Affiliate Marketing Instead of Viral? Why Is It Drawing So Much Attention?

Is Affiliate Marketing the New Trend?

Hello! I'm Luna, a marketer at Spray, bringing you useful marketing insights.

Are you familiar with affiliate marketing, which is gaining increasing demand for US market entry?

Brands that previously focused on seeding are now looking for marketing methods that can verify actual sales performance due to the ambiguity of performance measurement.

As this desire for sales visibility grows, more and more brands are preferring 'affiliate marketing' as one solution.

In line with these changes, this article will examine affiliate marketing strategies that are gaining attention in the US market.

Why Is Everyone Doing Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based online marketing strategy.

Simply put, it's a structure where affiliate partners promote a company's products or services and receive commissions for sales or actions generated through their recommendations.

From a brand perspective, it's evaluated as a highly efficient performance-based marketing method since you don't pay advertising costs upfront but only pay commissions when sales occur.

Fundamentally, 'viral marketing' style influencer marketing has the limitation of weak connections between content performance and sales performance.

Successful affiliate marketing can overcome these limitations.

The purposes of affiliate marketing can be broadly summarized into three categories.

First is sales channel diversification.

Beyond brand official websites or accounts, multiple partners introduce products through their respective channels, helping to expand touchpoints with potential customers and increase sales.

The more affiliate partners you have, the more potential customers you can connect with.

Second is enhancing brand awareness and credibility.

Consumers tend to trust recommendations from acquaintances or familiar influencers more than messages directly from brands.

Such recommendations are effective in building brand credibility, and as mentioned earlier, promotion through partners also contributes to increased brand awareness.

While this effect also appears in general seeding, affiliate marketing content delivers more detailed messages from a sales perspective (competitive advantages, reasons to buy now, etc.).

Third is cost efficiency.

Affiliate marketing can start without upfront costs and only incurs expenses when actual results occur, allowing even small brands to deploy marketing without risk.

Since you can promote brands through local influencers and conduct marketing without initial cost burden, it's natural that affiliate marketing gains popularity.

A Brand That Settled in the US Market with $0 in Advertising Costs

So are there brand cases that achieved notable results in the US market?

Korean skincare brand 'COSRX' introduced a TikTok affiliate program for US market strategy and achieved successful results through this.

COSRX operates an affiliate program called 'COSRX Affiliate Club' by entering both their official Shopify site and TikTok Shop.

1. First, they recruited micro-influencers with over 1,000 TikTok followers, provided samples, and encouraged TikTok content creation using these products.

2. Subsequently, influencers posted purchase links when uploading content, and the brand paid commissions proportional to sales generated through those links.

3. They also introduced an incentive tier system providing higher commission rates to top performers, boosting influencers' participation motivation.

4. As a result, COSRX secured an influencer pool based on TikTok and effectively promoted their brand to US consumers through their promotion.

If You Want to Do Affiliate Marketing, Pay Attention to 'This Season'!

Now let's examine specific strategies for brands to actually utilize affiliate marketing.

To maximize affiliate marketing efficiency, you must strategically utilize major US promotional seasons.

Particularly, year-end shopping periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are times that not only affiliate marketers but all brands considering US market entry shouldn't miss.

These periods see the highest brand sales of the year, and since most products offer large-scale discounts, consumer demand explodes for items they've been watching all year.

Accordingly, purchase conversion rates tend to be higher than usual during these periods.

Therefore, if you secure brand awareness through influencer marketing before US promotional seasons begin, the possibility of consumers choosing our products during those periods becomes much greater.

What's the Successful Affiliate Operation Method?

To conduct affiliate marketing, you first need to select appropriate platforms.

Representative options include TikTok Shop, Shopify, Amazon Affiliate, etc. You can proceed by issuing multiple affiliate codes on channels that can combine with your brand's current expansion strategy and distributing them to influencers.

The next step is designing affiliate marketing's revenue structure.

You need to motivate partners to be active while setting reasonable commission rates considering your brand's margin structure.

Generally, commissions are set at about 10%, but for low-price, high-volume products, they're sometimes adjusted to 5% or below.

Also, like the COSRX case, providing additional incentives to high-performing influencers can encourage more active participation.

From an affiliate marketing operation perspective, providing advance guidelines is essential.

Since brands have limited areas they can directly control, you must clearly communicate campaign schedules, prohibitions, etc., in advance to prevent influencer content from damaging brand image or distorting messages.

Additionally, announcing operational rules like minimum payment thresholds and commission handling methods for refunds can prevent unnecessary disputes.

Affiliate Partner Selection Strategy for Efficient Campaigns

Once you've completed all preparations for conducting campaigns including timing and operational methods, the final and most important part is recruiting affiliate partners to work with on campaigns.

First, you must define influencer profiles that can effectively deliver brand messages to target customers.

Once you've decided what style of influencers to collaborate with, it's time to actually select affiliate partners.

When selecting partners, you should prioritize follower loyalty and content suitability over follower count.

At this point, rather than relying on a few famous mega-influencers, the strategy of discovering and broadly collaborating with multiple micro-influencers is more effective.

While major influencers have broad fan bases, their interactions with followers are relatively shallow, whereas micro-influencers are deeply connected to specific interest communities, resulting in higher purchase conversion rates.

Additionally, since marketing opportunities increase with more content, working with multiple micro-influencers is effective.