Things to Take Away From Affiliate Summit Europe 2018 – London

Every business sector has its own key and unmissable trade fairs and exhibitions. Affiliate Summit Europe 2018 is one of these. An essential event to attend for professionals in performance advertising and digital marketing in the broad sense, with its blend of networking, keynote speeches, training sessions, and best practice knowledge sharing. It’s for this reason that our entire team attended in London this past February 6 and 7. Amongst the various trends, we’ll be seeing developing over the course of 2018 are influencer marketing and strategic affiliate marketing.

The Affiliate Summit Europe conference and trade show

The Affiliate Summit was initially founded in 2003 by Shawn Collins and Missy Ward. Since then, it has grown considerably over the years. To date, it has expanded into various international events that take place on a regular basis in both North America and Europe. The Affiliate Summit London had a turnout of more than 1,600 visitors and 800 affiliates, all of which who came to share their knowledge, develop their expertise and find out more about digital trends to come.

Kwanko was represented by our UK team lead by Alvaro Sanchez, Managing Director and specialist in advertiser-side performance marketing, and by Zaza Zakaraia, Affiliate Account Manager and expert in publisher-side marketing. The event provided an opportunity to promote and highlight the solutions we offer in terms of increasing sales, generating more traffic, workable lead generation, optimizing conversions, and developing an influencer marketing-based approach for our clients.

Influencer marketing: a craze that delivers what it promises

Influencer marketing serves as a major form of leverage in the world of digital marketing. A real game-changer, it is now in the process of becoming firmly established alongside more traditional methods of online advertising. A growing number of brands have begun using it in earnest and others are currently experimenting with it in small doses, though almost all are interested in it.

Influencers can choose to incorporate an acquisition strategy into their approach. But working with them requires experience, practical knowledge and the support of a properly trained team.

Performance marketing: what’s the best way to work with influencers?

The first thing to do is to make sure you understand how influencers are organized

Content, editorial, tone, the volume and audience you are looking to target, expert knowledge of the subject matter before knowing how to work with influencers, you first need to know and understand what motivates them. This is work that takes place over a long term basis that is built on trust. For the majority of micro-influencers, performance marketing is one of the most effective tools available.

The second stage consists of properly and effectively communicating with the influencers

According to the Vuelio UK Bloggers Survey 2017, more than a third of influencers are contacted up to seven times per week on average. However, very few of these contacts result in value-added content on the influencers’ blogs, channels or social media accounts. Hence the importance of making targeted choices and carefully choosing to word to avoid drowning influencers in technical jargon they won’t necessarily be able to master. To communicate effectively with influencers, you need to build a natural human-like relationship and take the time to really get to know their brand and their audience. This is a win-win strategy and push-pull. You help them, they help you.

And lastly, taking an economical approach is an extremely important factor

the traditional model based on CPA and funded via conversion at the final click does not work with influencers. The scope needs to be increased to enable more effective tracking, established on the basis of community engagement. To achieve this, each advertiser must know and understand what the KPIs and most impactful metrics for their brand are and build their relationship with their influencers around these more open and less restrictive factors.

Both a catalyst for creative energy and a high-value place to meet and share good practices, the Affiliate Summit Europe conference and trade show enabled us to confirm the relevance of our acquisition solutions to performance and to broaden our teams’ expertise on highly specific and targeted issues. It also provided a way for us to make ourselves directly known to advertisers and publishers in order to share our experience and know-how.

Would you like to contact the UK team to know more about our solutions? Feel free!