Marketing is a team effort, but when it comes to effectively driving growth and expanding your reach, you’ll often have to team up with folks outside of your organization. That’s where affiliate marketing for B2B marketers comes in.
Affiliate or partner marketing is a powerful marketing strategy that can boost the reach of your content, expand your engagement with new audiences, and ultimately help you grow your revenue.
But how can you set up an affiliate marketing webinar program? Well, we explore this in the post below. Read on to learn more.
What is an affiliate marketing webinar?
Affiliate marketing is simply promoting a product or service with another brand. Often, this can be done in return for a commission via lead sharing or a share of profits from sales. It’s a collaborative strategy that raises brand awareness and helps you reach new markets.
However, if you want to run a successful affiliate program, you will need to engage your affiliate partners on a regular basis. These recurring meetings will help keep them engaged with your brand and educated on new developments within your business.
Why use webinars in affiliate marketing?
The great thing about webinars is their flexibility. They can be adapted to suit pretty much any purpose within your affiliate marketing program. Webinars make it easy to share and distribute new product information and brochures, host a networking session for existing partners, train or onboard new affiliates or facilitate an Q&A with a subject matter expert relevant to participating partners.
But how do you set up an affiliate program? Here are five tips to consider as you bring webinars into your affiliate program.
5 tips for running an effective, engaging affiliate webinar
1. Decide who you’re speaking to (and what you’re going to promote)
Great planning makes all the difference when it comes to producing effective webinars. So, before you get caught up in the finer details, work out your goals for any planned virtual event, session or summit.
For example, if you have a new product line you need to educate partners on, you may want to create a virtual training webinar series. This means recruiting subject matter experts from your product team, aligning with your messaging strategists and setting up a webinar template that you can use to cover different aspects of your new product line.
It’s a lot of work, but when all is said and done, you’ll know your affiliate network has the resources it needs to market and promote your brand, plus you’ll be able to scale this educational resource to additional markets as needed. As an added bonus, you can even provide certifications to your affiliates.
Regardless of what you do, make sure your webinars contain two key elements:
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- They address a specific problem facing your affiliate partners (like problems they’re facing in messaging or understanding your service).
- Engagement tools that they can use to provide feedback, ask you questions and overall deepen their relationship with your brand (more on this in a moment).
2. Decide whether you’re going live, simulive or on-demand
Building on the first point, you need to decide whether your webinar will be live, on-demand or simulive. This decision will largely depend on your planning and what the purpose of the event is.
Let’s take a look at each of these now.
Live webinars
Live webinars are great for product launches or general announcements. This format can also encourage participant engagement and help you more easily gather feedback through polls, Q&As, live chat and more.
On-demand webinars
Pushing on-demand webinars, by contrast, is a good strategy when you want to produce evergreen content, like a virtual training course or an overview of your company, for affiliates. Like live webinars, these events can collect and gather engagement metrics that you can use to empower your affiliate partners.
Simulive webinars
Simulive webinars borrow elements from both live and on-demand webinars, often offering producers the ability to run pre-recorded webinars with live elements, like engagement tools and virtual breakout rooms included. This is particularly useful have a big keynote presentation or update you want to give to attendees.
Keep in mind that you don’t always have to choose one or another. Any live or simulive webinar can also be published as an on-demand event. You can also rerun on-demand webinars as “live” if you have a representative answering questions in chat.
3. Bring a thought leader into the fold
A respected thought leader or subject matter expert can be a huge draw for professionals and, in some cases, can be a minor celebrity in their own right. Look for thought leaders who are either familiar with your product or service, have interesting industry insights or have experience with the central theme of your event.
Keep in mind that thought leaders can do more than simple presentations. Q&A webinars, workshops and interactive breakout discussions are all possible with the right webinar solution. Still, make sure you talk with your SME and agree on the format they’d most prefer and, if you’re running a virtual summit, how involved they’d want to be in your event from a partner or sponsor perspective.
4. Promote your affiliate marketing webinar effectively
Every webinar needs a promotional strategy — even webinars for affiliates. So make sure you plan to connect with your affiliates in the run-up to your webinar.
There are a few ways you can go about promoting your webinar to affiliate partners. These can include:
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- Email nurtures
- Newsletters
- Social media promotions
- Promotion on popular forums
- Embedded CTAs in on-demand webinars
Check out our six-month event planning timeline contains easy-to-follow guidance on bringing your promotional plan together, while our event planning checklist will provide you with step-by-step tasks and prompts to help you get the most from your experience.
5. Make your webinar as interactive as possible
Webinars are great engagement engines and provide you with the opportunity to directly deepen relationships with affiliate partners, evaluate overall sentiment and gather feedback. So, give your affiliates everything they need to interact quickly and easily with your host and team through powerful engagement tools embedded into your webinars.
Some engagement tools you’ll want to consider are:
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- Polls
- Post-event surveys
- Live Chat
- Q&A
- Resource lists
- Speaker bios
- Certifications
- Book-a-meeting
- And CTA windows
Engagement tools are most effective when you plan to use them ahead of time. For example, you can use in-session polls to get immediate feedback on some of the key points in your presentation – then leverage a content repurposing strategy to incorporate this data into future content such as blogs or e-books.
When planning your webinar, consider which tools you’ll want to use, when you’ll want to push them and measure how much engagement they’ve generated.
And that’s it! Running an affiliate webinar program involves planning, measuring and optimizing. Make sure you take the time to work with your partners to deepen your relationship — good luck!
