AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliate Marketing: Untapped Resource for Non-Profits?
In today’s digital landscape, non-profit organizations are continuously looking for innovative ways to raise funds and reach a wider audience. One such approach that has gained popularity in recent years is affiliate marketing. Despite its potential benefits, affiliate marketing remains an underutilized resource for many non-profits.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy where an organization partners with affiliates (individuals or companies) to promote its products or services. In return, the affiliates receive a commission for each sale, lead or action generated through their marketing efforts.
How it Works
The basic model of affiliate marketing involves three main parties:
- Advertiser: The non-profit organization seeking to promote its cause, products or services.
- Affiliate: The individual or company responsible for promoting the advertiser’s offerings through various marketing channels.
- Consumer: The end-user who engages with the affiliate’s content and takes the desired action, such as making a donation, signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Non-Profits
There are numerous advantages to implementing an affiliate marketing program for a non-profit organization. Some of these include:
- Cost-effective marketing: Since affiliates are only paid when they generate results, non-profits can optimize their marketing budget and reduce spending on ineffective strategies.
- Increased brand awareness: By partnering with multiple affiliates, organizations can tap into new audiences and increase visibility for their cause.
- Additional revenue streams: Through affiliate marketing, non-profits can diversify their fundraising efforts by promoting products or services alongside traditional donation campaigns.
- Scalable growth: As the affiliate network expands, so does the potential for increased donations and revenue. This allows organizations to plan for long-term growth without incurring significant upfront costs.
Affiliate Marketing Techniques for Non-Profits
While the concept of affiliate marketing is relatively simple, there are several techniques that non-profit organizations can employ to maximize the effectiveness of their programs. Some proven strategies include:
Choosing the Right Affiliates
Selecting affiliates who share similar values and interests as your organization is crucial to building a successful program. By partnering with individuals or companies that have a genuine connection to your cause, you increase the likelihood of attracting an engaged audience who will take action on your behalf.
Creating Compelling Content
Providing affiliates with high-quality content such as blog posts, infographics, videos, and social media graphics makes it easier for them to promote your organization. Providing a variety of content formats ensures that affiliates can tailor their promotional efforts to suit their unique audiences.
Offering Incentives and Competitive Commissions
To attract top-performing affiliates, consider offering competitive commission rates and attractive incentives. These could include tiered commission structures, exclusive discount codes or promotional offers that affiliates can share with their followers.
Utilizing Affiliate Tracking Tools
Implementing reliable tracking tools helps organizations monitor the performance of their affiliate partners and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly. Several third-party platforms provide comprehensive tracking and reporting features specifically designed for affiliate marketing programs.
Case Study: Affiliate Marketing Success for Non-Profits
To illustrate the potential of affiliate marketing for non-profits, let’s consider a real-world example:
In 2015, a leading environmental organization launched an online store selling eco-friendly products and partnered with several affiliates to help promote its offerings. Within just one year, the organization reported a significant increase in donations and sales while also expanding its reach to new audiences.
This success can be attributed to several factors:
- The organization carefully selected affiliates who shared its values and were passionate about promoting eco-friendly products.
- Affiliates received ongoing support, including access to high-quality content, promotional materials and regular communication from the organization.
- The organization offered competitive commission rates and incentives, which encouraged affiliates to actively promote its products and generate sales.
While affiliate marketing may not be the traditional fundraising solution for non-profit organizations, it presents a valuable opportunity to diversify revenue streams, increase brand visibility and grow donor bases. With careful planning, strategic partnerships and continuous optimization, non-profits can tap into this underutilized resource and drive long-term growth.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
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Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
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AFFILIATE MARKETING
Campbell’s Soup Is Trying to Change Its Name. Here’s Why.
The 155-year-old Campbell Soup Company, the first to bring canned soups to the market, wants to drop the “Soup” part of its name and go by just the Campbell’s Company. Shareholders can vote on the suggested name change in November at Campbell’s annual meeting.
