Identifying Cross-Channel Synergies in Affiliate

Successful marketing puts the customer journey at the center of strategy. In an omnichannel framework, each marketing channel serves as a lever to drive brand outcomes through unique KPIs and investment structures.

The beauty of the affiliate channel? Affiliate publishers engage with consumers at every stage of the journey–complementing, activating, and amplifying outcomes for all marketing channels—and we encourage you to use them that way! Affiliate can be the hero of your omnichannel marketing efforts, allowing other marketing channels to tap into its inherent performance-based efficiency, accountability, and transparency. That’s what we call channel amplification.

In this article, we’ll match affiliate publisher types with marketing channels, give some examples of how to use them in omnichannel efforts for your brand, and talk about the CJ tools that can help you along the way.

Find Cross-Channel Synergies for Your Brand

Just like certain marketing channels lend themselves to stages in the customer journey, so do affiliate publishers! Use the chart below to identify the publishers that match the marketing channel you'd like to amplify throughout each stage of the customer journey. The combinations are endless, but they’re always measurable and always performance-based.

* Publishers can fall under multiple stages, these are just a sampling of their capabilities.

Check out these examples of how you could use the publisher types listed above to amplify other marketing channels:

• Your social team has been tasked to reach niche communities for a product launch, but they’ve maxed out their budget. You can use affiliate to tap into content sites and influencers to be that trusted voice—and you can do so efficiently.
• Pair browser extension partners with conversion-focused teams like UX and merchandising to help increase overall conversion rates.
• Have discussions with teams that consideration-focused teams like search and email to determine how you can incorporate review or comparison sites into their strategy.

How CJ Can Help You Amplify Your Digital Marketing Channels

CJ has a great suite of tools to identify new opportunities and synergies with other marketing channels:

Recruit Partners: Search for new partners that tap into cross-channel synergies with CJ’s Recruit Partners tool. Use search terms like email, site optimization, podcast, and sustainability to find partners who have the power to amplify the other channels in your brand’s digital marketing stack. Or filter by property type to identify new social or paid SEM/display partners. 

Competitive Benchmarking: Did you know CJ's Competitive Benchmarking dashboard can be used to run an on-demand gap analysis? Visit the YoY Change tab, select Breakdown by Partner, and add your brand/the applicable category to the view. This will show you which partners are performing well with your competitors—these are strong candidates for channel amplification efforts!

Campaigns: Considering a campaign with a flat fee payment? Use CJ’s Campaigns tool to forecast lift and incrementality. Track important KPIs like revenue and ROAS to demonstrate the impact of these partnerships on other channels' efforts.

Cross Channel Journey Analysis: Looking to measure the impact of your omnichannel efforts? Cross Channel Journey Analysis presents the full picture of shopping journeys across marketing channels, measuring all touchpoints before purchase—and it’s available to all CJ advertisers, on demand.

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Get ready to tap into the added value affiliate brings to help all channels meet their goals!