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Guest Post 2: How to make agencies your sucka

Welcome to my second guest blog post. Seeing as I had some insight from a merchant in my last post I thought I would ask an agency to pitch in for the second guest spot. There’s always a lot of bad karma about agencies in the world of affiliate marketing, mainly because many are crap. However, now and again you do find a good agency, and some good people working there too. So, over to Fiona and Tara…

How to make agencies your sucka
Yes, affiliate agencies sometimes get a bad reputation, and there are some that deserve it, but for the most part we are quickly becoming the people to go to for affiliate programme management. The advantages to a merchant are obvious – we run your programme! But here we’ve put together the reasons why it’s so darn good to get to work with an agency from an affiliate’s perspective.

Work it baby
Merchants work the pants off their agencies. They make us do back-flips. It’s a good thing we’re so good at it. I’ve never understood why affiliates don’t make “their” agencies work equally as hard. Make us write that 500-word copy for you!  Ask us to create those deeplinks! Demand a list of all hotels with how many rooms each has! Believe it or not, we’d be glad you did just because it helps us build our relationship with you and brings the programme that much closer to making our targets.

Use our expertise
Because we work with so many different merchants we often know quite a bit about the whole industry or vertical. If an agency has got several travel merchants chances are they know a lot about the travel industry. Key times of the year for the brand, best converting terms/copy for different seasons, when their advertising is at its peak – ask us! Also, agencies usually hire marketing experts so we know more about the marketing mix. We know their brand – and their customers, we sometimes even know more about them than the client themselves because we’ve got industry insight. OK, so you have the technical know-how to get a campaign up and running but you may not know how best to market it; a good agency wants to help you fit your current promotions in with a merchant, representing the brand effectively and increasing the likelihood of your campaigns converting.

Share the bed
This is where agencies can probably help affiliates the most. If we’ve sorted out a “deal” for you on one of our programmes and we like what you’ve done then we can probably sort something out on another programme.  Find out what your agencies’ rosters are and speak to them about getting deals across the board on everything you promote for them. All the better if you can supply us with stats and expected sales or clicks! This also helps when receiving info – instead of being bombarded from each programme manager; one email will share information on several different programmes. 

Impartiality is good
Get to know us because even if it’s not our programme we can introduce you to new merchants who you may not already be working with. We are aware of the industry as a whole – and are not network, merchant or industry specific. In that sense we aren’t biased. We love everyone equally!

Who are Fiona and Tara?

FIONA
The name is a bit of a give away - Fiona hails from Scotland; Glasgow to be exact. After completing an honours degree in Marketing, her experience with online advertising and development led her to a position with Online Marketing Agency, Equator, over 14 months ago. As well as becoming involved in online media planning and buying, Fiona became very attached to affiliate marketing, quickly gaining experience across the Travel, Retail and Financial industries, as an affiliate manager for a variety of programmes.

TARA
Born and bred in the arctic mass that is Canada, Tara had no idea her journey to the UK 4 years ago would lead her into the arms of affiliate marketing. She’s been practicing the art of affiliate management for nearly 4 years now, mostly at Equator, a Glasgow based online agency. Now back in Canada, Tara has managed dozens of affiliate programmes for clients in all verticals and is now senior affiliate manager overseeing the strategy of them all.

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.