A proactive affiliate marketing program requires a multi-pronged approach. To make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts, you need to employ numerous different channels to aggregate audience engagement and conversions. While you might think about creating a social media strategy when first planning, you’re overlooking one of the best options available to you: high-quality video.
Affiliate video marketing is a surefire way to bring attention to your brand, along with increasing the overall effectiveness of your company’s affiliate marketing strategy. Whether hosted on social media, YouTube, or an affiliate company’s website, promotional videos can bring your company the attention it deserves — but what exactly is affiliate video marketing and how do you implement it as a marketer?
Affiliate Video Marketing
In a time where attention spans are shortening, marketers are having a hard time reaching potential customers. Rather than reading through a wall of written marketing content, people want quick snippets of information that are easy to consume and digest. Here is where the strength of video marketing takes the limelight.
Affiliate marketing strategists have started using video for the amazing qualities it provides: Videos can promote and market products and services directly to customers; they can increase brand engagement across various social media channels, often helping you reach new audiences; and they can educate your customers, and potential consumers, about the benefits of your products and services.
At its simplest, the video format is an easy way to capture a person’s attention. By combining audio, visual, and narrative elements, you can draw in a viewer and get them interested in what you and your brand have to say. For affiliate marketing strategists, this is the perfect avenue to increase both engagement and conversions.
Why Affiliate Video Marketing Matters
Videos of your products and services are more likely to resonate with your audience. More than half of consumers enjoy watching video content more than watching television and 84% of consumers said that videos have convinced them to buy a certain product.
The video marketing space has only grown in recent years and, as an affiliate marketer, it would be short-sighted to discount its inherent values. Online video access has essentially transformed the way businesses and consumers interact with one another, allowing for representative parties — affiliates — to support businesses by connecting audiences with consumer products and services. Not every interaction will lead to a sales conversion, but affiliate video marketing can increase engagement, making it easier for you to expand brand awareness.
The options available to marketers looking to expand their affiliate video services are nearly endless, too, with the internet, video-hosting platforms, and influencers making it easier than ever to reach your company’s niche audience.
Types of Video Marketing and Platforms
Platforms for affiliate video marketing
- YouTube
The largest online video platform and second-largest search engine, YouTube is the most preferred affiliate video marketing platform, whether for the ease of accessing audiences or the instant ability to upload and host videos, free of charge. With over one billion hours of video content watched each day, you’d be missing out not to take advantage of the video platform.
With YouTube, you can effectively redirect viewers to your company’s website, either with the placement of in-video annotations or hyperlinks pasted into the video’s descriptions.
- Instagram & IGTV
Instagram has given some competition to YouTube in recent years, and this is further evidenced by the introduction of IGTV. The video app is perfect for affiliate marketing purposes, surpassing the 60-second restriction of the Instagram App by allowing videos that can be an hour long.
- Facebook Live
Facebook Live is a great way to present your brand image to your audience while receiving immediate feedback. You can notify followers about when you’re going live and hold interactive Q&A sessions with attendees, wherein they can ask questions about the business, helping to establish your company as a personable, helpful brand.
LinkedIn is the primary professional networking hub of the modern age, and you should consider making the most of the opportunities it provides. To engage other professionals with your brand, think about what they might be looking for — present yourself as the informational expert willing to guide them through the haze of affiliate marketing. Furthermore, put out regular content seeking to engage potential affiliates. Someone might end up seeing one of your videos and end up being interested in joining forces with your company.
If you’re looking to redirect past customers back to your page, it’s best to target them in their inboxes. Interesting, insightful videos are a great way to engage with customers. Digital research has even shown that mentioning the keyword “video” in an email subject line increases open rates by almost 20%. If you’re posting videos across other channels, from Facebook to YouTube, it can be helpful to share such videos with them elsewhere, all to engage them wherever possible.
- Brand videos
Sometimes it’s best to present your company as it is — what you stand for, what you look like, and how committed you are to your audience. Usually created as part of an advertising campaign, a brand video depicts a high-level perspective of what your company is to your audience, both existing and potential.
A brand video allows you to build brand awareness — you don’t even have to sell a product in the video. Think of well-known commercials from FedEx, Doritos, and more: They resonate because they catch your attention and give you an idea of what the brand is, as a whole.
- Interviews with Team Members
Looking to engage your customers with intriguing internal insight? Consider recording some videos with experts within your own business, either describing your products, services, or the technical aspects of your industry. To increase your outreach with affiliates, consider showing the faces behind your business. This can include a profile interview with a reputable affiliate, a get-to-know-you sit down with an executive of your company, or an engineer describing the finer details of an affiliate marketing platform characteristic.
