Nowadays, linking is becoming a common trend in the world. Not outside the general rule of the times, affiliate marketing is also growing. The expansion of the Internet as a giant information network has made this communication channel truly become a fertile ground for affiliate marketing activities of businesses.
Knock on Affiliate Marketing
One of the core principles of business is that we cannot operate alone. Lorraine Segal, author of Intelligent Business Alliances, observed that 30% of the revenue of most American companies is the result of business alliances. So it can be seen that alliances are becoming a trend in the business world. Usually, alliances are made between brands or services that have similar target audiences. For example, last year, Motorola teamed up with luxury fashion brand D&G to launch the high-end V3i Gold phone line. Through this, the image of Motorola, specifically the V3i Gold, is associated with the image of D&G's fashionable and trendy image. Conversely, D&G also associates the brand with Motorola's youthful and modern character.
The birth and development of the Internet has changed traditional marketing campaigns, businesses are free to roam and be creative on this Internet land. Accordingly, the term Affiliate Marketing was also born. The form is very simple, websites place links to other websites, gradually affiliate marketing develops more complex to become advertising methods based on the Internet platform, in which a website will promote many other websites by placing banners of those websites on its website and receive commissions through traffic to customer websites (pay per click - PPC), sales or when the registration form is completed (pay per sale - PPS) ... This form of payment is completely different from traditional advertising which mainly depends on the time and frequency of advertising, while advertising in the form of Affiliate Marketing is mainly based on the effectiveness of advertising, this not only helps businesses measure the effectiveness of their campaigns but also ensures the value of every penny the company spends on advertising.
Affiliate Marketing – the inevitable trend of modern advertising
According to the Vietnam Internet Center (VNNIC.NET), as of June 2008, there were 20,159,615 internet users, equivalent to 23.61 % of our country's population. The above figures show that an information technology whirlwind is sweeping through Vietnam. In the current era of people "eating the Internet - sleeping the Internet", web advertising is gaining more and more advantages. Recent surveys show that the role of traditional advertising on television, newspapers and magazines is decreasing. Specifically, in the second quarter of 2008, advertising on printed newspapers decreased by 16.1%. This is a signal for businesses to accelerate further in promoting their brands and products on their company websites and bring their websites to a wider audience. To do so, businesses cannot stand alone but must establish extensive links with other websites.
Keeping up with the general trend of the world, in Vietnam, affiliate marketing is increasingly developing and popular in the activities of most websites or online forums. Typically, dantri.com, if calculated roughly, each day the homepage alone has about 30 banners placed in all forms. The "tricks" to attract viewers to click on banners are also increasingly diverse. Today's banners are designed with funny animations, eye-catching colors, 3D graphics technology, Flash is applied to the maximum. More uniquely, sometimes, information boxes like "You are a lucky customer who visited our website at the 100th second, click here to win our prize..." suddenly appear while you are surfing the web with very attractive sounds. If you click on it, the link will immediately lead you to an online shopping website with extremely attractive promises and incentives. This type of advertising appeals to the public’s curiosity and love of discovery. In addition, it gives the public a sense of excitement because they are the ones who seek out information, not being forced to receive advertising information like traditional forms of marketing on TV, newspapers, magazines, etc.
What direction for Affiliate Marketing in Vietnam?
Despite a favorable start, Affiliate Marketing is still a new industry in Vietnam, so there are still many shortcomings, typically the cost of hanging banners is not calculated accurately and clearly. Unlike the general trend of the world, which is to charge for banner advertising on websites based on effectiveness through PPC or PPS indicators, Vietnamese businesses still pay advertising fees in the traditional way based on the frequency and time of hanging banners. Nguyen Khai - Moderator of buonbanonl.net: "I think that calculating advertising costs based on banner placement time is not very attractive to small and medium-sized enterprises because even if the advertising effectiveness is not high, the business still has to bear a significant amount of "virtual" costs."
Furthermore, one of the immutable principles for effective Affiliate Marketing is to identify the right partner, which means identifying the right website with content that is suitable for your company's products to propose placing banners. However, in a vast information highway like the Internet, finding suitable websites is like "looking for a needle in a haystack". Researching information about websites used to hang banners is not done carefully, leading to customers losing confidence in the banners hanging on that website.
That is why, in the world, Affiliate Marketing service providers are born one after another. Some of the giants include: Google AdSense, LinkShare Corporation ... These websites operate as online advertising networks (Affiliate Network Marketing), a bridge providing services to help websites that need to place banners and websites that want to hang banners have the opportunity to find each other. In addition, periodically every month or quarter, the system also monitors and provides both the website that hangs the banner and the website that is hung the banner with reports and statistics on advertising results as well as commission payments. Thereby, businesses can evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and decide whether to continue placing banners on that website or not. The website that hangs the banner is also not afraid of losing money due to incorrect calculation of traffic to the banners hung on its website. To build an online advertising network that can track traffic with such high accuracy, requires a modern technology platform. For example, AdSense uses JavaScript code to inject advertising content into member sites.
In addition, to combat fake clicks, AdSense also provides banner posting websites with a number of click tracking programs. This is a type of program to identify visitors. They allow displaying detailed information about visitors and clicks on AdSense ads. Websites posting ads can use this information to determine whether they are victims of fake clicks or not. Technological limitations can be said to be the main reason why Affiliate Marketing services have not really had a chance to develop in Vietnam. Professional affiliate marketing service providers in Vietnam so far can only be mentioned as lienket247.
The expansion of the Internet and the current rapid economic growth are opening up great opportunities for affiliate marketing to develop. Modern technology platforms are just a prerequisite, the success of this new form of marketing depends largely on the capacity and reputation of service providers in particular and all participating businesses in general. Can affiliate marketing be the future of electronic advertising in Vietnam? That question remains open and as Mr. Le Quang - representative of the website lienket247.com shared, it is the online advertising service providers who hold the key to the answer.
According to Marketing Magazine
