Five affiliate marketing and program management trends for 2021

AffiliateInsider suggests five tips for affiliate management to include in your 2021 strategy.

As we reach the end of 2020, it is important that we reflect on what we’ve learned in the past year. Things have changed and we’ve all managed to pivot businesses and team practices pretty quickly as Covid demanded. In doing so, the trends for 2021 have opened up new challenges for global affiliate programs and teams around the world, no matter what vertical you’re currently operating in. Here are five of the best affiliate management tips you should include in your strategies for the year ahead:

1. Flexible working will lead to more training and development

What this past year has shown is that remote working doesn’t actually impact productivity when you have the right tools and management processes in place to communicate effectively as a team. Many of us have had to adjust to maintaining a more rigid culture of being mindful and keeping a balance between work and self care along with finding new ways to effectively engage and manage a team of affiliate managers remotely. 2021 is simply going to offer us the opportunity to further enhance these skills. Remote management skills, tools and time management strategies will need to be a priority investment for managers leading big teams of affiliate account managers. Team training and personal coaching for Affiliate program managers who want to level up and build better connections online should be invested in. Understanding how to build personal rapport with partners without the engagement of live physical events, will be key especially as affiliate recruitment still comes in mainly from live events or networks with publisher relationships.

2. Marketing automation will improve efficiency

There is a constant stream of new tools and platforms emerging onto the market that can help affiliate managers build rapport, find new niches and keep expanding their program delivery. For 2021, you should focus on finding the ones that can help your team to automate your current sales, program marketing and affiliate recruitment and management services. Much of this is still done by human resource. Networks are realising that they need to develop new tools that simplify the growth process of programs, such as CJ’s Recruit Partners tool which was recently launched along with other industry lead publisher discovery tools such as Breezy (beta) and Publisher Discovery which was first to market. Intelligent data and niche recruitment will serve a big part of program expansion efforts and helping affiliate managers to access this information quickly and accurately can help support program growth.

Read more: www.thedrum.com