Affiliate marketing is one of many premier ways a business can effectively promote its brand to audiences out of their existing reach. Affiliates are exceptionally useful, as they allow your business to promote what you do, provide, sell, and specialize in. This is an exceptional field for businesses looking to expand their network. By utilizing affiliates, your company is effectively able to promote what you do, sell, and specialize in — your business’s niche.
But affiliates can help you do more than just promote your business within your niche industry; they can also help you home in on your area of focus. By connecting yourself with affiliates, you have a direct line to the consumers you are trying to target. This chain can provide you with information as to those consumers’ needs, struggles, and interests. That level of insight can be beneficial to your business, especially if you exist within a niche that is oversaturated.
But what’s an oversaturated market look like? One such example is that of the all-natural supplements industry.
The Holistic Health Industry
The health industry is known as an evergreen industry: an industry that will always maintain relevance. The reason for this is that people are (and will) always look for ways to improve their health and avoid disease. This provides an incredible market for businesses to profit from, offering a swath of people to be marketed to — it explains why the industry generated approximately $4.4 trillion in 2022.
But while it’s an easy industry to sell, becoming a business that stands out from the rest of the market can be difficult. The reason is that there are so many businesses in the market — many hardly different from the next. So you can take measures to help your brand stand out, such as entering into a more specific niche, but that won’t do much if you’re not properly marketing your business.
It’s an easy market to make sales in, as people are willing to try out varying products to see whether they can improve their health in an instant. This is especially true for the all-natural supplements industry, as people tend to seek out supplements when they either know or think they have a deficiency or health condition.
Whether it’s valerian root for sleep or magnesium for muscle relaxation, people in need are willing to take their chances on a product to see if it will help. With people spending more on organic food and looking for holistic wellness cures in recent years, it’s no surprise that all-natural supplements are in high demand.
But if the supplements are all-natural, what makes one business’s different from another? Here’s where the issue of standing out among a saturated market comes into play. While you might have the best all-natural supplement on the market, it won’t mean a thing if you can’t get it into people’s hands (and stomachs).
Why You Need to Stand Out — Making Waves in a Big Market
Because the all-natural supplement market is saturated, you need to find ways to stand out from the rest of the market. Developing your brand is one of the simplest ways to do this — honing your brand voice, tone, style, and image. These are succinct, surefire ways to make you look different from the rest of the crowd. But it will only go so far within the digital realm where you’re most likely to do your business.
You’ll need another means and approach to make waves around you. One of the most reliable methods is through affiliate marketing. By signing on affiliates — fellow health and wellness brands or influencers — you can have your products promoted to a vast array of audiences who are going to already be interested in what you’re selling.
As mentioned, the health and wellness industry is an evergreen one, and it is mighty profitable, too. So it’s in your best interest to find ways to capitalize on that, expanding your outreach to bring in all the consumers looking for what you have to sell. And affiliate marketing makes that incredibly easy, whether it’s sharing a banner advertisement on a gym’s website to a branded post on an Instagram influencer’s feed or a cross-promotional email sent out by a fellow brand from the industry.
Why Affiliate Marketing Works for You
So you think you need an affiliate marketing strategy for your all-natural supplement company, but you’re not wholly convinced how it can benefit you in the long run. There are four ways an affiliate marketing platform and network can be beneficial to your business, especially while existing in the health and wellness industry. These include:
1. Finding the right customers:
Although you have your niche defined, it’s difficult to make a name for yourself in an industry that is already filled with 1000s of businesses that look and sound the same as one another. Affiliate marketing is a business-saver as it allows you to access audiences that you otherwise might not have had overlap with, even if you existed within the same overhead Health and Wellness industry.
The power of affiliates and influencers cannot be overstated, as their expertise in the industry — and with their audience — can go a long way toward providing you with authenticity. This alone can earn you new customers. And, if they’re happy with one of your products, they’re bound to continue returning as a customer once a month or a few times a year to stock up on their all-natural supplements.
2. Developing lasting relationships:
Affiliates not only bring you sales but long-lasting relationships. As said above, you’re bound to get some lifelong customers who will come to rely on your products whenever they need a refill. But you’ll also make serious relationships with your affiliates, too. Treat them right, pay them on time, and offer them a competitive commission, and you’re bound to foster a relationship that will continue to pay off for you. The harder you work for them, the harder they’ll work for you, and the better your returns will regularly be.
