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Affiliate marketing is a popular advertising method where you collaborate with individuals, known as affiliates or influencers, to promote your brand. You pay commissions to these affiliates for every lead or click they generate for your brand. While you can use affiliate marketing on any digital channel, many businesses prefer Instagram due to its impressive engagement rates.
In fact, Instagram has a median engagement rate of 1.22% – a whopping 13.5 times higher than Facebook posts and 27 times higher than a Tweet. If you’re interested in learning more about Instagram affiliate marketing, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we will cover the basics of Instagram affiliate marketing, including its benefits, steps to run, and best practices to follow.
The growing popularity of Instagram affiliate marketing is evident by the fact that 93% of businesses on Instagram use social media influencers (affiliate marketers) to build brand awareness. Let us find out why so many E-commerce brands use affiliate marketing on Instagram:
Humans have a natural tendency to seek recommendations from trusted sources before making purchasing decisions. Around 49% of people rely on recommendations from influencers when making purchase decisions. When these recommendations come from affiliates on a popular and reliable platform like Instagram, it carries significant weight. Therefore, partnering with the right affiliates on Instagram can help you boost your brand’s reputation and drive sales.
The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to reach out to celebrity influencers to promote your E-commerce brand. Instagram is inundated with micro-influencers (less than 100K followers) who will be happy to promote your products for a nominal affiliate fee. This can drastically boost the returns on your investments in Instagram affiliate marketing.
According to the latest data, Instagram has 1.628 billion users. That’s 1.628 billion potential customers you can tap into! All you need to do is partner with relevant affiliates and influencers who resonate well with different audience segments like millennials, Gen Zs, and Gen Alphas. This scalability is important, especially for fast-growing E-commerce brands.
Here are five simple steps to get started with affiliate marketing on Instagram –
Before you kickstart your affiliate marketing on Instagram, it’s essential to lay down a well-thought-out action plan. This plan should ideally encompass your marketing goals and target audience.
Possible goals could be sales generation, brand awareness, or better user engagement with your brand. Having clear goals and objectives will guide your affiliate marketing efforts in the right direction.
When it comes to the target audience, you need to define the demographic characteristics of your ideal customers. It could include factors such as age, gender, location, education level, and occupation. This information will help you identify affiliates whose followers align with your target audience.
Commissions are the amount you pay an affiliate for each sale they generate for your E-commerce brand. There is no right or wrong amount when it comes to commissions. It has to be fair to both you and the affiliate while also providing sufficient incentive to the affiliate to promote your products.
Now there are several ways to determine the right commission. One way to do this is by analyzing the profit margins of your business. After all, commissions are going to come out of your profits. So you need to decide the percentage of profits you are willing to sacrifice for your affiliate marketing program.
You can also find out how much your competitors pay their affiliates. This can give you a good idea about the industry standards and what can keep affiliates happy in your industry.
Along with the commission rate, setting your payment terms is important. Typically, payouts happen once in 2 or 3 months. This will give sufficient time for your brand to accommodate failed orders, returns, and exchanges.
When picking affiliate partners, there is only one mantra to follow- the quality of your affiliate is way more important than the quantity. You do not have to collaborate with hundreds of affiliates to boost your store’s sales. Even if you pick a handful, make sure they serve as strong voices for your brand and products.
The easiest way to find affiliates is by analyzing your competitors’ partnerships. This can provide insights into which affiliates are influential within your niche. Research their content, engagement rates, and audience demographics. Selecting an affiliate with a smaller, engaged audience is better than partnering with one having a large but disengaged audience. Selecting affiliate marketers whose values and content align with your brand is also important.
Equip your affiliates with all the necessary resources and information they need to promote your products. Sharing unique affiliate links or codes is a crucial part of the process. These links or codes enable you to track the sales generated by each affiliate so that you can accurately calculate commission payouts.
Communicate the guidelines for using the affiliate links or codes. For instance, provide instructions on how the affiliates should incorporate links into their content. You can even provide content guidelines to the affiliates so that your brand message is consistent.
