Fintech services will always be in demand, especially as there is a constant need for accessible money transfers, bills processing, and receipt and sending of payments. Because of this, fintech platforms specializing in different branches of financial technology will always have a customer base, especially at a time when contactless financial processing is preferred.

The United States fintech industry processed digital payments amounting to $1,272,816 this year, according to Statista. As a new fintech player, you want to make sure that you can take advantage of the in-demand nature of the services you offer.

The sector is very competitive, especially with a lot of fintech options for all types of platforms. Affiliate marketing can help you achieve this goal. Read on to know how this technique can help your fintech startup.

Ways Affiliate Marketing Can Help Fintech StartupsWhat is Affiliate Marketing?

The first question that might come to mind when talking about affiliate marketing is this: what is it exactly? For businesses or practices like yours, this marketing approach is the practice of hiring third-party individuals to promote your offerings and provide compensation through commissions. The affiliate uses their network and marketing techniques to secure a sale and earns only once they do so.

Affiliates are usually entities that have a wide reach and a comprehensive network. This practice is typically conducted over the Internet using different platforms. Affiliates different avenues available to them including their blogs, vlogs, and social media. They also utilize their own strategies in order to drive sales.

If you are not sure how it works, you just need to look at social media sites to see perfect models of these. Take Instagram influencers, for example. Many of these promote brands, companies, and products, encouraging their followers to avail of the offerings they are endorsing. In a way, they are referring their audience to you for your services.

They usually post content showing off a business’ offering along with an affiliate link that helps track any traffic toward the website. When customers finalize a purchase using that link, the affiliate will receive a percentage of the sale.

A lot of brands use this strategy because of its many advantages, but it is always advisable to use it alongside other marketing techniques like search engine optimization (SEO), as well as referral, social media, and content marketing.

Affiliate Marketing vs Referral Marketing

For the average individual, affiliate marketing sounds a lot like referral marketing. The thing is, they may have some similarities in order to achieve a single goal, but they work differently. As mentioned you want to use these two in tandem, so it is better if you have an understanding of how they work.

If affiliate marketing is the practice of partnering with an advertiser and paying them for every sale they drive, referral marketing is the use of word-of-mouth to get sales and give the referrer some incentives.

To further demonstrate the difference between the two, just take a look at the services you use. Many services let you share a unique link with your friends and family, which they can use to sign up for the service. You can receive rewards after they sign up or after they complete a purchase. Rewards come in different forms such as free credits, discounts, free shipping, and the like.

To sum it up, referral marketing compensates existing customers instead of partnering up with an advertiser. Moreover, it offers compensation in the form of rewards instead of commissions.

Fintech startups who use these two approaches together can get increased chances of getting new customers, boosting their sales, and reaching new audiences.

Affiliate Marketing in SEO

So, you now know the difference between affiliate and referral marketing. You also have an idea of what you can achieve when they are used together. The best part is, there are other marketing strategies you can use to boost your company.

One of them is search engine optimization, which also has its own type of affiliate marketing. Search engine optimization or SEO is a practice in digital marketing that utilizes different techniques to make a website rank high in Google search results.

Let us explain how it works. Whenever your potential customers look for the fintech service they need, they use search engines such as Google to look for the right platform. If they are looking for a reliable digital payment service, they can use “best payment service” or “most reliable digital payment app.” Google with then look through its archive of websites and pages crawled by its bots to look for the most relevant ones to include in the results.

You want to be included in the results page, preferably at the first spot or at least on the first page. SEO helps you achieve this. What you need to know is that Google looks at your website’s authority on the topic, which is influenced by its popularity and trustworthiness, when ranking you in search results. Optimizing your website for search engines and getting backlinks from high-authority websites can help increase your popularity and trustworthiness.

This is where SEO affiliate marketing comes in. In SEO, affiliate marketing combines the techniques used in both strategies. As a service provider, you can partner up with an affiliate website to publish SEO articles leading to your service using an affiliate link. This way, you can increase the chances of customers finding your platform.

With proper use, affiliate websites can also boost your authority. The keywords here are “proper use.” You do not want to partner up with a thin affiliate website, which is defined by Google as those that essentially do not add value to the topic and do not provide original content.

Keep in mind that affiliate links may not be considered inbound links (also called backlinks), which means that they cannot improve your authority. However, a good affiliate website is a great platform to include backlinks because they are not thin. They can refer potential customers to your website through original and valuable content.

How Affiliate Marketing Help Fintech Startups

Now that you know more about affiliate marketing and its role in boosting your business, you might be wondering how exactly it can help your fintech startup. Here are some of the benefits:

  • Offers a Low-Cost, Low-Risk Option

Affiliate marketing is an excellent option for startups because it does not bloat your marketing expenses. You do not have to hire a team of advertising experts to create your materials. You also do not have to purchase ad space. What you just need is to find the right affiliates in order to market your service.

Paying them for successful sales is also more convenient. Remember, they only get commissions from the sales they drive, which means that they get a portion of your earning, minimizing the risks. You can look at it as a win-win situation for both parties.

  • Drives Targeted Traffic

When you choose the right affiliate, you are tapping into their audience. If you want to present your services to young adults, working with an affiliate that has a large young adult following is your best bet. A successful promotion from your affiliate will result in a surge of traffic from their followers.

  • Provides a Way to Widen Your Audience

The best part is, you do not have to stick to one affiliate. Once you have an advertiser with a young adult viewer base, you can look for another that targets another set of audiences. Maybe you want to market your services to older millennials. You can also look for an affiliate that resonates with parents. The key here is to have the ability to find the right partners and vet them.

Plus, when their followers hear of your service, they tend to search for your platform and services as a way to do research. This can have a positive impact on your rankings, so make sure that you optimize your website for maximum benefits.

  • Improves Scalability

Given what we talked about above, you can see that affiliate marketing is extremely scalable. You can cut down or increase the number of your affiliates with minimal impact on the cost and operations. In fact, because of the nature of affiliate marketing, you might not even need to spend when scaling your activities.

  • Boosts Online Reputation

The best part is partnering up with the right affiliates can improve your online reputation. These influencers are called that because they have an impact on their audience. With recommendations from these advertisers, their followers tend to have a positive perception of your brand and offerings.

Paired with effective online reputation management, your brand name can be as positive as ever. Just make sure that your affiliate’s reputation and brand are in line with yours to avoid hiccups.

Affiliate Marketing Can Help Fintech StartupsThe Takeaway

Your fintech startup is bound to reach its potential when you use the right digital marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing, along with other techniques, can have a lot of positive impact on your startup and can help get your company off the ground and into greater heights.