This white paper mainly discusses how Chinese brands can leverage "affiliate marketing" and "partner marketing" to enter overseas markets. The content covers strategic advantages, industry trends, practical pain points, and solutions, making it suitable for e-commerce, brand owners, and practitioners interested in overseas marketing. The core content is as follows:
1. What is affiliate marketing? What is it for?
- In simple terms: Brands collaborate with overseas influencers, media, KOLs, etc. They help promote products, and are paid commissions based on performance (such as number of sales or clicks). For example, if you see a blogger on Instagram recommending clothes from a Chinese brand and you buy through their link, the blogger earns a commission.
- Core advantages:
- Low cost: Pay only for results, unlike traditional advertising where you spend a lot for exposure without knowing the effect. Costs can be as low as 1% of traditional advertising.
- Fast localization: Cooperate with local influencers or media who understand local consumer preferences and can quickly build trust. For example, selling pet products by having pet bloggers recommend them is more effective than advertising yourself.
- Long-tail effect: Once cooperation is established, there is long-term traffic and orders, and revenue can even be comparable to search engine marketing (SEM).
2. Which categories are suitable for affiliate marketing? What are the trends?
- Popular categories:
- Apparel, beauty, 3C electronics: Rely on social media for product seeding, e.g., clothing is showcased by influencers, 3C products are reviewed by tech media.
- Pet supplies, home & garden: Users like content sharing, e.g., smart pet feeders are demonstrated by niche bloggers.
- Software, toys: Fastest growth, with toy category affiliate marketing growing by 109% in 2022.
- Market size: Global affiliate marketing reached $14.3 billion in 2023, expected to hit $15.7 billion in 2024. The US is the largest market, followed by Japan and Germany.
- Driving factors:
- After the Amazon store shutdown wave, brands shifted to independent sites and needed new marketing methods.
- Rising costs of traditional advertising (e.g., expensive Google and Facebook traffic) make affiliate marketing a cost-effective choice.
3. Pain points for brands going overseas: can't find the right people, can't manage data well, waste money
- Pain point 1: Difficult to select partners
Overseas affiliates and influencers are scattered, making it hard to know who is reliable. For example, when looking for French home bloggers, it's hard to tell who has real followers and who is just faking numbers.
- Pain point 2: Data chaos, can't calculate accounts clearly
When cooperating with multiple platforms, the same user may click and buy through different channels, resulting in duplicate commission payments. For example, a user watches influencer A's video, then clicks influencer B's link to order, and the brand may have to pay commission to both, wasting money.
- Pain point 3: Lots of fraudulent traffic
Some affiliates use bots to fake clicks or fraudulent orders to cheat commissions, with fraud rates as high as 20%.
- Pain point 4: Unprofessional teams
There are few talents in China who understand affiliate marketing, and communication costs are high. For example, when negotiating with overseas influencers, language barriers and cultural differences may lead to poor strategy execution.
4. How to do affiliate marketing well?
- 1. Choose the right partners: Find channels by stage and category
- Cold start phase: Look for small and medium influencers (with fewer but more targeted followers) and niche media. For example, selling electric scooters, first find outdoor cycling forums and KOC reviewers.
- Growth phase: Increase cooperation with top influencers and social media (such as TikTok, Instagram) to quickly expand exposure.
- Maturity phase: Integrate B2B cooperation (such as joint events with overseas e-commerce platforms), brand ambassadors (well-known figures for long-term cooperation).
- 2. Use the right platform: Don't be greedy, choose the suitable one
- Regional matching: Use ShareASale, Impact in North America; AWIN in Europe; affiliate marketing platforms like Rakuten in Southeast Asia.
- Functional needs: Small and medium brands can choose one-stop platforms (such as CJ Affiliate), which include partner search, data tracking, and commission payment; large companies can build their own systems or use multiple platforms in combination.
- Avoid multi-platform traps: Too many platforms lead to data chaos. Most brands use 1-3 platforms, e.g., Impact and AWIN together to cover different regions.
- 3. Manage data and commissions well: Prevent fraud, calculate clearly
- Attribution models: Prefer "last click attribution" (commission goes to whoever made the final sale) or "first interaction attribution" (commission goes to whoever first attracted user interest).
- Anti-fraud technology: Use platform's built-in traffic filtering tools to monitor clicks and conversion rates; abnormally high numbers may indicate fake traffic.
- Commission strategy: Initially set a unified commission rate (e.g., 5%-10%), later tiered by performance, such as higher commissions for top influencers and rewards for small and medium influencers who meet targets.
- 4. Long-term strategy: Localization + AI efficiency improvement
- Content localization: Let overseas partners adjust materials according to local culture. For example, avoid revealing designs when promoting clothing in the Middle East; emphasize eco-friendly materials in Europe and America.
- AI tool application: Use AI to generate marketing copy and images, and automatically match partners. For example, input product keywords, and AI recommends suitable influencers and content styles, improving efficiency by 90%.
5. Future trends: Influencer marketing explosion, smarter platforms
- More influencer cooperation: Consumers trust "real person recommendations" more, so brands will increase cooperation with KOLs and ordinary bloggers, especially on short video platforms (such as TikTok).
- Deep AI involvement: From finding partners and generating content to fraud prevention, AI will become more widespread. For example, use AI to analyze influencer data and automatically filter out fake traffic.
- Omnichannel integration: Affiliate marketing will be combined with social media marketing and private domain operations to form a closed loop. For example, after users watch influencer videos, guide them to independent sites, then use email marketing for repeat purchases.
Summary: Affiliate marketing is a long-term investment, don't expect to get rich overnight
Affiliate marketing is not as fast as paid traffic; it usually takes 3-6 months to get the process running, but the long-term cost is low and the effect is stable. Brands need to patiently build teams, choose the right platforms, and focus on localization to achieve sustained growth in overseas markets through "word of mouth" and "trust".
