Partner up: How affiliate marketing drives results in the AI era

TOGETHER WITH

Marketing’s new dream team. To create an efficient funnel, marketing needs a powerhouse coach to help call plays. Awin provides the tech platform, partners, data, and human expertise needed to help boost marketing channels and visibility in the AI age—from influencer and search to programmatic. Learn more.

A modern marketing mix needs to be just that—a true mix. There’s no denying that AI has transformed how customers discover and make decisions about products, but your strategy can’t focus on just one channel.

Affiliate marketing helps support your entire mix. And before it gets written off as a standalone channel, hear us out: Affiliate partners help build trust with your customers, improving your standing in AI searches in return. It’s not a channel that can be measured in isolation.

With a strong affiliate marketing program, marketing teams get low-risk, measurable results, and the C-suite gets clear ROI. We teamed up with Awin to learn how brands can make the most of their affiliate strategy in the AI age. Let’s get into it.

Partner perks

By reaching out through trusted influencers and partners that audiences already look to for recommendations, brands can strengthen every major channel in their mix. From boosting paid media efficiency and influencer scale to customer acquisition and loyalty, affiliate marketing helps support the entire funnel.

When compared with opaque, black-box platforms, affiliate programs provide transparency and trust by connecting brands with customers in places they actively choose. They help brands recognize which partners are performing best via clear attribution data.

Here’s how it works: Strong affiliate programs balance a wide portfolio of partner types, and each partner type plays a different role (and requires its own optimization). That means leveraging loyalty and cash-back partners to help drive conversions while using content publishers to support discovery and tech partners to solve e-commerce challenges with simple plug-ins. Influencers drive impact across the entire funnel, shaping purchase behavior, strengthening brand affinity, and connecting brands with high-value audiences who are already primed for consideration and conversion. Now, let’s talk about where AI comes in.

Better together

Think about why customers turn to AI during their buying journey. Maybe they need help looking for a niche product, or maybe they want to streamline the research process. Regardless of the reason for their AI search, these customers tend to be high-intent shoppers. This is where your trusty affiliate program can help boost conversion.

Success in an AI-driven market requires more than just tech: It needs data. In a landscape shaped by LLMs, using your affiliate program and AI strategy in tandem can help improve your visibility and credibility.

Publishers and creators are more important than ever in the AI age because human authenticity and candor carry a lot of weight. Publishers power the affiliate ecosystem. They’re often the first to explore new models, technology, and traffic-driving strategies. That means their content is among the first to show up in LLM-driven commerce and AI-powered product discovery—and they have invaluable first-party consumer data.

Having the credibility and third-party validation from a robust affiliate program helps determine how visible brands are across the customer journey, and it can make the difference for conversion, too. Speaking of—let’s talk numbers.

Dive into the data

Before you can optimize any of your channels, you need a deep understanding of the customer data across your marketing mix—from affiliate marketing to AI and beyond. For brands looking to develop their partnerships (and need a platform to support ’em), you might be missing out on easy growth opportunities by prioritizing spend across traditional paid search and social while keeping affiliate in a smaller, separate lane.

Partnerships help all of your marketing channels without breaking the bank, and they can reach audiences more effectively than programmatic channels. Plus, you gain the transparency that traditional channels often can’t provide.

Awin helps brands put that transparent customer data into context so they can make data-driven decisions. Its foundation in data is combined with deep strategic expertise, getting you the support you need.

Awin’s AI architecture combines deterministic and probabilistic approaches to help brands better understand what drives outcomes, including new and ever-changing AI environments.

By pairing AI capabilities with human expertise, Awin helps brands interpret signals, anticipate your competitors’ next moves, and optimize your own strategy accordingly. Think of Awin’s approach like a financial advisor managing an investment portfolio: It’s never static.

It’s all powered by Awin’s consolidated partner growth engine. With access to 1m+ performance-based partners, Awin provides a single platform to manage, measure, and scale growth across your entire business. From influencer and adtech to loyalty and brand-to-brand partnerships, the platform is supported by hands-on expert service that helps teams activate and optimize every channel in one place for full ecosystem reach.

Ready to grow

In an AI-driven marketplace, brands can’t rely on a single strategy to reach customers. It takes human expertise and tech to make a difference. A strong affiliate program helps boost every channel in your mix.

Put your dream human-AI team to work with Awin.