- Educational Content
Along with conducting personal interviews with employees and affiliates, create some educational content for your audience. Videos of this nature can include informational videos for interested enterprises, onboarding walkthroughs for first-time customers, and in-depth explanatory videos that show affiliates how to interact with your affiliate marketing interface.
- Animated How-To Videos
You want to educate your audience, but you want to make it less informal and more fun. An animated how-to video can be the best solution. With bright colors, infographics, and eye-catching illustrations, you can host simple animations on your website’s landing page to introduce visitors to your brand or on your Instagram to increase awareness of a new product line dropping in the near future.
- Case Studies
Especially useful on LinkedIn and a dedicated page of your website, Case Studies are a great way to show off the efficacy of your company, no matter your industry or expertise. This can garner the attention of other companies interested in your services, especially if you’re focused on B2B marketing. And, if you’re a distributor of products, you can share filmed testimonials with customers that discuss the usefulness and efficiency of your products, possibly enticing other potential customers to be referred to your website.
- Chronicling Events
Did your company recently participate in a larger industry convention? Did it hold a yearly get-together for clients? Are you having an employee function which you’d like to show off — something to show the fun side of your business?
Whatever it might be, it can be helpful to show that your company is more than products and services. You can remind viewers that, yes, you are a company of diverse people, all of them caring deeply about what they do and who are committed to improving themselves on a daily basis, whether through team-building or industry events.
Crafting Your Affiliate Video Marketing Strategy
Understanding your audience and planning ahead
Before you can go about creating a video or video series, you need to understand who you’re creating these videos for. Furthermore, ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this video?” Here are just a few of the primers you and your marketing team should work out prior to pressing record:
- Who is this video for? Who is the target audience? This will inform the tone, aesthetic, and conception of the video. You can’t create content without knowing who you want to view it most.
- What’s the purpose? Why exactly are you making this video, and how does it benefit your affiliate video marketing? The answer to all of these questions will inform the direction that the writing process of the video will take. Whether you’re launching a new product or want to produce a know-how video about a service, you need to know its basis before you can begin planning any further.
- Where is this video going to be uploaded? You’ll want to craft your video for your intended audience and platform. A 10-second advertising video will work better on Instagram than it would on YouTube, and a client case story video will be better suited for LinkedIn or Facebook than it would be IGTV.
- What’s your available budget? Before you can really start thinking outside of the box, you need to consider your limitations. Will a strict budget cause creative limitations? And is there any wiggle room when it comes down to the line, financially?
- What would a successful video look like? Beyond the purpose of the video, its message, and its intention, you should know how you expect the video to perform. Obviously, you’ll never know how a video will land with the public, but you can make an educated guess that can then be tested, all to determine whether the video and its production were worth it.
Preparing your story
So you’ve narrowed down who it is you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, where the video will live, and what you want the video to accomplish. Good! Now comes the time to begin developing the story.
Some videos — live-streamed Q&As and customer testimonials — do not require a script, but most all other videos will. Not only will this provide your video with the necessary structure to move forward, but it will give you a skeletal system over which the video can be mapped out. This can include indicating what people will say, what shots will look like, what music you want playing over the video, and much more.
Rather than skimping on the scripting process, you should consider running it through a few drafts, making sure that it is as tight as possible, all to ensure that the people who see it are immediately sucked in and understand exactly what you’re talking about. There’s little room for error, here, so it’s important to take your time.
Shooting footage & editing
Shooting will require an expert’s touch, from setting up your location to prepping your studio, allocating equipment, and deciding which cameras to use. It’s a beast within itself, but prior planning will save you time while capturing shots.
From here, it’s on to the editing bay, where unedited footage will be snipped, shifted, and cut, where music will be added atop scenes, and where voiceovers (automated dialogue replacement (ADR)) will be completed. This process takes some time, but it’s a necessary step to ensure your video looks as polished as possible.
Work That Pays Off
Creating the perfect affiliate video marketing strategy requires a lot of work, but that work will eventually pay off, helping you to refer audience members to your website, increasing site engagement, and, hopefully, increasing conversions.
No one plan is perfect, so it’s important that your company takes the time to determine what it is that you want out of an affiliate video marketing program. At Refersion, we can help you track your analytics to guarantee you know how well your videos are performing, allowing you to make fine-tuned tweaks as you go.
