From growing your customer base to increasing brand awareness, influencer, and affiliate marketing are useful tools for small business owners. Influencer and affiliate marketing has grown in popularity in recent years. While many people associate affiliate marketing with websites covered in the “best of” links, there’s more to this marketing style than simply placing a link on a webpage. 

Here, we discuss the difference between influencer and affiliate marketing, their similarities, and how they can benefit your business. So, without further ado, let’s jump into the topic at hand.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing works by marketing to an established following or audience. For example, if you see a popular musician like Rhiana promoting a cosmetic, that’s technically influencer marketing. This marketing uses an influencer’s sway, “star power,” or authority to reach their built-in following. By marketing to these customers, brands can boost their outreach to a built-in market while increasing brand awareness, clickthrough rates, and more. 

Depending on the agreement, influencer marketing can share some similarities with affiliate marketing in that influencers get either a cut of the products sold or other payments to continue marketing the product. However, the process focuses more on reaching new audiences and boosting brand awareness and reputation over total sales. 

Key Influencer Stats

Both influencer and affiliate marketing have great upsides for small businesses. According to one study, not only do 72% of Gen Z and Millenials follow an influencer of some kind, 50% of Millenials said they’d purchase from an influencer. In addition, while many people associate influencers with health and beauty categories, influencers can promote several products and niches, from farm life and eco-conscious movements to car sales. 

Interestingly enough, while macro-influencers interface with many people and have a larger outreach, micro-influencers tend to reach their target niche more efficiently, gathering 60% more engagement than their macro-influencer peers. This is partially due to their laser-targeted niche focus, which allows them to reach their customers on several levels without facing as much competition from outside sources. 

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing centers mainly on sales, focusing on traffic to a single website or page. This marketing form uses links, clickthroughs, and purchase codes to track customer interactions. Unlike influencer marketing, which focuses on interfacing with an existing pool of customers, affiliate marketing uses natural page traffic combined with search results to funnel customers toward a product or service. 

A good example is any listicle on the internet with embedded links to products and services. These affiliate marketing partners get a percentage of sales, or a set percentage, as part of their deal with a business. As a result, the company gets exposure through the affiliate website and additional sales, making it a win-win for both parties. 

Key Affiliate Marketing Stats

Affiliate marketing has been a cornerstone of online advertising for some time. While how individuals market their brand through affiliate channels may have changed over time, the formula generally stays the same. Interestingly enough, estimates put the total amount of funds invested in affiliate marketing at close to $8.6 billion for 2022 alone, making this a significant marketing cornerstone. 

Unsurprisingly, with over 80% of US businesses investing in some kind of affiliate marketing, small business owners would jump on the bandwagon. While most people think of large-scale affiliate networks like Amazon when they think of affiliate marketing, working with smaller affiliate programs can still increase brand awareness and drive customers toward your business and products. 

There are a lot of blurred lines between influencer and affiliate marketing as the two have started to merge together. With easily-available resources like Amazon, anyone who has a following can monetize the products they choose to talk about on their social channels. This type of content can do amazing things for brands and products. There are millions of instances where one influencer/affiliate post on social can completely sell out a product in just the blink of an eye.

Influencer & Affiliate Marketing For Your Brand

If you’re ready to see the same results for your brand, we got you covered. There’s a lot that goes into setting up an affiliate and/or influencer program for your brand. On the affiliate side, we first determine the best affiliate tracking platform for your brand. We’ll completely set this up, monitor results, and even do outreach, depending on the setup. We’ll also work with you to help you determine commission rates that make sense for your business.

Influencer programs are a bit more hands-on. We start by doing some behind-the-scenes work that includes creating contracts and outlining what we want our influencer collabs to look like and the strategy behind it all. Once we have this in place, we manually research influencers that will best fit your brand and your budget. Then we handle all the communication from contract to final deliverable.

Influencer and affiliate marketing is still one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness and sales for a brand. If you’re ready to get started, send us a message!