For many businesses, affiliate marketing is still something that’s completely new. After all, the era of digital advertising has encouraged many businesses to stick with what has worked for them in the past, and it’s no surprise—from social media marketing to SEO, the diversity between approaches is astonishing. It’s for this reason that affiliate marketing has often been an afterthought, used mainly by smaller merchants looking to get a leg up when it comes to the discoverability of their products or services.

However, over the past few years affiliate marketing has truly grown—long gone are the days of sub-standard affiliates putting out half-baked content to make a quick buck. Instead, modern affiliate networks and publishers are increasingly professional and experienced, offering businesses a number of unique advantages. Today’s article is going to look at just three of the biggest benefits—if you still haven’t taken the plunge into one of the most cost-effective and efficient digital marketing strategies, you’ll want to.

Performance-Based Payments

Earlier, we used the word “cost-effective,” and that’s perhaps the biggest reason why merchants turn to the tactic at all. In essence, affiliate marketing works as follows—a business partners up with either individual affiliates or established networks who are responsible for creating and publishing content that promotes specified products or services. Each piece of content contains links to purchase the product, with the affiliate in question earning a small commission with each successful conversion. Other than that, there is no regular payment made by the business to their affiliates—they only pay for what works. This means that any company can specify the metrics most important to their campaign—whether that be sales, leads or even simply clicks—and track progress based solely on these key metrics. If affiliates start to fall short of expectations, it’s easy to switch to another network. The lack of an up-front cost means everyone from small businesses to established multinationals alike can take advantage of the marketing tactic without worrying about the costs associated with a failed campaign.

Easier Entry to New Markets

For smaller businesses, nothing is more difficult than establishing themselves as relevant players in their respective industries or markets. With established brands taking an increasingly large slice of the pie, it’s important that smaller companies are able to stand out from the crowd and attract their fair share of attention—this is where affiliate marketing shines, for two key reasons. First, appropriate affiliates exist in every industry and in every region of the world, giving businesses across sectors the luxury of turning to the promotional tactic.

Second, trusted affiliates work to the interests of their core readers and demographics. Rather than trying to appeal to all audiences simultaneously in order to try and create one-off conversions, the most successful affiliates are those that understand their niche and create content that appeals to their established audiences. This will enable your business to identify just a few high-performing affiliates that are highly respected and partner up with them to create a much stronger reciprocal relationship. In turn, consumer trust in your partnered affiliate will quickly become trust in your brand, turning a quick conversion into lifelong loyalty.

Indirect SEO Assistance

In a world where the entirety of human knowledge can be accessed via a quick Google search, it will come as no surprise that SEO—or search engine optimisation—goes a long way towards helping your business generate more awareness, leads, and sales. Thankfully, in addition to being an effective marketing strategy in its own right, affiliate marketing can tie into your existing SEO strategy. As more and more people discover your business, they’ll begin to search for it more often and recommend it to others more readily, causing a spike in both your rates of direct and organic traffic. With more searches and more clicks feeding search engine algorithms, your website will be considered increasingly reliable, resulting in substantial SERP improvements.

Affiliate marketing once had a reputation as being inferior to other forms of digital marketing. When the practice sparked a proliferation of inefficient content creators that wrote to generate quick, unsustainable sales, this reputation was perhaps deserved. Today, however, it couldn’t be further from the truth! In fact, affiliate marketing has rapidly established itself as a premier avenue for businesses of all sizes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing endeavours. As we move towards 2020, there is no reason for your business to continue overlooking the low-risk, high-reward strategy.