The world around us is changing at a rate that’s often incomprehensible to us. We’re seeing new inventions everywhere we look, and it’s happening every single day. 5G, AI, VR, satellite Wi-Fi - these and other inventions are constantly hitting our cognitive system, making it overwhelmed.
This trend is visible in every field of our life, be it work, entertainment, or leisure. And among a vast selection of changing industries, there’s the marketing world that’s also undergoing some serious developments.
Long gone are days when a simple spokesman in front of a big crowd would attract some potential customers. People have grown alongside the technology around them and they’ve become more demanding.
That’s why marketing is also following that trend and keeping up with modern technological findings. Otherwise, it’s very easy to be left behind in this frenzy race.
Leveraging comparative advantage with affiliation
One of the most popular forms of marketing today is affiliate marketing. It’s been around for at least 20 solid years, which means it’s had its time to grow and mature. Unlike regular marketing strategies, affiliate marketing uses a partnership between a company and a marketing department to achieve an end-result - make a certain product or a service popular.
In this method, the marketing departments take the producer’s service/product, generate online links, and put them in different places of their online content.
The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it uses the comparative advantages of both partners to the fullest, making an end-result even more refined.
And what’s also great is that affiliate marketing can be used by entertainment providers such as PlayAmo casino affiliate program, health institutions like Health Plans of America, movie brands, and even governing bodies and their political websites. Its uses are virtually endless!
So, affiliate marketing is a technological achievement in itself. It uses online resources, websites, and links that generate traffic. But as technology moves forward, so do its “subjects”, including affiliate marketing.
Automated affiliation as the future
One of the most crucial aspects of affiliate marketing is engaging with customers. Affiliates make the best use of their technological arsenal to collect data about their customers, including what they like, which websites they visit, how they spend their money, etc.
In short, cookies enable affiliates to get crucial data and then turn them into usable information.
However, the mere data generation won’t cut it in today’s marketing world. Affiliate marketers need to have much deeper connections with their customers, to get more detailed feedback regarding the product/service quality, customer preferences, as well as changes that they’d make in the company.
And while all of that can be done by humans, technology can ultimately do it much better and more effectively. There are many affiliate marketers that already use chatbots and AI with greater efficiency.
They’re programmed to provide some basic, as well as comprehensive responses in the chatbox and if the customers’ questions become too complicated, there’s always a human service center to take matters into their hands.
That’s where the opportunities for complete automation lie in future developments.
One of the most popular and already sophisticated chatbots is developed by Facebook. Its Messenger platform and the automated customer service is already used by many providers all around the world. Affiliate marketers, considering how large of a consumer base Facebook has, should definitely leverage this tool to their advantage.
AI to sort through the vast database
Another important aspect of affiliate marketing is its dependence on user data. If businesses and marketers use the information correctly, they can get some crucial conclusions from their customer preferences that can ultimately improve the quality of their products and services.
However, as the internet grows, so does the data generated on it. Almost 4.5 billion people around the world create online traffic that goes beyond the wildest expectations of the “founding fathers” of the internet. And this directly translates into terabytes of user data, what they search, which websites they visit, and so on.
Therefore, sorting through this vast kingdom is an unbearable challenge for humans. Our brain might not be limited universally as such, but every individual has their own restrictions as to how much information they can consume. So, making an order from this mess isn’t an option for humans.
That’s where AI and computer-powered information sorting mechanisms come in. While your affiliate website gathers all the information from Google Analytics, you can “unleash” an automated software that can easily sort through all this data, categorize them, and finally, provide some useful analyses. And as this technology becomes more sophisticated, the conclusions and suggestions will also become more refined.
One of the most popular and already sophisticated chatbots is developed by Facebook. Its Messenger platform and the automated customer service is already used by many providers all around the world. Affiliate marketers, considering how large of a consumer base Facebook has, should definitely leverage this tool to their advantage.
Chatbots can also offer affiliate links
But the chatbot system can have an additional benefit in this branch of marketing. You see, when a customer chats with the AI, the chatbot is constantly monitoring the words used by them. And depending on which words are used, the pre-programmed responses are generated accordingly.
This kind of automated mechanism can be utilized for affiliate marketing. For example, if a user writes words like hair and color, a chatbot can intuitively provide an affiliate link to the hair coloring solution. And this is just one tiny example of how the AI-powered responses can reduce effort and cost spent on finding appropriate places to put the links.
As of right now, there are several new automated tools that can easily interpret the data and provide some useful insights. And all of that without human intervention. For example, open-source data analytics platforms such as KNIME or Orange can be a good start for processing a vast collection of data. These types of tools, in general, are already quite sophisticated to the point where data exploitation and analysis happens automatically and in an instant.
New challenges in the new decade
As we step into the new decade of 2020, the technological possibilities are becoming ever-more exciting, not to mention crucial to our elevated lifestyle and increased demands. Affiliate marketing, being a product of internet interaction, is going to experience that change even more drastically.
In this era of information exchange, affiliate marketers should be looking for ways of automating their platforms to better sort through vast databases of information and effectively translate them into usable analytics. And in this task, AI can prove beneficial more than anything.