Why is brand affinity vital for affiliate programs?

Brand affinity is one of the strongest influences that can help a consumer make a purchase. There will always be something that causes an individual to consider choosing one brand over another. Nowadays, many customers choose to vote with their dollar and give money to the brands that share the same values as them – brands that they have developed an affinity for.

This is something vital that affiliate programs and marketers need to learn how to play off. Let’s look at some of the reasons why brand affinity is important and how you can use it to attract an audience.

Not the same as loyalty

Loyalty and affinity can often be talked about within the same spheres as they are both forms of emotional selling. They appeal to someone’s needs and emotions in a way that other forms of selling do not.

Brand affinity is powered by the desire to make that emotional connection between the product and the consumer. An affiliate marketer who uses brand affinity correctly will often find that they are able to improve their outreach easily and will be able to bring new partners and consumers onboard with little effort.

This is not the same as loyalty. With loyalty, the connection should already be there, and though you will have to maintain it and reward the customer, you should be creating content that already appeals to them. With brand affinity, you might be trying to appeal to someone who has discovered your brand for the first time, or who has used your services once and should now be receiving marketing to turn them into a repeat customer.

What can building brand affinity look like?

When trying to identify how you can build affinity for your brands, you need to break them down to their core concepts. It can be tempting to just make something that will generically appeal to your target demographic. In doing so, however, you could end up missing the mark.

Work out what values your brand holds, and see if there is a way that you can market these to appeal to your demographic. Keep things really simple. Honesty, integrity, and a commitment to delivering a high standard of product can be just as important when trying to appeal to a large audience as some of the other more complex issues that you might decide to address.

Affiliate managers need to assure that they always work to create marketing content that can really build brand affinity with anyone who might come across it. It needs to be able to support a program and plans for growth and engagement.

Put affinity into your affiliate program from the beginning

You need to make sure that you are building affinity into your affiliate program from the moment you create it. It can be as simple as being completely honest and open with potential partners about their commission rates and the work they can do to build engagement.

Why not offer examples of the types of content that you create? What about the resources and support that you can offer partners, whether they are brand-new or they have been with the program for years? All of these are factors that could affect whether an affiliate chooses to sign on with your program, or whether one of their customers chooses your links and program to gain benefits. Having a structure in place for affinity from the beginning means that you can easily look to nurturing relationships earlier than your competitors whilst achieving better rates of outreach.

Brand affinity can cost nothing but pay a lot back

Setting up a good perception of your company to lay the foundation for brand affinity is something that you should be doing from the very beginning. There are many things that you can do to best establish how your company is perceived. It costs you nothing to establish these factors but it can really mean everything when it comes to receiving interest from partners and their audiences.

You need to ensure that you establish what affiliates want to see from your program, and then make sure that you convey it from the moment that they begin to check out what you have to offer. Small details such as the tone of voice that you use throughout your copy, or understanding your partner demographic fully, will truly make all the difference.

Good brand affinity can help to boost your affiliate program much faster than other methods. If you want to offer your program as a good, credible option to affiliate partners, you need to make sure that you can appeal to their emotional side and build affinity with them.

Need some help building affinity for your affiliate program? Affiverse’s agency is here to help – get in touch with us today to find out more about how this can benefit and grow your affiliate program.