According to a recently published study, brands that use affiliate marketing to promote their products or services are trusted significantly more than those that use other digital marketing strategies such as email marketing, social media marketing or even display advertising.
The study surveyed 1128 online shoppers and 206 bloggers (who don’t use affiliate marketing to monetize their sites) a series of questions. Each of the people surveyed already had a basic understanding of what affiliate marketing was.
When asked what type of marketing they felt was the most effective, the results looked like this:
- Social media marketing – 33%
- Email marketing – 21%
- Search engine marketing – 16%
- Affiliate marketing – 13%
- Display advertising – 6%
- Other – 11%
This shows that affiliate networks may need to do some more work educating people about just how effective affiliate marketing can be. As most PMI readers already know, when done properly, affiliate marketing can drive huge numbers. In addition, social media, email and search marketing are all tools used with affiliate marketing, so that may have some impact on the results of this question.
More interestingly, however, is when the survey provided people with a list of 50 well-known brands and retailers. The list was made up of half brands that used affiliate marketing, and half that did not. Based on that list, they were asked to score each company on a scale of 1-10 regarding how trustworthy and reliable they perceived them to be.
In the results, all the brands that did not use affiliate marketing averaged a score of 5.7 out of 10. Those who do participate in affiliate marketing, however, got a 7.7 out of 10. That means they scored over 33% higher than the non-affiliate companies.
The survey was done by Optimus Performance Marketing, which is a UK based affiliate marketing agency, which does draw into question the objectiveness of the study. It seems, however, that they did what they could to get honest answers from the people they surveyed. Whatever the case, it is good to see another example of performance marketing in a positive light. Learn how to generate leads in Affiliate Marketing Here