3. Doing your research with on-hand analytics:
Affiliate marketing software like Refersion has many characteristics that are beneficial to affiliate marketers, but there is one that is best of all: statistics. The Refersion platform provides affiliate marketers with live updates related to their affiliate program, allowing them to see how well specific affiliate links are performing, the conversion rates of specific affiliates, and more.
These insights will prove immeasurably useful to marketers, as they will shine a light on what is and isn’t working. Knowing this is imperative, as it makes it far easier to make changes on the fly, whether it’s tweaking language or redirecting focus to specific audiences throughout the year.
4. A constant return on investment (ROI):
Traditional marketing efforts like radio, print, and billboard advertising have fallen by the wayside. With people now shopping primarily online, there’s hardly any use for that type of advertising. However, while digital advertising has become the norm, some forms of it aren’t as effective as they once were. For instance, Facebook advertising and search engine marketing (SEM) has shown itself to work, but not as effectively as it once did. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.
Affiliate marketing has the upper hand over its competitors due to the return on investment (ROI) it offers marketers. Rather than paying for banner space on a website, affiliate marketing allows you to pay only when it works in your favor — you’ll only pay an affiliate when an action is completed.
That action depends on the contract you signed with one another, whether it is someone clicking on a link (pay per click), having someone visit your website (pay per engagement), or having someone complete a sale on your website (pay per conversion).
Affiliate Marketing and All-Natural Supplements
If you don’t know anything about affiliate marketing, you’re not lost. The truth is, you can begin building an affiliate marketing program from the ground up, especially with the help of an affiliate marketing platform like Refersion. Here are just a few reasons why it’s essential to your all-natural supplements business and the ways you can develop a reliable, effective affiliate marketing strategy.
Organic Marketing Can Only Take You So Far
Marketing tactics like search engine optimization (SEO) are extremely useful for businesses, as it provides them with an organic way to drive consumers to their webpage. Whether it’s an optimized blog, webpage, or site metadata, the right keywords can lead someone using a search engine right to your website when you need it most.
But it has its limitations. You’re relying on someone completing an online search rather than effectively harnessing an audience you can drive to your website. Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, completes just that task for you. This marketing strategy allows you to utilize established audiences in your favor.
While you’ll still be creating content and developing your approach, you’re providing this to another professional who will promote that content to their audience. That hand-off is an important transformation from the usual organic marketing route. By presenting your content to their established audience, your affiliates are directly presenting your brand to a mass of people, all wrapped in an authentic, personalized package.
This will be far more effective than that just hoping someone clicks on a hyperlink of yours on Google search.
Developing Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy
So what does an affiliate marketing strategy look like? The amount of competition in the all-natural supplement market means that you must have a well-prepared marketing strategy; otherwise, you’ll be starting a venture that won’t pan out as well as it could.
First of all, consider who it is you want as an affiliate — who will work best when promoting your all-natural supplements. It could be a chain of gyms, a dietitian, a yoga influencer, a weightlifting YouTube channel, a CrossFit organization, a health and wellness podcast, or a vegan chef with a large Instagram following.
From there, you’ll need to understand what it is you’re attempting to achieve with the development and launch of your affiliate marketing strategy. Are you in it to increase traffic to your website, are you looking to increase your monthly sales conversions, or do you want to improve monthly subscription numbers to all-natural multivitamins if you sell them? Identifying your goals before you begin will make it far easier to structure your affiliate marketing strategy.
Finding Your Affiliates
Even if you’ve identified who you want as part of your affiliate team, you’ll need to find a way to bring them in. There are many ways to go about this, but one simple way is to develop a prospective script that can be sent out to potential affiliates.
Another way is to develop the part of your affiliate marketing platform where affiliates can find you and read relevant information about your brand and what you’re looking for.
Best of all, you need to offer competitive commission rates. This is a collaborative effort — one that is a two-way street: Your affiliates need to be properly compensated to motivate them to put their heart into working for you and promoting your content.
Use Refersion to Stand Out in the Crowd
The world of all-natural supplements might be oversaturated with hundreds and hundreds of businesses, but that doesn’t mean you have to get lost in the thick of it. With some foresight, you can effectively capture the attention of consumers and procure a steady base of monthly sales. Consider checking out Refersion’s affiliate marketing software to get your company started on the right foot as you head into 2023.
