NB: This is a guest article by Lee Brignell-Cash, co-founder and COO at FusePump.
In the previous article we looked at channel diversity and how this relates to new opportunities in affiliate marketing, as the discipline continues to grow and evolve.
Now it is time to look in closer detail at developments around product feeds in affiliate marketing, how widgets and new platforms are evolving the wider marketplace and managing partnerships.
In other words, putting the pieces together.
The product feed challenge
With more online travel sites out there than ever before, it is vital a product can be found easily and that the affiliate is able to give the consumer the information they want in one simple, clean hit.
To achieve this, a travel brand can build a product data feed for a specific affiliate marketing application, comprising product information such as the holiday destination, pricing and availability. Applying this data feed across multiple channels and potentially hundreds of affiliates increases complexity by an order of magnitude.
In the past, travel brands have struggled to ensure pricing and availability information included within the feed accurately reflects their package availability on a daily basis. The data feed also becomes unwieldy if it includes too many combinations of different products.
At the same time, affiliates need product level information supplied and structured in different ways. All too often, it is left to the affiliate to extract product information in the format they need to convert it into consumer-facing content.
Inaccurate product information results in a poor consumer experience and damage to the company’s brand. It can also have legal implications if the consumer’s complaint is brought to the attention of a trade or regulatory body.
Moreover, affiliates don’t want to have to wade through huge volumes of product information. This is especially true for those specialising in the long tail, where many sites are managed on a part-time basis.
Data feed technology has therefore evolved, with advanced data extraction and feed creation tools being developed to enable travel brands and affiliates to use data on holiday and hotel packages across a wide range of applications, drive conversion rates and revenue.
Getting tooled up – Widgets, Dynamic Adverts and f-Commerce
By harvesting (among many other elements) pricing, availability and holiday package attributes directly from the travel brand’s website, it is possible to ensure that the extracted data feed is accurate and includes comprehensive product data.
This enables a travel brand to deliver to its affiliates all the elements their online audience may, in turn, be engaged with. Also, because there is no requirement for technical resource from the travel brand, feeds can be generated and deployed quickly and at low cost by extracting the "front end" product-related HTML code from the website, with no requirement for any back end data.
At the same time, affiliates need feed creation and management tools that quickly and accurately convert information carried within a travel brand’s feed into consumer-facing content.
They also require controls for ensuring consistency in ad/brand messaging, as well as filtering out and presenting special offers or engaging content relevant to their target audience.
Creating interactive and engaging advertising content is just as critical in the conversion of the online consumer. Ad and widget creation tools, for example, can allow affiliates to create dynamic advertising solutions that go beyond the simple ‘banner advertising’ concept and enable consumers to engage and select products within the banner.
Facebook Commerce (f-commerce) and social media widgets allow the travel brand to soften their corporate messaging and engage customers with interesting, fun and potentially viral media.
Rich product attributes are also included in the feed allowing for the exploration of some very creative engagement angles. Business logic can also be applied to the feed and API’s created to allow the extraction and combine of data from other sources.
Clear and open channels of communication are just as important in building relationships with affiliates. Many affiliates feel they have limited or zero means of direct communication with their travel brand partners.
The provision of an interactive portal (an ‘affiliate hub’) by the travel brand not only provides easy access to the types of affiliate tools discussed but improves communication and knowledge.
This makes it much easier and more attractive for the affiliate to work with them, eliminating the time it takes to wade through product information, minimising the risk of inaccuracies and increasing conversion rates by making consumer-facing content easier to distribute.
Thomas Cook for example recently launched an ‘affiliate hub’ portal where its online affiliates can access a suite of online marketing tools, as well as the latest information on its products, pricing and availability.
Delivering mutual benefit
Affiliate marketing has been described as a microcosm of the entire digital marketing mix. The complex nature of online channel marketing can certainly bamboozle all but the most tech-savvy. There needs to be investment of time and resource within the channel to make it work over the long term for both travel brands and their affiliates.
Despite high booking values, margins can be very low in travel, meaning the ability to drive traffic and conversion rate is crucial. What’s more, with travel experiencing one of the highest levels of consumer research prior to a purchase being made, it is vital that affiliates are able to display as much rich product information as possible.
This information enables them to become more like online travel agents than simple brochure-style websites.
Product data feeds that are accurate, well structured and rich in information simplify the affiliate proposition by making the distribution of the feed much easier.
When feeds are combined with ‘easy to use’ deployment tools enabling customisation of feeds and the production of dynamic advertising units, they provide a platform for powering the best online product marketing performance.
Once an affiliate starts to generate revenue from the travel brand, they can invest further in the functionality of their site – thus delivering mutual benefit. By making content more engaging and by deep-linking searches to the exact product pages, high-quality data feeds ensure that consumers are able to find what they are searching for and convert better too.
Interactive, dynamic advertising content that uses product feeds adds further functionality that enables consumers to combine different products such as flights, hotels and car hire to create a tailored package and purchase all of the elements directly.
After all, a wasted click is wasted potential revenue for both the affiliate and the travel company!
NB: This is a guest article by Lee Brignell-Cash, co-founder and COO at FusePump.