Affiliates for B2B Merchants

How does B2B Affiliate Work Best?

Business services have been moving online over recent years and that has opened up increasing opportunities for B2B affiliates. In an article for online merchants, leading OPM agency, Acceleration Partners suggested that the way to realise best value in affiliate in B2B is:

working with the right partners to promote their products or services
Driving a higher quality of customer traffic - along with volume
Driving signup or your 'north-star' conversion
Using their marketing spend more wisely by paying by performance

Certainly for any company looking to generate new business leads, the PPC route can have variable results with no guaranteed outcome. This is where the affiliate model makes such perfect sense - depending on your product, you can get to a place where you only pay for a converted lead.

Affiliate Types to drive success

Finding the ideal B2B affiliate partners have a huge impact on the overall business performance, assuming the business is strong in the first place of course! Affiliates can be introduced into whichever channel is working well for you - as a lever to supercharge your own efforts.

Among affiliates are some of the most experienced and effective practitioners across the marketing channels - whether paid search/social, email or SEO and they can become an integral part of your own business. Many have spoken of affiliates being considered as freelance consultants paid on performance; that thinking demonstrates the importance of developing those relationships.

For instance, if paid search is converting strongly, working with specialist PPC and paid social affiliates. By aligning activities you can ensure that your competition is outbid on your key terms where your website is the most relevant target page. This is especially if your brand name is a semi-generic word. Our Chrome extension can be very useful in finding the right affiliates here.

Structuring your commissions correctly is vital; it's your second lever and should be set to align with your business goals. Affiliates should understand your objectives - and commissions reflect that.

How do you find the relevant affiliates?

For many it's a case of digging into the search results on your keywords. That of course means you end up trawling through literally hundreds of pages or results. Of course you could use the short-cuts we've built such as the Chrome extension mentioned above. You can also dig into the main platform.

This selection of 5 affiliates below is taken directly from the Publisher Discovery platform under the B2B / Jobs niche. This shows their advertiser partnerships and social links giving a view of their promotions and audience, and email to reach out to contact them.