Affiliate marketing allows a business to reward one or more affiliated brands or vendors for each visitor or customer drawn in by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. This type of marketing is often used on digital mediums – websites, blogs and in stores that employ digital signage.
Have a question? The Internet has the answer
Everywhere you look, electronic messages are giving you advice. The Internet has taken over as the primary opinion leader that people turn to when considering a new purchase, deciding whether or not to try a new restaurant or searching for the best deal. We look on Yelp for restaurant reviews, Trip Advisor for hotel and vacation advice and product reviews when we are looking to make a purchase.
Digital endorsements play a large role in where we choose to shop, what to buy and where to eat, so smart business owners should take the time to consider the most effective ways to communicate with their customers.
Technology changes the way we communicate
Shopping habits have certainly changed as consumers are more technology-oriented and sophisticated than ever. Stores that utilize digital signage are a prime opportunity for affiliate marketing. Rather than spending advertising dollars on campaigns that people are likely to avoid or not even see, communicate with shoppers in their preferred medium – electronically.
Affiliate marketing + digital signage = more revenue
Given all that we know, then, affiliate marketing and digital signage seems like the ideal pairing. These media virtually guarantee that customers will see important messages about new products or information about current or future promotions in-store by conveying them at the most important point: while the customer is in the store browsing or waiting on line.
An affiliate marketing campaign may showcase a product or brand on a store’s digital signage to help boost sales for both parties. In fact, some stores can generate enough additional sales to pay for their entire digital signage set up and then some!
Digital signage is one of the most customizable forms of publicity, so these ads can be changed often to complement the business by elevating the status of certain brands, services or suppliers that want to raise brand awareness and generate additional revenue.
How do you track it?
We can tell you how effective digital signage and affiliate marketing is, but you don’t need to just take our word for it. Although our eyeballs don’t talk, our actions provide the data you need to measure the effectiveness of a digital affiliate marketing effort.
Businesses can set up a people counting system around their digital signage to see how many people are reading the sign and viewing the marketing messaging. These sensors recognize when a customer has entered the digital signage zone and provide retailers with valuable information about how many people entered these zones and their traffic patterns within the store.
Combined with sales information, these numbers serve as powerful indicators of marketing success. Counts can be correlated with your retail POS software to see if specific messaging led to an uptick in sales for the product or brand at the center of the campaign.
For example, if the shopper walked over to the product or brand of products being showcased after viewing the signage, you can see the campaign is working. Keeping track of the information obtained from your people counting system and POS software will help you put together a data set that could help improve your affiliate marketing efforts in the future. The data set can provide hard evidence that X amount of people who read the sign were engaged and X percentage of those people who were prompted to action actually followed through. The higher the percentage, the more effective your space and/or message are.
Have you considered affiliate marketing in your digital signage space?