Lastly, outline the objectives you want to achieve with the affiliate marketing campaign to the affiliates. Establish a timeline for the campaign, including start and end dates. This will help the affiliates better plan their content creation and promotion activities on Instagram.
Your job is not over once you have started running your affiliate marketing campaign. You need to consistently track campaign performance, build long-term relationships with the affiliates, and keep building your brand.
For instance, you need to analyze key metrics such as clicks, conversions, click-through rates, and revenue generated from influencer content. This data will guide your decision-making, help identify affiliates helping build your brand, and reward them for their efforts.
You also need to encourage open dialogue with the affiliates. You can seek their input on campaigns, products, and marketing strategies that can improve your brand. At the same time, be readily available to address any queries or concerns they may have. Prompt and clear communication helps build a strong working relationship and boosts their confidence in promoting your brand.
Lastly, you need to implement an approval process for affiliate content. Reviewing and approving posts before they go live guarantees that the content adheres to your brand’s values and messaging.
Let us now look at 3 popular brands from different industries that have mastered the art of affiliate marketing.
Source: Instagram
Nykaa, the cosmetic brand, has built an affiliate partnership with Ankush Bahuguna, a rising micro-influencer on Instagram. Ankush has nearly 500K followers due to his engaging posts capturing various fashion and beauty trends. Ankush’s collaboration with Nykaa involves creating Instagram posts that talk about different products from Nykaa’s extensive range. Through these posts, he effectively showcases the products, highlights their features, and shares his personal experiences. He also offers authentic reviews of Nykaa’s products, discussing how they have worked for him and emphasizing their effects.
Source: Boat Instagram Account
The collaboration between Boat and Aadar Malik on Instagram demonstrates how a brand can leverage an influencer’s creative content to resonate with audiences and establish a strong brand presence. This collaboration is part of their popular friendship band contest campaign. In this example, the influencer has captivated Boat followers through his creative and funny compositions. While he doesn’t directly promote Boat’s products here, his artistic pursuits align with Boat’s ethos.
Source: Pepperfry Instagram Account
Pepperfry’s collaboration with Sughandha Gangwar(mi_colourfulworld) is a prime example of how strategic affiliate partnerships can generate impactful content that effectively promotes a brand’s offerings. This micro-influencer with 11.4K followers shares aesthetically pleasing visuals of Pepperfry’s products within real-life home settings. By artfully integrating these products into relatable spaces, she captures her audience’s attention and imagination and directs it toward Pepperfry’s products.
Here are some key strategies specifically tailored to affiliates for making more affiliate sales on Instagram:
Transparency is crucial in affiliate marketing. Your affiliate must clearly label the posts featuring your products as paid partnerships or advertisements. This will not only build trust with your audience but also ensure compliance with Instagram’s guidelines.
Instagram offers a “Paid Partnership” tag that your affiliates can use to label their posts. This tag appears below the Instagram handle and signifies to the users that the affiliate is compensated for the promotion. In the below Instagram post, you can see the words ‘Paid Partnership’ just below the Instagram handle.
Source: Instagram
Alternatively, the affiliate can include a clear disclosure within the captions. For example, they can use phrases like “this post contains affiliate links” or “This is a paid promotion” and place them at the beginning of the caption to make it easily visible.
One of the most direct ways to drive affiliate sales on Instagram is by adding product or brand links to your affiliates’ Instagram bios. This strategy makes it convenient for their followers to access and purchase your products, increasing the likelihood of conversions. Here is a popular Instagram influencer who has added Myntra’s link to his Instagram bio:
Source: Instagram
Instagram initially allowed users to include only one link in their bio, which hindered many affiliates from promoting multiple products at the same time. Instagram then increased the count to 5, but even this was not sufficient. Luckily, there are several workarounds for this.
One of them is to use a tool like LinkTree. It can create a landing page with multiple affiliate product links. This allows your affiliates to place just one link in their bio, which then leads to a page where their followers can choose among various products.
Your affiliates can leverage both Instagram Stories and regular posts to promote your affiliate links. Both these formats allow your brand to engage with the affiliate’s followers directly. Engaging, informative, and visually appealing stories and posts revolving around your products or brand can make the users curious and encourage them to click on your affiliate link to know more about you and your products.
