Affiliate Marketing on Facebook: 4 Tips to Succeed in 2021
For the past several years, Facebook has been the ‘holy grail’ for affiliate marketing, thanks to a robust ad platform and billions of users for marketers to reach.
Despite recent challenges like the iOS 14 update, Facebook can still be an effective marketing tool. If you’re looking to get products in front of new audiences, partner with successful brands, and build a sustainable business online, then affiliate marketing on Facebook is worth a look!
In this article, we’ll share 4 different ways to dominate Facebook affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
“With the rise of self-publishing tools and social media marketing, the global population of affiliates has grown substantially.” – Bonnie D’Amico, Shopify
In case you’re new to the idea, affiliate marketing is all about promoting other companies’ products. You earn a commission whenever someone buys a product through your affiliate link. In other words, your job is to help companies sell their products to your own audience!
Best of all, this business model is scalable, allowing you to promote products from a variety of different companies and earn commissions from all of them. And the more people who buy using your affiliate links, the more money you can earn.
No wonder affiliate marketing is so popular!
Facebook Affiliate Marketing is About Trust
So, how do you make this affiliate marketing thing work on a popular social media site like Facebook?
These days, the name of the game is trust.
Consumers today are skeptical of flashy brands and gravitate toward authenticity. If you want to sell more products to your audience, you’ll need to establish trust and rapport with everyone you interact with.
Here’s how to do it on Facebook:
Post regularly (ideally, 1-2x per day)
Engage with your users’ comments, likes, and shares
Provide insane value as a trusted advisor
Share other people’s content
All of these little tactics will help you build trust with – and grow – your audience. It’ll take some time, but the payoff will be huge!
4 Facebook Affiliate Marketing Tips
Now, let’s look a little closer at affiliate marketing on Facebook and the 4 ways you can use it for your own affiliate business.
1. Run Facebook Ads
Kau Media Group reports the number of social media users worldwide has reached 3.484 billion, and it’ll continue rising nearly 10% year on year if the current trends hold.
On top of that, the average person is projected to spend 6 years and 8 months of their life on social media. That speaks volumes for the global opportunity to reach people.
On Facebook, organic traffic can only take you so far. As your affiliate marketing business grows, there will come a point where word-of-mouth simply won’t cut it anymore. You need a bigger audience, but how do you get it?
The answer is Facebook Ads. This is what your long-term affiliate marketing plan needs so that you can reach new audiences quickly and make more money.
Facebook Ads for Beginners
Do you want to create ads targeting people living in the US, between the ages of 18 and 30, who love organic beauty products? Facebook Ads let you do just that. What’s more, as you gather data, you can tweak your campaigns to meet the needs of your audience more effectively.
It takes just a few minutes to create an ad campaign targeting your audience, and another few minutes to get your brand in front of thousands of potential customers.
As with any type of advertising, you should start by gathering enough data to analyze your target groups and best-performing keywords. Then, create a campaign that will help you succeed.
Bonus Tip: Use the Pixel
If you’re serious about ads, you should use Facebook Pixel. This tool will make sure your ads are shown to the right people and that they are driving sales. The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you place on your site. It lets you monitor the conversions from your Facebook ads in order to optimize your campaigns.
create a facebook pixel for affiliate marketing
Using Facebook Pixel is a great way to track the movements of your audience and optimize your ads to get more conversions.
This tracking tool measures cross-device conversions to report the consumption patterns of your audience by device. Facebook Pixel even tells you which device type is best for your audience so that you can optimize your ads for optimal conversions and a lower cost per click.
How to Create a Facebook Pixel:
Click on the Pixel section
Click ‘create a pixel’
Enter the name of your Pixel
Click ‘install pixel now’
Copy and paste the base code into your website template or between the tags on each web page.
According to Facebook: “You can place events on the pages that matter to your business. For example, you can capture your customers’ journey from viewing product pages all the way through to a purchase. If you study all the steps along their journey, you can measure and optimize your ads for the conversions that mean the most to your business.”
Facebook Ad Tips for the Experts
If you’re already a seasoned Facebook user, it’s fair to say you know your way around the platform. You will know about the analytics tools that help you target your audience more effectively and you also know how to set your marketing objectives.
So, what’s next?
Here are two quick pointers to remember:
Use a bridge page. A bridge page (or presell page) is a page between your Facebook ad and the offer page that warms up your audience and helps with Facebook Ads compliance. Lately, we’ve seen quiz funnels and calculators drive higher engagement and conversions. For more ideas on bridge pages you can deploy, check out ClickBank’s affiliate bridge page guide.
Pay attention to CTR. A lot of media buyers focus on their return on ad spend (ROAS), which is important, but one of the best ways to really improve your ad performance is to look at the overall clickthrough rate (CTR) – specifically, the rate of unique link clicks. This number should be at least 2%. If you can improve your CTR, your ROAS will improve too.
affiliate marketing on facebook clickthrough rate
As a general rule, if your ad isn’t converting well, you should take another look at your choice of creative (ie the image or video in your ad).
That’s because visuals are a huge factor on Facebook – as people scroll through their feed, a visual is what’s most likely to get them to stop and engage with your ad.
2. Build a Facebook Group
One of the things people hate about affiliate marketing is all the links they’re spammed with. This can be damaging to your affiliate marketing success, often turning people away and sometimes even drastically reducing sales.
