industry by accessing more accurate data that reduce cost and increase the efficiency of an overall marketing campaign.
In the affiliate marketing landscape, AI brings endless benefits to marketers, brands, and affiliates. In short, it seems like everything we do today disrupts too soon. Already, we are noticing how AI and ML are helping eCommerce business owners to deliver personalized content to users. Here we have only seen the highlights of how AI affects affiliate marketing. If you are already active in the world of affiliate marketing, you should pay close attention to how this field is evolving everything.
In summary, it might seem like technology has made our lives easy, but for businesses, sometimes it has become difficult to keep pace with the ongoing changes and processes. Every new development is going to bring lots of changes and benefits, and it is imperative that affiliate marketers know how to keep their business afloat and what kind of changes they should make to meet these rising demands.
