Tips & Guides — 21 Mar 2023
Top 5 challenges for the partner marketing industry in 2023
Digital marketers are seeing more and more difficulties in getting desired results while witnessing a considerable decrease in their budgets. Many factors, including inflation, the cost of living crisis, and a possible recession, drive this scenario.
To reduce costs and optimize production for different channels on a large scale, new methods, and channels are gaining space. Partner marketing is one of the key sources for digital marketers to maximize advertising efforts as it offers many benefits, such as the opportunity to spread the word about your brand, build trust and pay only for the results.
Brands can create a partner program to promote products and services and define partners’ commissions each time they achieve the desired results. In a nutshell, the principles of partner marketing remain the same, but the industry has evolved and requires proper solutions and tactics to meet digital marketers’ goals.
So, many are asking what comes next. Due to obstacles to the current economy, what will be the future of partner marketing? What are the crucial challenges to be aware of? IIs this industry still a lucrative channel? To begin with, let’s understand the main challenges of partner marketing in 2023.
In 2023, the prevailing economic instability is expected to persist. Despite forecasts of economic recovery in the previous year, new global and economic challenges are causing inflationary tensions. Forecasts are that 2023 will have the lowest expected growth and the weakest in the last few years.
Additionally, platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon increase ad costs while providing less effectiveness. Since the previous year, consumers have felt the effects of inflation in their pockets, which has also changed their buying priorities. They expect more from brands, while brands see their budget getting tighter.
In recent years, we watched TikTok become the most downloaded social network. According to a Hootsuite report, it continues to grow its user base, with 1.023 billion active users. This led to a mass trend, the short videos, lately adopted on several social networks, such as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Amazon Video Shorts, and Netflix Shorts.
People already use social networks as a search tool to relate to brands and discover products and services. While Google search stays the starting point where people aged 25+ go online, finding information doesn’t quite mean the same thing it used to, as Hootsuite’s latest report says. Social media algorithms can suggest products and services from influencers or affiliates before users know what they seek. Below, we can see the growth of video marketing used over the years
Partnership Marketing Trends To Watch in 2023
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The challenge for brands is to find out what’s culturally relevant to their audience and keep on track with updates that move things along faster. So, what concerns marketers now is: how to manage and stay relevant amidst so many social media channels.
For affiliates and influencers, marketing channels complement each other to create a relevant presence online. For instance, a creator regularly updates videos on deep topics on Youtube and uses Instagram to remind the audience of their daily events. Now, creators want to be on other networks, stay relevant, and establish multiple sources to earn money online. One of the best long-term goals for any content creator is to diversify their income to reduce their dependence on any platform. Digital marketers are expected to do the same.
2023 promises to be a year when the industry will be even more focused on the quality of their partner’s relationship with their audience and whether that audience is a good fit for the brand. The ultimate challenge for digital marketers and creators will be building a solid connection with their audience regardless of any platform.
To navigate the economic downturn, digital marketers are looking to work with creators with similar demographics to their audience. Relying on segmentation is a way to maximize the high efficiency of every advertising dollar spent on campaigns this year.
Take into account that affiliate marketing is a worldwide trend. People in many different channels see this industry as a way to have a source of income despite the waves of crisis. For digital marketers and brands, finding new GEOs for their products or services is a challenge that comes with a great opportunity.
Each country has unique characteristics and requires specific research with various affiliate products and peculiarities; finding the most profitable niches and GEOs in affiliate marketing will be crucial to successful campaigns. The most efficient way to do that and generate the best niche ideas is to continually analyze current global trends and research. Although finding the best GEOs is not always easy, discovering new advertising opportunities will be essential in 2023.
Unfortunately, high rates of affiliate marketing fraud are not new, but they remain a cause for concern. Increasingly, fraudulent activities are using more creative methods to compromise the quality and results of affiliate marketing campaigns. As a result, digital marketers’ budgets are being depleted at a time when every dollar invested in marketing is crucial.
In Q2 2022, mobile advertising fraud rates increased globally. Among the four most widely used operating systems, Linux recorded the highest fraud rate in Q2 2022. It is not easy for digital marketers to detect fraudulent activity until it reaches a higher level. Therefore, this increases the importance of trustworthy tracking partnership solutions in 2023.
In 2023, Google Chrome, the most widely used browser with over 60% of the search engine market share, will also join other providers such as Apple, Firefox, and Brave in blocking third-party cookies by default. This change will significantly impact digital advertising, which relies heavily on these cookies for targeted advertising. However, even before that, research shows that consumers were already taking measures to protect their personal data, with 1 in 2 internet users regularly deleting cookies from their devices.
As a result of these changes, 71% of agency and brand executives are uncertain about what the future will bring, according to GWI. Building lasting customer relationships will become more important than ever in a cookieless future. Businesses must focus on delivering value to their customers and building relationships beyond a one-time purchase. This could include offering personalized recommendations, exclusive content, transparent data privacy, and secure communication.
How to Track Performance in the Cookieless World
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Despite the current economy’s challenges, partner marketing continues to be a promising channel with high growth rates. But more than that, it has become the channel best prepared to meet the difficulties of a possible recession. This is mainly due to its efficiency, which allows brands to pay only for accurate results.
Many companies already recognize partner marketing and understand its importance in marketing strategies. Increasingly, meaningful results are more impactful than numbers that don’t lead to action. By seeking answers to digital marketers’ most common questions, we have put together an in-deep report on “The state of partnership marketing,” with statistics and trends, traffic analysis by GEOs, valuable insights from industry experts, examination of browsers, niches, fraud rates, and more.
To make a picture of the partner marketing industry in 2023, we dug into data and expert insights that were carefully researched to provide you with the most comprehensive updates. If you are looking to build a bulletproof strategy aligns with the market needs, we recommend you download our white paper, “The State of Partner Marketing: A Review and Predictions for 2023”, which aims to answer what it will look like in 2023, the role of affiliate marketing, and how it is becoming one of the most profitable channels in the coming years.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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