Lee-Ann is once again joined on the podcast by an affiliate marketing peer ready to share their insights. This week, PerformanceMarketingJOBS founder, Mike Carney is discussing with Lee-Ann what makes an ideal affiliate marketing manager.
They are going over hard versus soft skills, what makes the ideal candidate on paper and if there is even a demand for affiliates. Spoiler: there is!
Click the link below to hear all the advice. And if you are interested in learning about the variety of jobs in the performance marketing industry, reach out to Mike via LinkedIn.
So, what does it take to become a player in the affiliate marketing industry? We’re breaking down some of the key points from Lee-Ann and Mike’s discussion to develop a simple guide for potential affiliate marketing managers to follow.
What qualifications do you need?
According to Lee-Ann and Mike, none really. However, some specialisms would be welcome. But ultimately what is valued in affiliate marketing is experience.
Lee-Ann said: “If you want to be a great candidate ask great questions and go and do the due diligence that you need to do in order to get into this industry. Because there is no certification, you don’t have to have a degree in X, Y, Z to be an affiliate marketer. A good, solid background in terms of a degree or a digital marketing diploma or certificate from a university or a college is fine. It’ll give you the grounding, but ultimately everything that you learned in that degree is going to be completely different in real life.”
This might be because it is overall still quite a new industry, and extremely quick to change, therefore your education might well be out of date by the time you get the chance to use it.
What skills do you need?
Well, as it turns out, it’s less about anything you can stick on a certificate and more about who you are as a person.
Mike has some insight there, saying: “Between affiliate managers and salespeople and people who are involved with digital marketing agencies, the commonality between all of them is that they’re, they’re smart people. … I think probably the most important quality, if you want to be an affiliate manager, is you have to love to learn.”
Lee-Ann responded: “I love that because you’ve touched on that point so well. I think to be a good affiliate manager, it’s less of the hard skills. More of the soft skills. It’s more of the desire to want to learn. The challenge of changing the way that you think about doing campaigns, about how you relationship manage people.”
The hope of skill shortage
As Lee-Ann pointed out, there are a lot staff in the tech and digital industry who have been very recently made redundant. Between Twitter’s shenanigans and tech giants like Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google tightening the belt they let loose after Covid, there are a lot of people in the tech industry looking for a job, and there might be hope found in the affiliate marketing industry.
Mike said: “Well, there actually is a huge demand right now and the reason why [is that] there’s a skill shortage for experienced, performance, marketing focused, professionals.”
“And the reason for that, to a grand extent, is that when Covid hit in March of 2020, basically everybody was forced to buy online. So the online content consumption, e-commerce, exploded. But the biggest difference was people who were not buying online were forced to learn how to shop for their groceries and how to buy stuff for their house. So, you sell to a lot of people investing heavily in home and health. So the amount of, uh, opportunity revenue opportunities for companies that were in the online space was phenomenal.”
So, as long as you have the skills to handle affiliate marketing, the opportunity is definitely there.
If you are interested in more affiliate and social media marketing insights, take a look at our blog for all the latest news and advice. Or for a more personalised approach, book a free call with a member of our team.
Or, for the very best advice from industry peers, sign up to gain access to our Amplify Virtual Summit. Download or stream our Amplify event which aims to bring you the latest affiliate, performance, and partner marketing insights from across the globe. Don’t miss it.
Listen to find out more about:
- The pitfalls of looking for staff in affiliate marketing
- The effects of Covid on eCommerce
- The demand for skilled affiliate marketing managers
- The importance of a clear and straightforward CV
Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune into go direct
[05:00] – The most important quality to being an affiliate marketing manager
[10:00] – The difference between US and UK affiliate marketing
[15:00] – Marketing the affiliate marketer
[20:00] – Advice to redundant affiliate industry professionals
[30:00] – Learning on the affiliate marketing job
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