Written by Kristin Savage
Affiliate marketing is a great way to gain publicity for your brand and become viral on social media. However, it’s also a marketing tactic that emphasizes first impressions and requires careful copywriting to hook the customer.
According to the Hosting Tribunal, a well-crafted affiliate marketing campaign can boost revenue by 30%, with 15-30% of all sales being generated by affiliate marketing content. Likewise, 99 Firms reported that annual affiliate marketing spending is projected to hit $6.8 billion by the end of 2020. Whether you specialize in eCommerce, SAAS, or work as an independent storefront, smart copywriting for affiliate marketing can help your cause tremendously.
While we could break down copywriting into a science, practical advice should be the priority for anyone looking for ways to improve their writing. After all, practical marketing copywriting advice is based on psychological triggers, which can help you attract the right leads to your business. Let’s take a closer look at how you can make your affiliate marketing campaign shine through practical copywriting tips as we go into 2021.
Reasons to Improve Your Copywriting for Affiliate Marketing
Before we dive into practical copywriting tips for affiliate marketing, let’s cover the basics and why you should pursue this particular marketing channel. Affiliate marketing represents a commission-based marketing model that allows you to scale your promotional campaign based on current trends.
You can work with a variety of micro- and macro-influencers on social media and within your industry to promote your product portfolio. Based on True List, nearly 65% of affiliate marketers generate traffic through blog posts, while affiliate marketing has proven useful for 40% of US businesses. Marketing copywriting meant for affiliate marketing represents a writing challenge for many businesses due to its specific nature in generating leads.
However, combined with the aforementioned influencers, copywriting for affiliate marketing can turn the tide in your favor quite effectively. That being said, some of the best reasons to rethink and refresh your marketing copywriting strategy today include:
- Streamlined audience targeting due to collaboration with influencers
- Performance-based marketing expenses akin to pay-per-click
- Improved brand reputation and industry authority through affiliate exposure
- Easy scalability and onboarding of new affiliate marketing partners
- Improved brand loyalty of both customers and affiliate marketers
Practical Copywriting Tips to Consider for Affiliate Marketing
1. Treat Your Headlines as “Hooks”
Whether you focus on social media or blog posts, headlines carry a lot of weight in regards to making your content appealing to the audience. Based on HubSpot, 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts, while only 27% read them back-to-back. This is a good indication of the fact that headlines are crucial in terms of hooking the visitor into reading your affiliate marketing content thoroughly. Good headlines need to combine several marketing copywriting elements in order to hook the reader into visiting the link:
- It should excite the reader
- It should offer a solution to an issue
- It should pique their curiosity
- It should offer something of value
This is what makes affiliate marketing copywriting such a challenge for many freelance writers and career marketers. The best way to write enticing headlines for your affiliate marketing content is to write the content first and headline later. This will allow you the benefit of hindsight and give you context into what the blog post or piece of content is all about. Always follow up on the headlines you write in order to build trust with your audience and encourage them to purchase your products.
2. Plan Your Keywords Early On
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a large role in how your affiliate marketing content will rank with global search engines such as Google. According to Smart Insights, 81% of people search online for products or services, with Google holding the search engine monopoly with 93.87% of market share.
In practice, this means that you can use tools such as Google Adwords and Keyword Planner to determine which keywords to integrate into marketing copywriting. Writing tools such as Classy Essay, Evernote, as well as Trust My Paper can help you write and format your affiliate marketing copywriting more efficiently.
To make the most out of this strategy, you should plan your keywords early and integrate them into every piece of copywriting for affiliate marketing. In doing so, each piece of content you publish will have certain keywords and phrases related to your brand present in its text. In case of social media copywriting for affiliate marketing, you can also use trending hashtags to boost your content’s reach.
3. Rely on Impactful/Actionable Wording
Depending on how you word your marketing copywriting content, readers will either engage it or look someplace else for relevant content. To do that, you should use as much practical wording in your copywriting for affiliate marketing as possible. You can rely on a tool such as Power Thesaurus to look for inspiring verbs that will entice readers enough to push them toward conversion. Some of the words you can try including in your affiliate marketing content going forward include:
- Superior
- Exceptional
- Long-lasting
- Family-oriented
- State-of-the-art
Using such lingo in your marketing copywriting will undoubtedly help your efforts to engage more readers through written affiliate marketing content. As we’ve mentioned previously, you should only rely on words that represent your product or service truthfully, without embellishing its actual qualities. This will help you build long-term relations and brand reputation with your target audience far better than any click-bait copywriting content could.
4. Copywriting Personalization Sells
It can be argued that personalization is the next big thing when it comes to customer loyalty. According to Medium, 65% of customers agree that personalization influences their brand loyalty, with 59% saying that it also influenced their final purchase decision. You can personalize your marketing copywriting content in a number of ways, starting with personalized pronouns in the text.
Judging by Forbes, 80% of customers like to purchase from brands which provide personalization, with 66% who are disengaged when it comes to non-personalized content. Customers like to be treated as essential parts of your business—which they are, as customers. However, pronouns such as “we,” “us,” and “you” can do wonders to increase that feeling and help sell your products or services.
Personalization can also extend to your research on customer expectations and purchase patterns, which can then be used as a baseline for future content. For example, if your customers are prone to purchasing mystery thriller books from your storefront, these books can be made central to your marketing copywriting. Take audience expectations and needs into consideration when crafting your copywriting for affiliate marketing, and their response will be that much more positive.
5. Solve Your Customers’ Problems
Lastly, customers often want brands to help them solve everyday issues through the content they advertise. This can often be seen in brands that focus on home improvement and personal hygiene products, which directly correlate with improved quality of life. However, given that you most likely operate as a SAAS or eCommerce storefront, you should go about marketing copywriting in a slightly different manner.
Audit your list of products and services and create a list of the things these items can solve for the customer. For example, what can quality makeup products do for young girls who buy them? Once you have the list, you can create headlines for future blog posts and social media updates with those solutions in the forefront. This strategy can be used in a number of industries by simply starting with your list of products and brainstorming the solutions they can provide.
Customers often don’t know that they have a problem that your product or service can solve until they see the advert under your brand’s name. This is a smart psychological trigger which can help seal the deal for your customers through carefully planned copywriting for affiliate marketing.
In Summary
Affiliate marketing is an easy strategy to integrate into your business model, yet it can provide your company with so much long-term value. You can start small and contact micro-influencers to test the waters of affiliate marketing for your business before branching out.
The marketing copywriting you provide your affiliates with can be improved on by the influencers to ensure that their target audiences accept your brand easily. Subsequently, you can gather engagement data and gauge which path to take during the next affiliate marketing campaign.
Go through the list of practical copywriting for affiliate marketing advice we’ve covered previously and see if you can fit them into your business strategy. Whether you’re on a limited budget or already have a network of influencers ready for work, affiliate marketing can transform the way you conduct business.
