Driving traffic towards your product

BENGALURU: Last week, we discussed referral marketing. We talked about how you can get your initial customers to refer your app or product. This week we will discuss about how you can get strangers to drive traffic to your product, even though they themselves are not a consumer of your product. This means they are not referring your product because they necessarily liked the experience but they are merely advertising it. Nearly 8% of e-commerce website traffic is attributed to this kind of marketing and it is called ‘affiliate marketing’.  

Firstly you should understand which strangers would send the traffic to you and why. Look for websites/ Youtubers/ Bloggers who talk about products in the similar domain as yours. For eg. If yours is a tech-app, look for websites that talk about app. If you have an e-commerce website, look for websites which divert  traffic to e-commerce websites.

Send them email, or call them up, tell them about your product and ask if they can promote your banner/ advertisement on their page. In return you can offer them commission for every purchase made through a consumer diverted by them. Some consumers are often deal-hunters that look for cashbacks and often visit such websites which tell them the best deals out there. If yours is an e-commerce website offering a special deal, it can surely get featured there. Similarly if your product is an app, a tech blogger or an app reviewer may talk about it or mention its features and the crowd interested in such stuff would click their way to your app.

Affiliates are an interesting modern way of promoting your product because :

i)There is no cost involved. All you have to do is give higher commission. So it’s a win-win. Instead of giving away your products for free or at a bleeding discount, why not pass a little commission who will divert traffic to you!

ii) These affiliate channels help you reach those consumers which are otherwise difficult to reach for you.  You can tap on new markets, new age groups, new customer profiles.
iii) A lot of these affiliate channels will use their own ways of marketing their website like sending email campaigns, post on social media, talk on forums or send push notifications. How awesome would it be if they talked about your deal there. Your product will get displayed in places you never would have thought otherwise.
If you have any queries write to Rajeev@TBSPlanet.com.
Rajeev Tamhankar is an IIT Roorkee Silver Medalist, ex-Flipkart, Xiaomi and currently the founder of comic books company – TBS Planet Comics (www.TBSPlanet.com)