How To Approach Affiliate Marketing in Public Relations Strategies

Image Created with DALL-E: I love how everyone is high fiving no one. Prompt: "Create an image to go along with my blog post, "How to Approach Affiliate Marketing in Public Relations Strategies." The image should depict corporate people high fiving and looking generally happy. Please include headphones and pizza."

In last week’s blog I alluded to the increasing importance of nailing affiliate marketing in today’s digital marketplace as a PR professional.

To contextualize the opportunity, we must recognize the profound blending of editorial and shoppable/retail-focused content. In many ways, both serve each other. And in truth, they always have. Brands that used to see spikes in sales when certain publications wrote about their products/founders/etc. would then advertise with that publication, which created a winning cycle:

-         Publication X writes a great article about Company Y.

-         Company Y sees a spike in sales, thanks to the positive publicity.

-         Company Y recognizes the Publication X’s value to its audience and buys ads.

-         Publication X wins, Company Y wins.

I asked DALL-E to interpret the bullets above into a graphic and it came up with this. Laughably bad. Don’t sleep on the weird dog-like creature in the bottom left.

Today that cycle looks a little different, but it’s foundationally the same. This blog post unpacks the landscape at a high level and offers a few tangible takeaways for PR professionals and marketers.  

If you want my help with wrapping your arms around affiliate programs and how they can work more closely with PR, hit me up because that’s kind of my thing. For now, here are some insights to consider:

Product Journalism and Commerce Are a Natural Fit

Leading sites like The Wirecutter, Strategist, CNET, and so many others, merged in-depth product reviews and guides with affiliate marketing years ago. This integration sustains operations with additional monetization strategies complementing editorial content, advertising and subscribership.

The approach garnered broader notoriety when the New York Times acquired The Wirecutter in 2016. This made Brian Lam a rich man and introduced a new wrinkle in journalism. Since then, media organizations have invested in creating and buying their own shopping-focused content sections, sub-brands, etc.

To this day, retailers and publications are identifying new ways to evolve and turn content/shopping data into DOLLA DOLLA BILLS Y’ALL. A great example is the blending of CNET and Best Buy’s advertising businesses. This summary from Kathryn Lundstrom at AdWeek in her writeup about the partnership is a great primer:

“The electronics retailer and the publisher are combining their ad inventory, allowing advertisers to buy across Best Buy Ads’ retail media network and alongside CNET’s tech-review-focused editorial content and measure whether ads seen on either platform drove sales.”

Integrating Affiliate Marketing into Your PR Day-to-Day

Alright, now the juicy sh-t. Tangible nuggets:

Align with Sales Teams: Today, actually yesterday. Collaboration between PR professionals and sales teams is crucial. The partnership can help uncover unique storytelling opportunities and give PR professionals guardrails to focus their resources on tactics/channels/stories that drive sales performance.

A practical approach to this could be a standing call with the appropriate individual in charge of affiliate marketing, or adjacent to the sales organization. Seek to understand what channels the sales team are excited about and home in on the media organizations/influencers/journalists they share.

Further, let the appropriate media organizations/influencers know their content is driving traffic. Think about it this way, a company invests more in a retailer driving high volume. Align with the outlets, journalists and influencers driving results and work together from a storytelling perspective to deliver content that helps both parties win.  

Create a Comprehensive Toolkit: Equip media partners with everything they need to seamlessly integrate your products into their content. This includes high-quality visuals, detailed product descriptions and easy access to your affiliate programs. Simplifying and providing robust assets makes life easier for journalists and frankly, life is hard enough.

Enhance Product Launches with Strategic Affiliates: Product launches are uniquely good times to consider affiliates. In my opinion, a lot of great launches miss the mark when it comes to appropriately modulating commission rates and finding the right partners that not only get the word out about your product, but drive early adopter sales.

By offering more lucrative returns to strategic partners, they are incentivized to produce high quality content. This move helps drive excellent storytelling, strengthens partnerships with influential media outlets, and maximizes the impact of earned media campaigns.

Additional reading: I really like the following writeup from the team at Hubspot (HubSpot Blog)​ about 2024 affiliate marketing trends. The landscape expands dramatically beyond the confines of PR. But every savvy marketer should have at least a basic knowledge of how it all ties together.

CONCLUSION

Affiliate marketing is now foundational in product-driven PR. It supports creators and enhances various GTM strategies in a sophisticated, story-first way. Thanks for sticking around. Hope you crush your day today and HIRE ME to do your product launch PR, you probably won't regret it.