The challenges and opportunity within the B2B affiliate space
While the proverbial B2C affiliate marketing bubble shows no signs of bursting in Australia, the B2B space, in contrast, shows a derelict wasteland of opportunity, presenting a huge opening for established publishers within the channel to expand their offering and tap into what is currently a neglected audience. Callum Wingrave, co-founder of CAm, explains more.
According to ASBFEO, the number of registered businesses In Australia stands at just over 2.6m, with 97% of those classified as small businesses. If you overlay this audience pool against a specific demographic, e.g. students >18 of which 1.6 million enrolled in higher education in 2023, you can see the stark size of a potential subset of Australians currently starved of informative content, deals and benefits derived from affiliate marketers. Naturally the dearth of suitable B2B options is presenting a major challenge to a lot brands, knowing there’s a huge audience that are there to be marketed to, but without anywhere near the level of partnership choice in comparison with the B2C space.
But why have we not seen the B2B space at least mature, even if not at the same rate as D2C and what are the problems brands are facing as a result?
Quality of Leads
The general perception centres on partners having to work harder to generate the same quality of lead that they would in comparison to the D2C space. Lead Gen historically saw a race to the bottom approach, with the CPL commercial structure removing the incentive for quality and instead making it a game of quantity, meaning the activity skewed in the partner’s favour. Now that the commercial approach to the channel (CPA) has sophisticated, the onus falls back on the partner to generate quality leads through informative, detailed and tailored prospecting, of which the lead is then handed off with very little influence able to be had beyond that point. This presents a conundrum of investment vs return that often doesn’t equate to a valuable outcome for the partner, which is one of the reasons we’re seeing a lack of affiliate presence within the B2B space.
The Journey
In the B2B world, the sales journey generally is more complex, involves longer decision cycles, and often passes through more than one data house, making integration challenging too. These characteristics present unique difficulties when applying traditional affiliate marketing to B2B sales. While the value of B2B deals often dwarf the average B2C sales amount, making compelling commercials affordable by comparison, the sales cycle is often more complex. The longer window taken to convert a lead into a sale, coupled with the difficulty in tracking performance has presented many partners with the feeling of ‘B2B selling goes in the too hard basket’.
Attribution and measurement
As prefaced above, CRMs, data houses, tracking platforms are all prevalent in most B2B sales instances which makes it uniquely difficult to track performance end to end and as a result, ensure the right partner is attributed the correct sale, given it’s often being passed from online to offline environments and across multiple platforms.
With the sales process often being multi-touch, involving various stages (e.g., lead generation, nurturing, sales demos, contract negotiation), it makes the role of an affiliate in this journey not as clear-cut as it is in B2C, meaning the tracking infrastructure again has made expanding into the B2B space for partners a daunting prospect.
But how can we overcome the challenges currently faced in the affiliate B2B landscape?
Well ,beginning with lead quality, it requires bend and flex from both parties. Brands may need to recenter expectations temporarily while partners are able to ab test sales messaging, content and copy that aim to educate and qualify customers as they’re trafficked to the brand. With the sales cycle often being convoluted and time consuming, brands need to grant partners grace while they gather intel that allows them to make better optimisation decisions longer term. This grace period may need to include a compromise commercially, adopting a similar approach as the D2C influencer space of hybrid commercial agreements to offset the initial risk to the partner while they’re optimising on the brand’s behalf.
Acknowledging there’s little brands can do to speed up the sales cycle, however leveraging affiliate specific technology, many of which have integration options with nearly all the CRMs in market, could at least grant greater visibility for partners to make informed campaign decisions from. Taking strides to close that feedback loop and improve tracking and measurement will grant partners the ability to understand what approaches they need to prioritise in order to guarantee the highest possible quality of lead, based on the actual data being passed from CRM to technology platform.
In reality, it’s going to take some investment from both sides to see the B2B space flourish into what it’s capable of. Partners are going to need to endure the teething pain of seemingly slow progress and investment required to get to a place where a B2B vertical is a lucrative arm of their offering, while brands will need to ensure they’re implementing the right infrastructure and practices to give their affiliate partners the best chance to succeed, including being more flexible commercially while being mindful that it may take a little longer to see the returns.
I know, from first-hand experience in setting up a business, we’d have benefitted greatly from educational content on start-up necessities like business insurance, accounting software, licensing and CRM platforms before moving into more transactional purchasing like website hosting and builders. So I come at this as a consumer as well as a member of the affiliate community to say that, established publishers in Australia could make a significant impact within the market and to their business if they prioritised developing B2B categories that cater to the 2.58m largely neglected small business owners that would benefit immeasurably from partner marketing.
Callum Wingrave is the co-founder of Commerce Amplified
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