If your goal is cost-effective customer acquisition, there is one key channel that is dedicated to driving bottom-line growth – is it in your marketing mix?
As traditional banks and credit unions race towards digital transformation, competition for online customer acquisition is growing fierce. With financial brands continuing to increase digital spend to capture target customers’ attention, how do you ensure your brand isn’t caught up in a race to the bottom?
In other words: how can you focus your marketing efforts to drive net new customers and not just clicks and impressions?
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In the overall mix of acquisition tactics, from paid search, to programmatic, to display advertising, there is one particular digital acquisition channel that is often overlooked by some of the smaller industry brands, even though it’s been in the financial industry for years.
Affiliate marketing – also known as performance marketing – is the secret ingredient for budget-friendly, transparent customer acquisition. And, more importantly, it can play a key role in transforming your marketing from a cost center to a profit center.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work for financial brands?
Affiliate marketing is a results-based channel. Brands that wish to reach a targeted audience can partner with affiliates (also known as publishers), who are content creators that specialize in a particular niche and typically work on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis. Affiliates are often marketers, influencers, bloggers and online personalities who promote a brand’s products to their audiences through their own channels, including websites, social media, and email.
Affiliate content can include long-form content, blog posts, reviews, product comparisons, and even videos. As partners, they are paid only when their audiences successfully become customers.
Think of affiliates of an extension of your marketing team: while your marketing team manages your full-funnel, affiliates are a dedicated channel for driving converting customers into that funnel.
Why is affiliate marketing ideal for customer acquisition?
There are several advantages that make affiliate marketing effective for customer acquisition.
Optimized spending
Ad platforms like Facebook and Google enable you to run paid campaigns that drive awareness, clicks and conversions. On Facebook, the average cost-per-click is $3.77 for companies in the financial industry.
While your spend can certainly drive eyeballs and website traffic, it’s not guaranteed to win customers.
In comparison, affiliate marketing is built on a CPA model and, as such, your spend is limited only to new customers acquired. Moreover, any exposure or traffic accrued during your campaigns are provided by your affiliates free of charge.
Laser-focused Targeting
Affiliates partners cover a wide range of consumer interests and, in turn, attract a wide range of niche audiences. By partnering with affiliates, financial brands can focus their spend on reaching high-intent customers that already have a need or affinity for financial products.
Full Transparency
It can be challenging to pinpoint which channels and messages are making the most impact on your customer journey. With affiliate marketing, you gain full transparency on the source of customers and the cost paid to acquire them. Affiliate network platforms can also deliver aggregate data and analytics to easily understand which partners and products are driving the greatest value.
Controllable Scaling
Whether you start with one partner or one hundred, this type of marketing drives value. The number of affiliate partners you work with and the diversity of your promotions enable you to scale your campaigns quickly. Affiliate networks for financial services also extend your campaigns to a curated collection of pre-vetted, relevant partners to make scaling even more efficient.
Built-in Compliance
Keeping your marketing safe and compliant can be a heavy burden for many financial institutions.
Affiliate marketing is one of few channels where compliance technology can be baked directly into campaigns. Fintel Connect, for example, provides an AI-driven compliance tool for brands to automatically monitor check the compliance of your brands content across the web.
