Affiliate Marketing’s Evolution and What the Future Holds with Michael Cole

Yeah, so affiliate marketing is very interesting. Based on my experience from back in the day when I could go to conferences and get my former coworkers from the agency drunk—many of whom still do affiliate management—my understanding is that a lot of affiliate marketing hasn’t really changed at all. They’re still doing the same things they were doing six or eight years ago. It basically breaks down to an affiliate marketing program being about three major things: you have your coupon sites, your content bloggers and content sites, and your review sites. Those are the three major types of affiliates, with a few other cool opportunities on top of that. Those have made up the backbone of affiliate marketing for a long time.

So I would say that in the past few years, the biggest change is just a rebranding—from affiliate marketing to partner marketing—which I think has been really good for the industry. As a marketer myself, it’s hard because we don’t call ourselves an affiliate marketing platform; affiliate marketing has a bit of a dirty word reputation, with negative connotations of only being about coupon sites, which is somewhat justified. But this rebranding to partner marketing has meant that a lot of the older affiliate networks, like Impact, have broadened the opportunities and made it less about just the core coupon affiliates and more about all the partnerships that can be enabled and how those provide value.

So I think that’s where we’re at right now: we’re in this transition phase of proving that partner marketing is more than just affiliates.

Yeah, so, I mean, obviously eCommerce has grown massively, which is a huge trend. I feel that every successful eCommerce merchant eventually needs affiliate marketing because it scales past what you can do internally by working with people who specialize in driving performance. So I think that’s trend one. Internally, one thing we’ve really focused on is integrations. This is how you evolve from just affiliate marketing to all partnerships: if you’re a B2B company or a SaaS company, the reason Salesforce is successful is not just because its technology is great, but because it integrates with everything. Every company using Salesforce can connect all their other data points and tech platforms, sharing all that data. I think the future of partner marketing is going to be the same—you need your affiliate program feeding into your CRM and your internal data analytics, with that data feeding back. Everflow, like 2020, has been our year to really knock out this process of integrating with different technology partners. I think that’s the transition from affiliate marketing’s past to partner marketing becoming a core part of every brand.

I mean, it’s like, why not? Salesforce prints money—their revenue numbers are insane. They’re doing billions and billions of revenue every single year, and Slack will grow a lot faster selling their product to Salesforce customers. And Salesforce has the money to do whatever they please.

I got two IPOs, basically because I have a friend who’s an engineer at Slack, and they IPO’d and then got acquired just now. So that’s two paydays.

Yeah, so I think that 2021 will be a really interesting year for influencer marketing on a performance basis. If you think about this year, a lot of influencers are pretty spoiled with easy brand money, where they get paid a ridiculous amount for a single Instagram post or whatever. A lot of that money washed up during 2020 because, when there’s a downturn, the first thing that gets cut is brand awareness dollars—and a lot of that goes to influencers. So this year, many influencers have been experimenting with running campaigns on a performance basis, sort of a hybrid of brand awareness and performance. I think that in 2021, the ones seeing success will start running more campaigns, and there will be a lot of opportunities to really ramp up influencers as one of your major partnership channels.

Yeah, on that, I was gonna say one more thing. It’s not just the influencer making this decision. Most influencers now are part of these giant influencer marketplaces, so there’s a lot of up-and-coming companies having success there. And from our perspective, we have a lot of ongoing partnerships and integrations with these marketplaces. They may have had very bare-bones performance tracking before, but now they need a robust tracking solution for their customers. And it makes sense for us to get this going.

That is interesting. It’s much harder to say—my advice is: don’t be an affiliate marketer. It’s really hard, and it just gets more challenging every year. In terms of being a brand, affiliate marketing is an awesome way to continue to grow your business once you’ve had some success with other channels. But being an affiliate marketer is super hard, and not many people can do it well. The ones that can do it well tend to continue building their businesses bigger and bigger.

