On this week’s episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann is joined by Simon Kingsnorth to talk about ‘How To Do Affiliate Marketing Strategically’. Not only is Simon the founder and CEO of SK, a strategic marketing agency, but he’s also the author of Digital Marketing Strategy. This is a book that grabbed Lee-Ann’s attention and one that she thoroughly enjoyed reading. Let’s join them as they discuss some of the hottest industry topics…
Listen in here for all of the insights:
What is strategy and what does it mean?
Lee-Ann begins by asking Simon to give an uncomplicated synopsis of exactly what strategy is and what it means.
Simon explains, “I think, you know, people often think of strategy as somebody who’s sitting around producing lots of PowerPoints that never really mean anything or go anywhere. And I’ve been in those organisations, by the way. I have been in a company where there was an entire strategy department of about 25 people. They spent the entire year producing PowerPoint presentations and presented them to people and nothing came out of any of it.
So, nice job, if you can get it. But, you know, I find that most people and most businesses are on a scale of strategy at one end and execution at the other. Some are very heavily focused on the thinking and the talking and the PowerPoints and not really getting a lot done. And others are at the other end of lots and lots of running around and doing stuff, but without really thinking about what you’re doing. Which causes a lot of frustration, a lot of wasted money, a lot of wasted effort. And of course, as with most things in life, the sweet spot is in the middle.”
“Affiliate is a channel that doesn’t get enough attention”
Lee-Ann explains that she was keen to read Simon’s book in order to discover his thoughts on affiliate marketing. She asks him: “In your opinion, right now, should brands be spending more in this channel? And, if so, why do you think that?”
Simon replies, “Yeah, so I do think that. You know, affiliate for me, alongside email, is a channel that doesn’t get enough attention. I’ve had so much phenomenal success, absolute game changing success, with affiliate marketing in my career.
And you know, when you’re out there talking about marketing, if you’re standing on stage talking about marketing or you’re reading books about marketing or you’re following YouTube or Instagram or whatever, and all the updates on marketing, it’s always about SEO. Or it’s about Instagram marketing or it’s about AI or something that’s like really sexy and cool, right? No-one talks about affiliate marketing, right? Not many people talk about it, except you, Lee-Ann, right? So, it doesn’t get enough attention. And that’s because it’s not as glamorous and exciting, right?”
Adapting content strategies to effectively incorporate AI
Lee-Ann refers to page 37 of Simon’s book that shows a graph talking about different channels and how content strategy should feed into each digital channel that you are working in, in order to increase customer conversion. She asks Simon for his opinion on how best to incorporate AI?
Simon explains, “I think for me, AI content is improving and will continue to improve. But for me, I’m not happy with the standard of it at the moment. I think if you’re doing it well, understanding how to prompt a GPT, then I think you’ve got a better edge than many.
I don’t use it for writing content, personally. And I mean, we have a fairly big copywriting arm in my business where we produce a lot of content for our clients and we don’t use AI for that at all, at the moment. Well, that’s not entirely true. We use an AI tool for checking the SEO quality of the content so we can make some optimisations to it at the end. But we don’t use it for the planning or the writing of content because there is a huge stream of content that’s coming out that is very generic and lightweight that I’m seeing.”
Take a look at the graphs referred to in the conversation:
You can purchase Simon’s book Digital Marketing Strategy: An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing here
Listen to find out more about:
- What does the desire for growth actually mean?
- How to avoid burnout by placing strategy at the epicentre of your Affiliate Program.
- Why Affiliate is the place to be and the channel to focus on right now.
Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune in to go direct:
[11:22]: Don’t get pushed into a panic – Develop your strategy.
[13:30]: The mistake of “looking for the fun” – Don’t forget the data.
[16:30]: The hot topic of AI – Room for improvement?
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