Let’s face it: integrating public relations and affiliate marketing can often be a pain point for brands. Your public relations and your affiliate teams might be operating in silos, reaching out to the same publications in a highly competitive market and undercutting your overall strategy. These publications may be easier to activate with a strong commission rate, which brands can offer through the affiliate model. Finally, affiliate marketing agencies often have different contacts than PR agencies, and those contacts may be easier to engage with than traditional reporters. For our clients and our editorial partners, we’ve honed a best practice for these channels to work together. The benefit: by working hand-in-hand, you don’t duplicate efforts, and your marketing team can fill gaps. If one party is struggling, the other can step in to support. On the other hand, if one party has an established relationship, the other can reduce focus there. Our strategy for integrating PR and affiliate marketing is simple but effective, and it depends on three key ingredients.
Communication
When clients bring us on to support a PR strategy and work in concert with their PR agency, the first thing we do is open the lines of communication. With these initial conversations, we want to understand how we can be most helpful in their goals and effective in reaching the brand’s targets. We’re all driving toward the same goals, and establishing robust, transparent communication early on to complement each other’s efforts fortifies that mindset.
Collaboration
Once we’re talking with your PR agency, we can quickly start rowing together in the same direction. We can find out who your PR team is contacting at a certain publication, then get in touch with different writers and creators so there’s no overlap. Or, if they’re having a difficult time reaching editors, we can see if our affiliate contacts have a way in. These complementary angles from a collaborative team often help brands get traction on their one message — streamlined, amplified and much more powerful.
Patience
This type of powerful approach delivers results, but it does take time and consistent outreach. We see the snowball effect happen with many clients, where a publication features a brand once or twice, sees that inclusion can drive commissions and highlights the brand in more roundups. From there, the scale on this strategy is impressive. Just be patient. Breaking down silos has shown success for many of our clients. For one retail client, the AP team utilized relationships with a subaffiliate to engage content partners that the brand’s PR team had struggled to connect with. AP increased the CPA for specific partners through the subaffiliate network, resulting in 33 inclusions across 19 partners and generating $75K in revenue during Q4. With this tried-and-true approach, we’ll keep communicating, collaborating, and driving measurable outcomes. Interested in pairing PR and affiliate marketing for your brand? Get in touch with our team by clicking here.