The request reflects Campbell’s broader strategy to expand beyond soup and into higher-growth categories, like snacks, which have shown promise. Snack sales grew 13% for the company last year while soups grew 3%. Nearly 48% of Campbell’s net sales came from snacks in fiscal year 2023. Meanwhile, Campbell’s Goldfish brand reached annual net sales of $1 billion in March, a feat only attained by one other product from the company: its iconic red-and-white-labeled soup.
Campbell CEO Mark Clouse said at an investor event on Tuesday that the “subtle-yet-important” name change more accurately reflects “the full breadth of the company’s portfolio.” Earlier this year, Campbell acquired Sovos Brands, the company behind the Rao’s sauces, Noosa’s Yoghurt, and Michael Angelo’s frozen entrees brands, for $2.7 billion.
The company has also made other acquisitions, like a $4.87 billion deal for snack company Snyder’s-Lance in 2017.
Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Photo Credit: Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images
Campbell executives said on Tuesday that they see stable sales in soup, 3% to 4% annual growth in snacks, and 1% to 2% in meals and beverages.
Even though the company assumes no annual growth in soup, it continues to innovate and invest in the category. Campbell recently introduced new spicy soup flavors, including the Ghost Pepper Chicken Noodle soup, to appeal to younger shoppers. Older populations usually buy more soup, so sales in that category could rise from groups like older millennials, the company said.
Campbell’s fourth-quarter earnings for the three months ending July 18, 2024, show that total net sales were up from the previous quarter, from $2.068 billion to $2.293 billion.
“For the last five years, we have been on a transformative journey to redefine our company,” Clouse stated.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Apple Adds AI Writing to iPhone 16 for Texts, Emails
AI can write emails. AI can write songs. AI can suggest writing improvements that go beyond spelling and grammar to word choice.
As big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple roll out their latest AI features, one use case of AI keeps coming up: AI can write. It’s sometimes so good that job seekers have asked it to write their resumes and cover letters, and new technologies have rolled out to detect AI’s presence.
Related: These 4 Words Make It Obvious You Used AI to Write a Paper, According to New Research
Easier writing is a key selling point of Apple’s AI, Apple Intelligence, featured in the new iPhone 16 released Monday. Apple Intelligence is “built into your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly” according to its product page.
Apple said the AI can help upcoming iPhone 16 users draft emails and texts.
iPhone 16. Credit: Apple
Apple isn’t the first to focus on writing as an AI use case: Google ran an ad at the Olympics last month about how its AI could write a fan letter from a child to her Olympic hero — sparking conversation about what would happen when the Olympian held a stack of fan letters that sounded the same.
“As more and more people rely on AI to generate their content, it is easy to imagine a future where the richness of human language and culture erode,” Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media in residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications wrote in a July 28 blog post.
Though Google ended up pulling the ad after public backlash, the future the ad portrayed — of young people turning to ChatGPT instead of puzzling through how to say something themselves — is fast becoming a reality.
ChatGPT has over 200 million weekly users, over 60% of which are under 34 years old. Nearly one in three users are under 24 years old.
Related: Can ChatGPT Help Start a Business? I Tried the Latest Version, GPT-4o, to Find Out.
Research published earlier this year shows that university students who rely on ChatGPT experience poorer academic performance and memory loss. A separate study found that the top uses of ChatGPT were creating content, responding to emails, writing cover letters and resumes, and coming up with ideas.
AI opponents point out AI’s writing abilities may be based on copyrighted works used by big tech companies without credit or compensation awarded to the people who wrote these works.
“To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books,” author Margaret Atwood wrote in a 2023 article for The Atlantic last year about the issue. “Now, really! How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.”
AI supporters say that the anti-AI group is “classist and ableist.” The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) defended AI writing last week, for example, by saying that “not all brains have [the] same abilities” and some need “outside help or accommodations” to write. Disabled writers took issue with the remarks, as well as NaNoWriMo sponsors, and the organization has since changed the wording of its stance and apologized.
Related: Klarna CEO Says AI Could Help Reduce Company Headcount By 50%
Then there are more neutral issues with AI, like estimates that AI systems could run out of free training data within the next two years, leaving open the question of what kinds of data to use next.
AI-generated content has steadily risen to the top of Google searches, doubling from about 7% in June 2023 to 14% in June 2024.
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