Yeah, let me mention one exception to that rule: I still think there’s a ton of opportunity to become a B2B affiliate marketer. This is sort of like the in-between, because really, you should be doing it on a partnership basis—building the partnership with the brand you want to promote. You’re getting set up with some sort of upfront payment plus a rev share deal, and then you’re building yourself as a B2B influencer on LinkedIn. There’s definitely a ton of opportunity there. It’s always really hard to find good marketers who can drive performance for B2B SaaS companies.

One thing I’ll mention is that if you want to do LinkedIn marketing really well, my hack would be to check out the LinkedIn page for gong.io. This is a sales intelligence company, and they’re insanely good at LinkedIn. They had an interview on another podcast where they mentioned that about 80% of their inbound leads come from organic LinkedIn. So if you want to learn how to do LinkedIn right, see how they do it—empowering employees to become influencers, posting really interesting content that reflects their brand, and then driving people to LinkedIn posts with anchors like “Learn the seven tips to sell success. Click here,” which then takes you to their email sign-up on their website. I just think they have a master class on becoming a B2B influencer, and there are a ton of hungry brands for you to be an affiliate promoting on the B2B side.

Yeah, I would say that podcasts have kind of filled in for my reading because what I really want is that one major insight from each book, and podcasts are awesome for providing that one insight. They’ve kind of filled that gap, but I do read.

I’ll answer both though. So my favorite podcast—the one I recommend for this audience—is the B2B Marketing Podcast with the CMO at Privy. There’s like 12 episodes. There’s an episode about Gong, which is where I learned how successful they are with LinkedIn. But he’s really good because we’ve been doing Fireside Chats ourselves, and I’ve been trying to get to a point where, while there’s a ton of content for people just starting out in the industry, there’s very little about, once you’re successful, how to take it to the next level. I really like any podcasting content that sits in that middle ground—covering the logistics of managing multiple employees, how to inspire them, and once you start doing paid marketing, how to actually optimize it. Those topics are much harder to find, and this B2B CMO podcast nails it.

And for book recommendations, the first one that came to mind is the best book on all things PR—it’ll help you understand everything that’s happened in the last four years with the Trump presidency and all that. It’s called Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It’s a master class on PR and about how to use controversy and outrage to get huge press attention. It doesn’t have to be aggressive or outrageous; you just have to realize that the news industry works by having a headline hook that draws in a ton of viewership, because each writer is judged by how many people view their articles. So if you pitch a journalist an article with a unique insight or a topic that will spark strong opinions, it’s much easier to get their attention. I personally tested this book’s theory with a Kickstarter back when Kickstarters were hot—we did one for my parents’ video game hero and raised about $409,000. The way I pitched publications was by giving them a headline and outlining how the interview would support that headline. It was really effective and super educational for PR.

He’s super interesting, for sure.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, and for me, as long as there was a Babel Fish translator so I could understand them, I’d probably choose three random people from different eras—like someone from the 1600s, someone from 1100, and someone from 100 BC. I’m always fascinated by how history doesn’t work the way we think it does. One example that really got me obsessed with history is this incredible book about the Mongols—I think it’s called The Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. At one point, the Mongols conquered China and the Middle East, and then they got into Europe. By the time they reached Europe, the Europeans were convinced the Mongols had dragons because, by then, the Mongols had flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and cannons. We tend to think of technological progress as following a video game chronology, but in reality, different parts of the world had vastly different technologies and experiences.

It would be fascinating to see what life was really like back then. Plus, the world was global much faster than we imagine—people were traveling across continents as early as 500 AD, which blows my mind because I don’t really know what that world looked like. Every time I uncover one of these insights, I’m like, “Oh, wow—this is totally different from what I realized.”

Yes, you can always just go to our website—we always have chat available, so it’s easy to reach our team. You can email me directly at michael@everflow.io; I’m always happy to answer any questions. The other best way to follow us is to go to LinkedIn and follow Everflow. On LinkedIn, we’re always producing regular content and talking with really interesting people. Last week, we talked with Matt Santos of NP Excel, which is Neil Patel’s SEO agency, and I learned more about SEO in that one hour than I have in the last five years. We’ve been getting really great content, and it’s very easy to learn—just very digestible.

Thank you. Have a wonderful day. This is really great.