How to Promote a B2B Affiliate Program in 2024 [on no budget]

Businesses in today’s world usually seek to collaborate and work with other businesses. B2B affiliate programs allow those businesses to work together so that both sides benefit from each other. As shown below, many people will focus on research, land, expand, and defend when they want to build a B2B affiliate program.

However, some people already know how to establish a B2B program. Instead, they want to promote it while not spending money. After all, some businesses may not have the budget to promote the program. Try some of these ideas so that you can get the word out about your program to gain affiliates and work them to make some money.

1. Use Automated Marketing Programs

While you may try to handle all aspects of B2B affiliate programs on your own, doing so could cost you money. Many businesses utilize automated marketing programs to help them with different parts of their business. You could try email marketing workflow automation to quickly send emails to your affiliates.

Email marketing workflows allow your software to send emails based on certain conditions and interactions from your customers. These next steps will show an example of a workflow.

• A business comes across your affiliate program on your website.
• They sign-up for the affiliate program and give you their email address.
• The software sends them a welcome email from a template you made.
• The other business receives an instant welcome, confirmation, and access to different affiliate information.

On top of this, your automation software can help you out in multiple ways. This includes sending emails, collecting leads, and tracking statistics and commissions. You can make things so much easier by using automated marketing, but some people may worry about the price.

You can easily find emails software that will fit your budget. Many tools have a free version that lets you send email campaigns and a standard version where you can take advantage of their automated features. Many businesses offer multiple plan tiers, so you can find one for your budget.

Automated marketing programs will help you to handle the common and simpler emails that you need to send to other businesses. This way, the work can get done, you can provide your affiliates 24/7 service, and you can save money.

2. Give Valuable Incentives

Other businesses have the same goal as you: make a profit while providing a service. If you want businesses to join your affiliate program, you need to provide them strong incentives to encourage them. You wouldn’t want to work for nothing, so make sure that you properly pay other businesses for sending you, potential customers.

For example, in this image, the business offers to pay up $5 commission to anyone that can bring the business new signups. Your affiliates want to make money, so you should offer them commissions.

This means that those affiliates will receive a percentage of the payments made from the businesses that they refer to you. This benefits you both in multiple ways.

1. Both businesses make money.
2. Both have a reason for your business to succeed.
3. Both build up a stronger relationship with each other.

While affiliate programs provide these benefits to businesses, some may wonder how much money they should give for commission. This depends on your personal position and how much money you both feel would be fair. You need to discuss this with the other business and determine what would be a good amount for both sides.

Make sure that you spend some time finding that right balance for commissions. You don’t want to give the other businesses too low of an amount, but you also don’t want to lose money. Talk with them and find the right amount for both sides so that you can both benefit and make money from this program.

3. Network With Other Businesses

If you want to have an effective affiliate program, you need to learn how to interact with other businesses. You can do so by networking with other businesses in a similar field. For example, if your business sells perfumes, then you may want to talk with other businesses that work in the beauty department.

Spend some time doing research to see which businesses work in the same field as you. It can be tricky because you want to find businesses that don’t directly compete with you. However, you also want businesses that look for the same demographic as you. So while other perfume sellers might not want to join the program, a nail salon might show some interest.

Depending on your approach, you can either seek business affiliates online or around your area. This depends on your target demographic and your goals. Keep these questions in mind.

• Do most customers purchase my products in-store or online?
• Do I think the online or in-store market will be more effective for my affiliate program?
• Even if I do in-store or online, are there parts of each that I need to include in my affiliate program?

If you want to network effectively, you need to figure out your B2B affiliate program, how you will do it, and what each business needs to know about it. Identifying your target demographic, goals, and channel allows you to figure out the best businesses for the job. 

4. Communicate

If you want to work with other businesses, you should figure out what you need to communicate with them. How will you present the affiliate program? What things do you need to explain or clarify? Are there specific details that they should know about the situation? Make sure that you spend some time figuring out what your potential affiliates would want to know.

As you can see, over half of the projects fail because businesses and people don’t communicate effectively. This means that if you don’t find effective communication tools for your affiliate program, then you face a strong chance of failure. This isn’t meant to scare you, but to help you realize the importance of communication.

