What is B2B Affiliate Marketing?
In this style of affiliate marketing, businesses partner with publishers and content creators to promote their software and services in exchange for commissions. Unlike traditional digital marketing strategies that require significant upfront investments, brands only pay for sales and/or mid-funnel conversions. This is why affiliate marketing is considered a performance-based method.
B2B Affiliate Program Strategies
-
Editorial Websites
Industry-specific publications with long-form editorial content tend to have high conversion rates and generally low traffic.
-
SaaS Product Reviews
Large product review platforms get traffic primarily through SEO. The sites generally consist of individual product reviews with user-generated comments, as well as category pages.
-
Influential Thought-Leaders
Small but highly influential traffic sources can sometimes do one-to-one sales with prospects. This can include YouTubers and influencers who may be leaders in their respective fields.
-
Door-to-door Sales Representatives
Hiring boots-on-the-ground sales reps and paying them on a commission basis. While not useful for every business, this is a great way to drive sales for brands targeting brick-and-mortar businesses.
-
Brand-to-brand
The other B2B: brands promoting other brands. Advertising content is usually located in a resource section, blog posts, or even a thank you page after the customer is done purchasing a product.
-
Start-up Resource Sites
Websites and communities catered toward startups (typically pre-seed through series B). These sites can range from showcasing discounted rates for founders to providing resources for networking/accelerators.
-
Product Comparisons
Your standard Top 10 comparison websites. Listicle content with short blurbs about each brand and its pros & cons. Rankings are generally determined by who has the highest eCPC.
-
Email Lists
Agencies can have access to millions of business email addresses. These players can range from brokers, all the way to full agencies with their own creative departments. Agencies are can-spam compliant and can suppress users using third parties like Optizmo.
What are the benefits of launching a B2B affiliate program?
-
Stop spending money on campaigns that don't convert. Unlike pay-per-click or CPM models, you only pay affiliate commissions when there is a sale.
-
By diversifying your marketing portfolio, you can insulate your brand from the risks of volatile and expensive channels like Facebook and Google.
-
As content creators promote your services, it drives interest from all stages of the funnel while boosting your brand's visibility.
How do I know if affiliate marketing is right for my business?
We find that the best results happen for businesses that have strong brand awareness in their niches, high conversion rates on their websites, and organized internal sales processes.
How does it work?
First, brands must identify trusted publishers with influence among decision-makers in their targeted industries. Selected affiliate partners create promotional content for the brand and distribute it across their website(s) or platforms. A unique tracking link is placed within the affiliate content, and when a user clicks through to the brand's site and completes a purchase, the affiliate partner receives a commission.
Designing an affiliate program for a business targeting an enterprise audience requires several considerations that differ from the typical structure of a consumer program.
-
If you’re selling project management software, an interested project manager might read an article, click an affiliate link, and start a free trial. But it doesn’t mean that the project manager will have the final say when it’s time to make the purchasing decision. The CFO might approve the purchase, and the accounting manager may be the one who ultimately supplies payment.
Additionally, many B2B SaaS and service providers have a user flow that requires the user to speak with a salesperson before getting a quote and purchasing the product (e-commerce flows, however, allow the consumer to complete the entire sale in one session).
These flows break apart the traditional affiliate model where a cookie is dropped after an affiliate click and a platform’s JS tag on the shopping cart closes the loop. Instead, the CRM needs to be the ultimate source of truth for a sale (generally marked as a ‘close win’) or any mid-funnel conversions (SQL, booked demo, etc), and affiliate attribution is based on a last-click sign-up. Additionally, attribution for that sign-up is made at the company level, rather than the individual who signed up, as that individual may not be the decision-maker or person who pays for the product. Once the lead has signed up through a form fill or entering a free trial, the CRM will dictate to the affiliate network where that company is during the sales cycle.
-
It is really important that your affiliate platform be able to easily integrate with your CRM. What we’re seeing now is that many platforms, including Everflow, Impact, and ParnterStack, have built CRM integrations in order to better serve B2B brands. One of the main difficulties in integrating with CRMs is that each advertiser will have set up how they use their CRM differently, and most affiliate platforms have very rigid container integrations which makes it hard to map stages, leads, deals, etc. When the CRM is acting as the source of attribution for each marketing channel, and opportunity stages are translating into commissionable events, having any breakage in your CRM / affiliate platform integration can lead to issues with your overall program. And when publishers can be very finicky and have hundreds of other advertisers to potentially promote, you don't want to run into any issue. I've seen several advertisers have to change their affiliate platform due to CRM integration issues, ultimately killing the momentum for their program and pushing back timelines and progress.
-
When it comes to how you want to reward the publisher, there can be some differences as well. If you’re selling an enterprise product that takes a year to close, your publishers might lose their patience waiting to receive their commission, even if it is 10% on a $50k deal. My general rule of thumb:if the sales cycle is 30 days or less, you can get away with paying on a Close Win, especially if your payout is pretty competitive. If the cycle runs longer than 30 days, you’ll want to pay on a higher up event. Paying on a sign up or form fill can be risky and subject your program to fraud. I would look to see what stages in the sales flow exist between a Sign Up and CW to see what you have available. This is easy since the CRM is your source of truth and will already have many different Opportunity Stages for you to look at.
Some common mid-funnel events can be paying on a SQL (a sales rep determines that this is a real lead), or a booked demo (sales rep has made contact with the person and scheduled a time to chat). If the user flow doesn't have a sales rep and instead is based on a Free Trial or Freemium model, there can be options where you pay only if the user has logged into the software 3x. Finally there can be hybrid models where you are paying on both a lower funnel event and close win. This is a great model for publishers who may be high traffic, low conversion players as you want to incentivize them to drive sales but still need to keep them interested.
For SaaS products, one trend we’re seeing is running continual payouts for the lifetime of any customer they refer. This allows a publisher to continually be rewarded for their referral and has the opportunity for that commission value to increase over time —the referral purchases more seats as their company scales. The B2B affiliate world can allow publishers to get a steady paycheck for one referral for years; something we don't see in the B2C world. This makes sense as the B2B affiliate world stems from the Reseller channel where agreements like this are common. It also incentivizes the publisher to have a continuing relationship with the referral to increase their package with the advertiser.
One of the biggest differences between e-commerce and B2B is the revenue potential for affiliates since B2B products tend to sell for significantly more than, say, a pair of jeans. That being said, it’s worth exploring whether affiliate marketing is a viable option for your B2B product.
Adam Westreich - Founder of Westreich Consulting
