What Is Affiliate Marketing and How to Get Your C-Suite on Board

Hoping to market a product with a low budget, low effort and limited risk? Affiliate marketing offers those benefits while promising a high return on investment, increased brand awareness and overall business growth. The passive income earned through affiliate marketing is considered one of the easiest ways for a business to make extra money.

What is affiliate marketing, and why is it important?

What is affiliate marketing? The strategy refers to a process through which an affiliate earns a commission for successfully marketing another brand’s products. Affiliates just choose a product they use or enjoy, then they promote the product and earn a portion of the profit from any sales resulting from their promotions. Online-based businesses participate in affiliate marketing by assigning affiliates a unique link that tracks traffic directed to the brand’s website. The affiliates then earn a percentage of sales made through their links.

Affiliate marketing allows companies to drive sales and generate significant online revenue with very little investment or effort. Affiliate marketing has proven to be so effective that it’s grown from $5.4 billion spent in 2017 to $8.2 billion in 2022, according to the Affiliate Marketing Benchmark Report 2022.

Why is affiliate marketing important? It provides participating brands a variety of benefits, including:

• Low cost – An affiliate program requires little monetary investment since it doesn’t require resources like an advertising team, advertising visual products or purchased ad space. Likewise, little effort is required aside from the initial time needed to select and vet affiliates. Because brands only pay affiliates based on successful sales, affiliate marketing also boasts low ongoing costs.
• Low risk – Because affiliate programs require little financial investment and payments are only made when a sale is converted, the marketing strategy carries little risk and can be a great fit for brands on a tight budget.
• Targeted traffic – Affiliates who resonate with a brand will likely have followers within the company’s niche or area of influence. When a brand participates in an affiliate marketing strategy, it gets to handpick its affiliates, ensuring that traffic flowing to its website is from individuals who use and enjoy the product or service.
• ROI – Affiliate marketing strategies have been shown to produce a much higher return on investment than many other marketing strategies. Why? The success of affiliate marketing can be credited to online influence. When a target audience learns about a product or service from affiliates they trust, they are more likely to purchase from the brand.

How do you present an affiliate marketing strategy to C-suite executives?

You might have decided that an affiliate marketing strategy is the right solution for your brand, but you still must get your C-suite on board. Sure, the affiliate marketing channel might solve a variety of marketing problems, but how do you demonstrate that value to C-suite and other decision makers?

C-suite executives are focused on the hard data that supports your campaign. They will want to know how an affiliate marketing strategy will help your brand grow and what markets it will reach. Decision makers will be interested in affiliate marketing trends, your proposed customer journey and any brand equity created through the affiliate marketing strategy.

Much of this vital data about affiliate marketing can be communicated effectively in a C-suite scenario with infographics and an engaging visual presentation. You don’t have to be a professional-caliber presentation designer to create a slide deck that dazzles an executive team, either. Beautiful.ai users can customize a large assortment of presentation templates with slides perfectly curated for a plethora of objectives.

Not only does Beautiful.ai offer a variety of pitch deck templates, but it boasts slide deck templates for a host of marketing purposes, including customizable options like the influencer marketing proposal template and the marketing campaign plan template. These templates feature all the necessary slides to illustrate an affiliate marketing pitch, including infographics selected specifically to display certain types of relevant data.

How do you get your marketing team on board with an affiliate marketing strategy?

You might think getting your C-suite executives or other important decision-makers on board with your affiliate marketing strategy would be the final hurdle in establishing your new marketing objectives. Seems like a logical conclusion, right? Wrong! To implement a successful affiliate marketing campaign, you must get your marketing team on board.

It's not enough to simply inform your marketing team about the affiliate marketing strategy. For best results, you need your team enthusiastic about the campaign and ready to contribute to its success. Communication is key to achieving this necessary excitement and dedication from a marketing team.

Visual presentations are again an effective tool for communicating with and engaging a marketing team. An enthralling slide deck complete with plenty of vivid visual elements can get the entire marketing team on board and ensure that everyone is on the same page with campaign details. With a visual presentation, you can break down the affiliate marketing campaign details into multiple topics and illustrate each with engaging visual storytelling elements, as well as informative infographics and even video content that leaves an impression on the audience.

You don’t have to dedicate hours to a mediocre slide deck to present your affiliate marketing campaign to the marketing team. Beautiful.ai’s free PowerPoint-alternative presentation software features all sorts of customizable presentation templates with slides selected by our team of talented designers.

With presentation templates for practically any business or marketing purpose, there are plenty of Beautiful.ai options to easily design a professional-level slide deck to present your affiliate marketing strategy. Plus, with the AI designer to assist, you won’t waste time on mundane and repetitive design details. Just add your custom content to our Smart Slide templates and watch in amazement as artificial intelligence automatically adjusts the format based on good design principles used by the pros.