Figure out the communication tools that will help your business. As you do this, you can keep your business affiliates fully informed about sales cycles. This includes informing them about expectations, commissions, and how to communicate with potential customers. Make sure that they know each step of your sales cycle and any differences it has from other businesses.

Find the right channels of communication for your business. You should always use email since it provides an easy way to send long information, important files, and updates that the affiliates should know. Feel free to also incorporate face-to-face communication so that you can get to know the other business and build a stronger relationship.

It comes down to experimenting and trying different approaches until you find a consistent communication method that works for your business.

5. Create Social Media Pages

More and more businesses use social media pages to promote and advertise their businesses. You can communicate through social media to get in contact with other businesses. This is possible because of the popularity and constant use of social media channels. Social media pages can help your B2B program in a variety of ways.

• Provide a place that your affiliates can refer potential customers to.
• Give yourself a place to advertise your business and share your affiliate program.
• Make positive impressions on other businesses so that they want to join your program.

Just like with other types of businesses, you can easily use social media as a platform to promote your business and to advertise yourself. This allows you to easily interact with other businesses and customers so that you can grow and make an impression on people. Since so many people and businesses use social media, it works as an effective tool to find affiliates.

This image demonstrates that nearly 9-out-of-10 businesses use social media for marketing. This gives you the perfect opportunity to reach out to them and see if they want to join your affiliate program. With so many involved, you increase the odds of gaining affiliates as you ask more businesses to join.

Take advantage of social media and use as many channels as you think your business can handle. This allows you to easily get your name out there and to share your affiliate program with more businesses.

6. Write Some Blog Posts

This may seem kind of strange, but consider writing blog posts to help promote your B2B program. While you may not realize it, blog posts can help you reach out to other businesses in multiple ways.

• Making guest posts on other websites to build up a relationship with that business.
• Get people to associate your business with affiliate programs and similar subjects.
• Improve your rankings on search engines to get more traffic.

These points work great because they open up more opportunities for you. The guest posts allow you to interact with other businesses, the association gets your brand some recognition, and the improved ranks increase your traffic. Blogging contributes to these benefits and allows you to promote your B2B program in those posts.

While blogging can provide these benefits to a business, some may wonder if blogging is worth the effort.

This graph shows that a business greatly increases its B2B and B2C (business-to-company) traffic as it makes more blog posts. This means that you can get more traffic from other businesses as you update your blog multiple times a month. This will encourage businesses to interact with you and to join your affiliate program.

Dedicating effort into making your blog enticing and relevant increases your overall traffic, which in turn heightens the chance of readers returning. With a large audience of recurring visitors, you’re able to draw the attention of other businesses, who would not only have a lot of interest in joining your affiliate program, but may also result in other methods of you earning income through blogging, such as advertising.

Many people overlook the outreach of blog posts. On top of creating your own blog, you can interact with other businesses by using it. From here, you can continue to promote your B2B affiliate program so that you can find more customers.

7. Invite Your Current Customers and Partners

While you can use these other resources to avoid going over budget, sometimes you just need to consider the options around you. If you want to create an affiliate program, then you likely already have a business and some customers. You can use this foundation to turn your current customers or business partners into affiliates.

Both groups can help you gain more affiliates and customers. Make sure to get in contact with them to find out if they have an interest in becoming an affiliate. Even if a business you work with doesn’t normally look for customers, you have nothing to lose by asking them. That business may know some people and want to become an affiliate.

On top of that, some of your customers may work for businesses that would want to become affiliates. If you see them often, you can casually mention that you’re starting a B2B affiliate program and that you’re always looking for more affiliates. If they know a business that you could work with, they will let you know.

You may be surprised by simple things that you can do to promote your business. Even just talking with those that you have a business relationship with could lead to more affiliates. The simple act of talking works as a promotional tool for your B2B affiliate program just like all of the other points addressed in these tips.

Conclusion

Businesses establish B2B affiliate programs so that they can find more customers, give money to other businesses that help them, and continue to grow. It allows both sides to benefit and to make money by working together. They also get to build up a sense of community and a strong business relationship that will benefit them both in the future.

While many businesses will spend tons of money on their programs to get them to work, not every business will have access to that kind of budget. If you have a small budget or no money at all, you can take advantage of this guide. Make sure to look over these tips and see how you can apply them to your business to promote your B2B affiliate program.