Guru's Verification engine ensures consistency, confidence, and trust in the knowledge your organization shares. Learn more.

Ambassador and Affiliate Strategies

From A Presentation featuring 𝗣𝗮𝗱𝗱𝘆 𝗠𝗰𝗚𝗶𝗹𝗹: Connect with Paddy

Q’s for Paddy’s discussion (recording in Slack): 

  1.  What "affiliate" means for SaaS today? Difference between 'partners' and 'affiliates' ('referral partners')?

  2. What you should have or consider to enable these types of affiliates who want to add revenue to their funnels (checkout funnel, blog post, marketplace...)? 

  3. How to incentivize new affiliates?

  4. Thinkific case study - what they did and why it worked?

  5. How to determine which users/customers of yours are a good fit to be an "affiliate"? 

  6. What are the types and cost/benefits to various affiliate networks? 

  7. Ongoing training for your affiliates - the frequency and how to get that content out?

  8. Different affiliate tracking tools and which to look at?

 Tips: 

  • When working with influencer-type affiliates, use their headshot on a custom landing page for their audience. And in the social post graphics. They love and sometimes require that. 

  • ShareSale/Tapfiliate vs Partnerstack/Impact etc… The former do not allow for multi-tier partner types so you will scale out of those quickly. 

Quick strategies: 

  •  Search {{competitor name}} + community and try to find then request access to their community under your personal email. 

  • Look outside Facebook/LinkedIn to find groups to offer affiliate relationships to. Mighty Networks is blowing up - search for keywords that match your target audience needs here (i.e. eCommerce marketing).

  • Setup a “Steering Committee” for your community which allows those members to host sessions for your community and gain “moderator” status in return for their time to put together the valuable sessions.
    Find groups/associations/online communities of your target user.
    Message the owners
    Offer a small monthly amount to sponsor community AND give % of sales
    Get an evergreen offer/post pinned at the top.

  • Do a google search - Your platform name vs [competitor] or Your platform name alternative or review

 Now, determine you have an ‘ambassador’ offer PMF: 

  1.  Sort user base by most success with your platform?

  2. Sort by network, reach, or list size (Bonus if you know how big?

  3. Is this potential affiliate’s audience the same as the one you are going after?

  4. Create your co-marketing offer if you have none atm.

    1. MDFs for sponsoring their content. 

    2. A segment in your blog.

    3. A series for youtube.

    4. A linked live event.

  5. Reach out with your co-marketing offer.

  6. Links to help:
    https://www.buzzstream.com/ - to find and reach out to people of influence
    https://www.upfluence.com/influencer-search - if you have the right data, you can dump it here and see which of your users are of influence.
    ​https://megkwheeler.com/2018/08/person-of-influence-email-tips/

Now, use that success to go to ‘affiliates’ to set up your affiliate program: 

  1. Prove out the value of your offer by converting users to ambassadors.

  2. Wrap some software around that for tracking and LMS.

  3. Create case studies from those who gain from it. 

  4. Package all of that up into an offer to take to affiliate networks. 

  5. Links to help:
    Thinkific.com
    Top sources of affiliates
    https://www.upfluence.com/influencer-search - if you have the right data, you can dump it here and see which of your users are of influence.
    https://www.buzzstream.com/ - to find and reach out to people of influence
    https://megkwheeler.com/2018/08/person-of-influence-email-tips

All Links to Resources