To avoid hurting your reputation with spammy practices, it pays to create a Facebook Group where you can build a community around your topic, share events or launches, and yes, promote products!
Not only does a group reduce the risk of spamming your personal Facebook contacts, but it also increases your chances of actually making some sales. This is because you have brought together a group of people who have raised their hand to express interest in your topic.
The other big benefit of Facebook Groups is how much more organic reach you can get with it. As a member of several Facebook Groups, I often see notifications in Facebook when there’s new posts or activity in a Facebook Group.
It’s just a much more cost effective and natural way to use Facebook these days.
Facebook Group Tips for the Experts
One of our favorite strategies for Facebook Groups has little to do with Facebook itself – it’s actually about email.
If you set your Facebook Group to private and create a few questions for users to answer before they join, you can include a field for someone to enter their email address.
Because they are opting in, it’s a simple and affordable way to build out your email list.
Here are a couple other great Facebook Group tips:
Go live sometimes. It’s simple and easy to do. As an admin, you can go live to your Facebook Group once or twice a week for a few minutes and share some tip or tidbit with the group. It doesn’t even have to be about your topic, as long as it’s entertaining or useful for your audience. This little tip is free and can drive huge engagement.
Restrict promotions to once per week. It’s no secret that other people will join your group to sell to your community. Depending on your niche, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but constant sales pitches could ruin your group. So, pick just one day each week where people can do their own pitches and enforce this rule.
Aside from these tips, I want to remind you again how important it is to be active in the group and engage with your community.
You’d be surprised just how many people set up a Facebook group and even make posts regularly, without bothering to interact with their audience. The more time you take to engage with your audience, the more you will come to discover what they love and comment on!
You should also consider varying the content you publish. According to Neil Patel, photos attract 53% more likely, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs and generic text-only posts. Are you making the most of varying content?
Short posts (less than 80 characters) are also extremely effective. By posting different kinds of content a couple of times per day, you can greatly increase your engagement.
Sometimes, it’s the small changes that make all the difference.
3. Use Split Testing
One of the fastest ways to achieve success on social media is to engage with your audience. Most people aren’t on Facebook to look at the ads – except maybe for other marketers, of course!
This is particularly true when they’re scrolling through their social feeds. But if you can create ads that mimic the most engaging organic posts and draw people in, you’re more likely to grow your overall brand and get more conversions.
So, how do you design the kinds of ads your audience will connect with?
No matter how long you’ve used Facebook or how much you’ve already learned, it’s always hard to predict exactly how people will respond to an ad.
The good news is, you don’t really have to predict anything. You just have to create enough variations of an ad to discover the version that works best.
Split testing is a great way to find the ideal combination of headline, copy, and creative for your ad. There are many methods you can use when it comes to running a split test, but we’re going to talk you through two of the most common: the A/B test function and AdExpresso’s split test feature.
A/B Testing
Log into your Facebook Ads Manager and select the campaign you want to test. Click the ‘A/B Test’ button and then choose the variable you want to test for.
Choose whether you want to compare separate or duplicate campaigns and then fill in the information. Select how Facebook will determine the winner of your A/B test, and you are ready to go. Once the results are in, you should have a clearer idea about which ads are working well and which ones, well, aren’t.
AdEspresso Split Testing
Log in to AdEspresso or create an account and then click ‘New Campaign’ in the dashboard. Fill in the name, select the campaign and choose the promotion you want to run.
The great thing about AdEspresso is that you can try out different variations of your ad by filling in ad text, headlines, images, and videos and AdEspresso will then automatically mix and match these and report back with the results.
4. Maximize Post Success
Posting on Facebook to gain sales can be a tricky business. So, it’s important to consider the kind of content your connections actually want to see.
For one thing, don’t ignore popular formats like video, online surveys, and infographics. Visual content is the way to go – images, graphics, and video are all much more engaging than text alone.
Create a content calendar so that you can plan posts and keep up with your schedule. You can even prepare content in advance and schedule it to be posted at specific times by heading over to the ‘Publishing Tools’ tab in Facebook’s Page Settings (or use a scheduling tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite). This will ensure your output is consistent and your audience is engaged!
Post Success Tips for the Experts
If you’ve posted on Facebook and your post hasn’t seen the organic traction you thought it would, don’t worry – we’ve all been there. You may have also seen that trusty ‘Boost Post’ button.
This button appears at the bottom of your post once it has been published. The idea behind the Boost Button is that you can boost your posts to get them seen by more people. However, this isn’t the most effective strategy!
If you want to ‘boost’ your Facebook posts and reach more people, you should create a more targeted campaign. The takeaway is:
Always Use Ads Manager to promote your posts!
Ads Manager allows you to customize your audience, selecting things like demographics and when and where your ads will be seen. Ads Manager lets you refine your ad process and target your audience more effectively.
For an even more advanced tip, you can use the post itself as an ad. When creating an ad, Facebook will give you the option to post from your page. To turn your post into an ad, find the ID number from that post and put it into your Facebook Ads dashboard.
Although this is a more advanced technique, this is a great way to increase post visibility and engagement in a more targeted way!
Final Thoughts
Facebook is a platform most people are familiar with, but if you want to achieve success with affiliate marketing on Facebook, it’s all about creating value for your visitors!
If you want to grow your affiliate marketing reach, promote more offers, and increase your sales, you have to put the needs of your visitors first. If you can establish trust, help solve their problems, and share content they truly care about, you will enjoy a bright future in affiliate marketing!
