😊 Tell me who your brand affiliates are, and I will tell you who you are.

👉 Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another company’s product or service, a commission-based arrangement. Or, in other words, it is a pay-per-performance marketing. 

🇬🇧 In the UK, in 2020, for example, £627m were spent on affiliate marketing. It represents a 33.12% increase compared to 2018. To be more precise, £258m (41.14%) were spent on affiliate via smartphones, whereas the non-smartphone spend was £369m (58.86%). Thus, we could definitely consider affiliate marketing as a significant marketing model.

Furthermore, if used wisely and affiliating with suitable third parties, affiliate marketing is enabling companies to boost their sales and moreover to promote their products or services. It is a business development opportunity which is an affiliate away. 🎯

That is how Burger King 🍔 created an online campaign to reintroduce Funnel Cake Fries 🍟, a product that had not been on the menu for 10 years. What they did was to identify more than 100 influencers and started to like hundreds of their ten-year-old Instagram and Twitter posts. They continued to do so until eventually, revealed the reason, the relaunch of the fries.

🚀 The real boost came after the brand, Burger King, got the attention of Casey Neistat, a YouTuber with 12.4m subscribers at the moment. His video post commenting on the campaign led to a 98.6% sales growth. Moreover, in 2020, the entire Burger King: Twitter Bait campaign won Gold WARC Awards for its Effective Social Strategy.

The above-mentioned case study proves, once again, that with an attractive and engaging idea as well as cleverly selected third-parties, it is feasible to obtain substantial organic reach and social media buzz❗️What do you think about their strategy❓

Hey! Google! What does the share of search mean? 🤔

🔎 Share of Search (SoS%) is a 12-month rolling average search index against a constant base. In other words, it is the total searches for a specific brand divided by the total searches for all brands in that category.

🔨 Moreover, a company’s organic online search queries is a valuable, inexpensive tool that marketers could use to establish short and long term ads impact. More importantly, it can even compare performance against competitors and forecast future changes in the market share.

🚀 The rapid growth of e-commerce has urged the rise of ‘digital availability’. It constitutes an extension of mental and physical availability, prominently advocated by the professor Byron Sharp.

• Mental availability – the probability of a consumer noticing, recognising, and thinking of your brand in a purchase situation;
• Physical availability – maximising the breadth and depth of your distribution in time and space offline.
• Digital availability – maximising the breadth and depth of your distribution in time and space online.
  
  
  

👟 That is how, for example, the sportswear manufacturer Adidas grew e-commerce sales by almost 80% across APAC (Asia-Pacific) through a Google partnership that added price extensions to the brand’s search results. Besides improving sales, the campaign increased Adidas’ CTR (Click Through Rate) by 30% and conversion rate by 56%. Furthermore, in 2021, the brand won gold WARC Media Awards for the best use of data for this namely campaign.


✅ In conclusion, we can remark that if used wisely, new technologies could create a more significant user experience that would benefit the customers. Moreover, marketers should consider the brand’s share of the online search when defining effectiveness, optimisation, and future strategies.

👨‍🎓 More information on the subject:

👉 Les Binet outlines why “share of search” is a powerful, predictive marketing metric.

👉 It’s time for ‘share of search’ to replace ‘share of voice’ by Mark Ritson.