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Performance marketing is the buzzword of 2023 (Wall Street Journal) in the social media space because of today’s macroeconomic pressures. In performance marketing, marketers focus on driving specific actions such as clicks, sign-ups, or purchases, rather than simply increasing brand awareness.
Marketers then use this measurement and analysis to make data-driven decisions and distribute their budget more effectively. With that, brands of all sizes are making the daunting step of embracing performance marketing tools and strategies for their ambassador / creator partnerships. Why?
Performance Marketing has Measurable Results
Performance marketing allows social media marketers to measure the success of their creator campaigns more accurately. In social media, performance marketing is entirely reliant on affiliate links, discount links, and discount codes to capture social attribution (up until the launch of LoudCrowd’s Creator Storefronts). Marketers then track metrics such as clicks, conversions, and revenue, and use this data to optimize their partnerships in real-time. For the CMO, having concrete data to reference, makes it much easier to justify future investments with particular influencers and campaigns.
Performance Marketing is Cost Efficient
Performance marketers prioritize paying partners who drive tangible clicks, sales, and sign-ups. Social media marketers do this by offering creators commissions for sales driven through affiliate links or discount codes. For brands, affiliate marketing is essentially risk free because they only pay out commissions to their social creators after the product has been purchased. As budgets fluctuate this year, allocating dollars towards pay-for-performance programs is imperative to every marketer’s strategy.
Despite all of this, performance marketing doesn’t actually have to be scary. LoudCrowd can help with a variety of different tools.
Ambassador & Affiliate Programs at Scale
LoudCrowd enables brands to infinitely scale their ambassador programs through best in class automations.
Industry giants with lean teams use LoudCrowd’s technologies for their best-in-class creator programs:
- boohoo – student ambassador program
- Wayfair – interior designers program
- Kyte Baby – all mother’s program
- Jersey Mike’s – all customer program
A single social media manager, with the help of LoudCrowd, partners their brand with thousands of creators instantly, offering them free product, discounts, and site credits in exchange for UGC and driving sales.
Specifically to performance marketing, LoudCrowd enables brands to automatically create and deliver affiliate links and discount codes to incoming creators. The end result is an army of social affiliates converting their Instagram & TikTok audiences into customers.
Some of the top businesses in the world get between 5-30% of their entire revenue from social creators. The percentage is even higher as the size of the brand decreases. More often than not, brands of all sizes are either manually running affiliate marketing programs or using legacy technologies that lack scale and automation. With LoudCrowd’s scalable ambassador and affiliate programs, the job not only becomes much easier, but the return is exponentially higher because more affiliates = more sales.
Performance marketing doesn’t have to be hard or scary with the help of LoudCrowd’s best in class affiliate automations and scale.
Ambassador Storefronts on your eCommerce
Even with performance and affiliate marketing strategies in place, eCommerce brands still have a big problem. Despite all of this traffic and importance, on average, social media traffic does not convert relative to other channels. And it is getting worse (down 20% in 2022). The disconnect is the shopping experience. On social media, people discover products and get inspired by creators and other people. No one searches for “shoes” on Instagram, you discover a pair of shoes from someone you are following. Creators drive traffic and provide the inspiration.
However, when someone is inspired by a creator and lands on the eCommerce site, the context completely changes. No longer is the consumer delighted with a creator-centric experience (which is why they are there). Instead, the consumer has to shift context and begin shopping by product categories. The results speak for themselves.
To solve this, we transform your eCommerce into a “creator-centric” platform. Each creator driving traffic receives their own customizable page which includes their profile, content that they’ve created, and favorite products. Traffic arrives to a shopping experience tailored uniquely to their social experience.
Ambassador Storefront Results
The results should make any performance marketer drool:
- It radically improves conversion rates for traffic generated through creators. Our brands, with Storefronts, have experienced 3.24% average conversion rates, which is 4 times the industry average.
- It drives up the AOV for consumers, since they want to shop all of the creator’s picks. Shopify cites that product bundles can increase AOV by 60%. Letting your creators build product bundles for you radically scales one of your most powerful conversion tools.
- It creates tremendous excitement and alignment with the creator – affiliate retention is instantly boosted. What is cooler than having your own storefront on the brand’s site?
The implementation of these storefronts is easy, with LoudCrowd’s technology automatically generating pages whenever a new creator signs up. On top of that, you have the option to give anyone a Storefront, like influencers or your ordinary customers.
Amazon, Walmart, and Target, some of the world’s leading brands have all proven that the creator-centric, Storefront experience is the direction eCommerce is moving in. With LoudCrowd’s ability to automate such pages, at a cost effective price, it should be a no brainer addition to your performance marketing strategy.
Conclusion
With LoudCrowd’s ability to automate the process of setting up affiliate links and creator storefronts, performance marketing doesn’t have to be hard or scary. Partner with us and leverage our best-in-class tools to make data-driven decisions and allocate your budget more effectively.
