Planning for key dates
Affiliate marketing isn’t like a poster campaign, where you can set it up and leave it, affiliate marketing is more similar to sales, in the sense that you need to be reactive to the climate and peoples desires, as such this makes planning an affiliate campaign far more involved than traditional advertising, with better and more targeting, there are so many factors to consider, its essentially a full time job and many large companies and agencies have in-house dedicated affiliate managers to tackle these issues and manage affiliates.
Planning forms a big part of affiliate management, in order to take advantage of seasonal changes and to ensure that a campaign remains competative with its competitors. Without sufficent planning, any campaign is bound to fall fall short of its expected potential, for example, you could plan a fantastic customer incentive that lasts 24 hours, only to tell affiliates on the day of the event, by that time, affiliates won’t have enough time to react to such and event and will most likely not react to this consumer incentive and not promote the campaign, leading to its failure. Ideally, you’d want to be giving at least 2 weeks to 1 months notice to affiliates for any campaign incentive.
Frostie is one of the affiliate marketing greats in the UK and he’s put together a handy list of the key dates in affiliate marketing, you can see it here:
- January Sales (26 December -> 15th January usually)
- Valentines Day (14th February)
- Easter (March / April)
- Summer (12 June -> 14 June *England only
)
- Christmas (25 December)
as an affiliate manager or a merchant in general you shoulod be planning according to these dates to ensure that affiliates have sufficent time to optimise their sites and to give your promotion the best chance of succeeding.
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