Appropriately wary of ceding control of their direct customer relationships and proprietary product data to Amazon, retailers are engaged in an ongoing struggle to find a scaled subsidy to the Amazon monster — a challenge that has been made more complex due to Covid-19.
As a growing number of quarantined consumers shift their shopping habits online, Amazon’s stock has reached an all-time high and exacerbated marketers’ concerns about how to compete like never before.
Amidst their achievement, Amazon single-handedly created opportunity for brands to diversify their marketing mix and expand audience reach using the very partnerships that propelled the ecommerce giant to its success by implementing sweeping cuts to affiliate commission payouts—a clear indicator that the behemoth prioritizes its core business over that of its partners. The partnerships that were damaged or severed as a result of the payout slash are left seeking to fill gaps in their revenue and will undoubtedly embrace the opportunity to establish direct relationships with brands over Amazon.
Amazon Associates’ drastic commission cuts demonstrate the risk that both partners and advertisers take by overinvesting in a singular relationship rather than appropriately diversifying partnership portfolios. For brands, specifically, diversification is paramount to expand consumer reach and drive incremental revenue and traffic within the affiliate channel—a low-risk, performance-based subsidy to primary sales and marketing channels that gives marketers the operating leverage they need.
Diversification is made easy with Discover, the Ascend™ platform’s partner recruitment and activation module. Discover’s partner recruitment capabilities don’t confine brands to a limited publisher supply like that of legacy networks. Instead, brands can recruit from a broader digital ecosystem and refine their search with attributes like social footprint, lookalike content, keywords and geographic location—and now, affiliates that use Amazon Associates.
The filter enables brands to effortlessly explore partner prospects that monetize their content through the Amazon Associates program. Brands can then easily invite partners that have been impacted by the sweeping Amazon commission cuts to join both Ascend™ and their program, effectively diversifying partner makeup during a period of economic transition.
Brands can immediately begin finding and recruiting partners using the filter in Discover. By diversifying partnerships, marketers can maximize the affiliate channel’s capabilities and create new, mutually beneficial revenue streams— a win-win for brands and partners, alike. Log in now to begin diversifying your partnerships.
