webmaster world
B3y0nd the Numb3rs Three steps to powering your affiliate business for the next decade. With our traditional marketing based on SEO, PPC and occasional forays into online media, as an industry, our focus has been on traffic management. Who can blame us when all we see of the hard earned customers we acquire is their backs as they fly past our door and into the operators, earning us another conversion click? From thereon in, we wait with bated breath for that click to turn into an action or deposit or wager depending on the deal we have with the operator they have chosen. Our focus is spent on evaluating effective earnings per click, analysing traffic sources, the conversion numbers they generate, and the prominence we give to each operator on our sites. Sometimes, we go so far as to look at the design and branding on our site and the overall customer, but most of the time it’s the numbers that keep us busy and focused. This is sound business practice, but is this enough for an industry that’s now been doing the same thing for over a decade? In that decade, the dominance of www has been threatened by social media and Smartphones. Our target audiences, however, are still searching and looking for our operators’ products so we continue to battle it out amongst ourselves and with operators to grab a share of search and capture the click. In our industry, the focus is all about the metrics and the results they produce. A decade later, we find ourselves still unable to predict beyond six months of certainty. We confidently assert that this uncertainty is the nature of the Internet. After all, who knows what tomorrow brings in a Web 2.0 world? Our obsession with the platform of delivery, the metrics we use to measure our activity on the platform and our business model keeps us blind to the key ingredient in the mix: the customer. It’s partly a fault of our business model. We assume we have nothing of value to trade with the customer. We view the customer as a click; a number, a percentage that affects the metric that obsesses us. We lose sight of the motivation that drives the customer to search for, and then click on, our link and then onto the operator we recommend. We view the ad text and organic ranking position as the prime customer motivators and our battles centre around the race to the top. Unfortunately for us, it’s not a free race. Time and
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iGB Affiliate decemeber/january 2010/11
money are the key elements required to fuel the engines for the race. Working in small teams or even as individuals, these commodities are in scarce supply so we focus all our time and our money on this small area to stay in the race. So how do we evolve our business and have a plan for the future? The first step is an old marketing maxim:
Know thy customer You have a very limited window to start trading with your customer once they hit your site. The fear of disrupting the customer journey to the key objective: clicking to an operator, obsesses us. Have you considered the following basics? ●● Can you offer them an extra incentive to register with you? ●● Can you use this database to run incentivised surveys? The database should focus on the customer consumption patterns and lifestyle to help you segment your audience. Rather than build an ad-hoc survey that provides meaningless data, the recommendation would be to use the services of a cost effective consultant to analyse your business and create a customer strategy that suits the market you operate in, the customers you target and the operators you have relationships with. The consultants chosen ought to be gaming experienced but must have at least 10-15 years of classical consumer marketing experience to deliver an effective solution for you. Doing it yourself, if you do not have the background or skill set, may result in a fruitless exercise and distract you from your prime expertise in traffic management. Choosing your consultants poorly will result in a ‘me-too’ approach. The next step focuses on an area that we overlook: differentiation and stepping away from a me-too position.
Why would a customer choose me? In our race to the top, we depend on the customer picking one of the top three or five links on the page they are viewing to be sufficient enough to deliver us the click. However, if we have sufficient knowledge of our customer and even a database we can market to, our customer strategy activity will give us direction to turn ourselves from being hunted for, into
becoming the hunter of customers. To do this, we need to create a differentiated and relevant reason for customers to engage with our message and take us up on our suggestions. As the gaming industry matures, most customers have experience of affiliate portals and sites and when the brand names are taken away there is very little to differentiate the masses from each other. They just become a list of offers that are supported with some information ‘hooks’ to appear impartial and capture the customer click. We can only build relevant differentiation from our competitor sets once we know our customers, understand the motivation for their searches, understand their consumption patterns and create content that meets them at their point of need. This activity can only be driven once you have a clear strategy for understanding your customer. The last step is crucial and will crystallise the efforts in the above two steps into tangible revenue and profit. Our intrinsic belief is that if we have enough volume we will have operators at our beck and call vying for our attention. True, but as the operator gets more attuned to multiple sources of traffic, the emergence of social media and the power of TV advertising, our income tends to be derived from smaller operators who are very dependent on affiliate-driven traffic. When TV campaigns are run, we sometimes have to compromise on our revenue positions to accept lower deals for a slice of the halo effect, recognising that we are not the driver of traffic here. It’s not a two way relationship at play, and often, we stay away from the operator. When we hear the phone ring or get an email we think ‘here they go again’. We assume they are contacting us to either lower our commission or to ask us to divert more traffic unprofitably to them. Its time to get proactive.
Deal with your operator as you would have them deal with you Relationship management is a skill set that is vital to a successful affiliate business. We need to develop an effective relationship with affiliate managers and directors who often move from one operator to the next. This relationship must transcend the night at the bar, at a conference or an industry event.