As we hinted at in the introduction, an affiliate represents your brand. Your brand could be a product or a service or even a person. Celebrities are individuals, but they are also their own brand. The goal of an affiliate marketing partner is to represent the brand and get paid in return for promoting it. This is the basic give-and-take relationship between an affiliate and a brand.

Now, let’s talk a bit about what a brand is. When we think about brands, we traditionally think of big names, like Coca Cola, Nike, Samsung or Apple. All of these brands represent a group of products, and some also offer services. Some brands, like Disney or Niagara Falls or the San Francisco Zoo are called hybrid brands – a combination of products and services, but essentially an “experience.” When you take a Viking Cruise or board a United Airlines jet you are not actually buying a product that you can own, but rather you are paying for an experience.

People can be brands, too. Perhaps the most obvious example is Michael Jordan. Remember Air Jordans? Nike made millions from selling a simple shoe, merely by associating the shoe with a famous name. In this example there are two brands at play – Michael Jordan the athlete and Nike the shoe company. In this particular case, even though Michael Jordan is himself a brand, he is also an affiliate insofar as he is promoting the Jordan-branded shoes sold by Nike.

I could keep going with various examples, but I think you get the point. In today’s world, there is are many brand types, ranging from a simple product like an iPhone or a combination of products and services like Disney to a micro-brand like a local boy band—you name it. Every one of the brand examples I have mentioned so far are promoted by someone.

If a marketing agency is promoting a brand directly, that is called direct marketing. However, if a person or another company is promoting a brand, the promoter is called a brand ambassador or a spokesperson or an affiliate. Whatever the case, when a brand gets promoted by a third party, someone does it and money exchanges hands. Affiliate marketing management is, essentially, the oversight of that process.

Now that we have discussed what affiliate marketing is, we should talk a little about affiliate marketing management software. This category of software is relatively new, even though affiliate marketing has existed for a while. Historically, most affiliate marketing management software has been offered by small, specialized software companies. However, with the rise of the channel and the evolution of partner-driven marketing and selling, affiliate marketing is now being recognized as a more mainstream software category, and organizations like ZINFI have begun to develop affiliate marketing management software as part of a more comprehensive package of channel management tools.

I have written on this topic before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about the various capabilities of affiliate marketing  management software, but here are its core functions:

I think you can see even from this brief overview how powerful affiliate marketing can be as a tool for amplifying your brand and extending your reach. The goal of affiliate marketing management software is to enable you to conduct these activities in a methodical and structured way. In addition to streamlining the workflows, the software can also help you to identify who is performing well, determine why, decide which campaigns you should focus on for a deeper dive, and understand how everything fits together. But the most fundamental purpose of this software is to give you higher ROI at a much faster rate.

In other articles we will discuss how to select affiliate marketing management software. There are a lot of choices out there, but based on the products and solutions you are promoting there are basically three types of software you need to evaluate and make sure they fit your business. Please keep an eye out for follow-up articles in this area.

For more information, please check this article.