Here is an Instagram influencer who has promoted the brand Flipkart using engaging storytelling:
Source: Instagram
Here are some ideas to promote the affiliate products via Stories or Posts:
Your affiliate marketing will bear fruit only when your affiliate’s followers know, like, and trust your brand enough to purchase the products recommended by the affiliate. So your affiliate must help their followers do just that. More importantly, the affiliate must achieve this without letting the followers exit their Instagram feed in search of answers. Wondering how this is possible?
Simple. Ask your affiliates to demonstrate how to use the product or share authentic reviews about it. Such demonstrations and genuine reviews will tell the followers that they genuinely like this product and want their followers to experience the same happiness using it. If the followers are convinced of the benefits of the product after going through the demonstration, they will click on the link to know more about the product.
Here is an affiliate and a popular influencer demonstrating and talking about the key features of a hair straightening brush of electronics brand Philips –
Source: Instagram
Ask your affiliates to use relevant and popular hashtags in their promotion posts to increase affiliate links’ visibility. When used strategically, hashtags can expose your affiliate products to users who are interested in similar topics, products, or trends.
The key is to research and incorporate hashtags that are relevant to your products. You can find relevant hashtags using competition research or with the help of tools like Tagsfinder, Inflact, and Toolzu. Here is an affiliate post with all the right hashtags added –
Source: Instagram
It is important to incorporate a combination of popular hashtags (with high usage) and niche-specific hashtags (with moderate usage). This balances your reach with the likelihood of being noticed among a specific audience. A word of caution, though, before adding any hashtag to the post, ask the affiliate to double-check that it’s not prohibited.
Here are some key strategies that you must adopt to help your affiliates drive more sales on Instagram:
This is a strategic approach to expand your affiliate marketing efforts beyond Instagram. By promoting your affiliates’ posts on your own website, you can leverage your existing website’s traffic, engage a broader audience, and increase the visibility of your affiliate partnerships.
You must designate a dedicated section on your website to showcase your affiliate partnerships. Ideally, it should be a section on your home page where you feature affiliate product reviews, recommendations, and related content. Here is an example where Loom, the popular clothing brand, has created a separate section for influencers to showcase their products.
Source: The Loom
You could also show it on the product page. But keep your affiliate section on your website up-to-date. Regularly review and refresh your reviews, recommendations, and any product-related information.
If you have a bigger budget, you could always run ads around affiliate posts to further boost sales. You could convert the affiliate’s post into a sponsored post, which can be a great way to increase followers and engagement. Instagram-sponsored posts also let you target specific audiences by filtering them based on demographics, location, interests, behaviors, and purchase intent. Many businesses use this strategy to support their awareness campaign.
The other option is to run a paid search campaign via Google ads. You can direct the user to the influencer’s post to drive more engagement. Yes, you could always direct the user to your store directly from the ad. But directing them to Instagram posts is pretty useful if:
The other option is to embed affiliate posts on the landing page, which the ads direct to.
This strategy is essential to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign and optimize it further. By monitoring key metrics and analyzing data, you can allocate appropriate budgets to the right affiliates to maximize your earnings. Here are some metrics you must focus on –
After measuring the metrics, you may want to compare each affiliate’s performance against the goals you’ve set. This evaluation indicates whether affiliates are meeting, exceeding, or falling short of expectations. It is also important to keep an open line of communication with your affiliates. Regularly discuss their performance, provide feedback, and offer suggestions for improvement.
Must Read: Top E-commerce KPIs & Metrics You Should Track For Business Success
For an E-commerce brand, Instagram affiliate marketing is a great way to boost brand presence, engage audiences, and drive conversions. In a world where customer engagement is paramount for E-commerce businesses to succeed, the significance of Instagram affiliate marketing can’t be denied.
To execute a successful Instagram affiliate marketing campaign, partnering with a seasoned expert can make all the difference. ANS Commerce, a popular name in the E-commerce industry, offers affiliate marketing services along with performance marketing and marketplace management. To know more about how we can help, book a demo now.
