How to Target Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign

The days of yelling your promotional materials into the void and hoping someone hears it will be interested in your product are long gone. Nowadays, many marketing strategies focus on promoting a product directly (and sometimes exclusively) to the most likely buyers.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to achieve this goal. Ad-blockers are most commonly used by Millennials and Gen-Z, making traditional marketing methods useless. Also, with younger generations using less email at work, the future of email marketing is in doubt. Affiliate marketing thrives in an era of ad blockers and unopened emails.

An affiliate marketing campaign mismanaged can quickly become ineffective. The good news is that failed affiliate marketing campaigns are cheap. But you didn’t click on this article. You clicked because you were promised this article would help you make a fortune in affiliate marketing. And this text will honor and fulfill that promise.

Identifying Your Audience

There are many ways to identify your target market and tailor your product to their needs. As this is only one of many necessary steps, we’ll only mention a few key ones.

1. Using Analytical Tools

Using analytics tools is the most effective way to identify your target audience. Without them, you’re essentially blind.

2. Creation of Buyer Personas

While stats are great, keep in mind that you are not marketing to them. It’s easy to forget that you’re marketing to people. Buyer personas help you stay on top of this.

A buyer persona is a fictional bio of your target market. No more than name, age, occupation and other basic information should be included. It should also include hobbies, interests, procrastination methods, and pain points. If you are a B2B company, you must also consider the persona’s position in the company hierarchy. This helps you reaffirm who your marketing efforts are meant to target.

You can easily find buyer persona examples online by searching for them on Google Images. The best examples always include images to further humanize the persona. A well-written bio will make you think about how to best address the persona’s needs and pain points.

How to Tailor Your Product to Your Market Audience

Now that you know your audience, it’s time to engage them. The best way to do this is to address their pain points, as discussed in buyer personas. Pain points are issues that customers in your market face.

They fall into four categories:

• financial pains
• process pains
• productivity pains
• support pains

Identifying Pain Points

Let’s use the simple example of wanting to buy a T-shirt online to show how these points differ. The examples will be structured from the customer’s perspective.

1. Financial pains

You like a design but want it in another color. A buyer must pay an extra fee to change the color. You don’t like it. Financial pains affect product quality. If the design fades after a few washes, you’ve wasted money on a T-shirt that won’t last a month.

2. Process pains

You bought the shirt; it looks nice and the design lasts. But it wrinkles badly and takes forever to iron. That’s a productivity hit—the customer must continually invest time and effort to fix a product flaw.

3. Productivity pains

So you’ve chosen your T-shirt, but wait… what’s this? You have to register before you can buy? A pop-up invites you to join the store’s newsletter. You’re forced to make unnecessary clicks when all you want to do is buy the T-shirt and move on? It’s a process. The product itself may be excellent, but the acquisition process is vexing.

4. Support pains

Back to step one. You want to buy a different color T-shirt but don’t know how. Maybe it’s available but you don’t have time to look through the whole catalog. You want to contact customer support, but it only works 8-hour shifts. So, if you still want a shirt, go to another store.

Targeting the Right Audience

If you’ve done everything correctly so far, the rest should be easy. You have a product your customers want. Now you’re basically preaching to the choir. But, as previously stated, you are not the preacher in an affiliate marketing campaign.

In Conclusion

In summary, Millennials currently have the most purchasing power, followed by Gen-Z. These generations shop mostly online. Both generations are highly ad-averse. By identifying your target market and tailoring your product to their needs, you can greatly improve your affiliate marketing campaign’s chances of success.