As a beginner online marketer, you must have heard of the terms “digital marketing and affiliate marketing. Then you wonder what these mean and how you can get started.
Which option should you choose that will help you quickly reach your financial freedom?
In today’s post, I will help you clear the confusion of digital marketing vs affiliate marketing, their differences, and which option is right for you, depending on your marketing skills and knowledge.
Before you jump into reading the key differences, why not get a good understanding of what both of these concepts mean?
This will help your knowledge of both worlds and inform your overall marketing knowledge. It will also help you choose the right internet marketing path that aligns with your passion and personality.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model where a seller/merchant rewards affiliates (publishers/bloggers) through commissions to generate leads or sales for the business.
Mainly, it is a partnership agreement between two parties (the seller and the affiliates) to help the product’s owner (seller) reach a wider audience and generate qualified sales. When a sale is generated through the affiliate, the seller credits his or her account with the sales percentage or commission as agreed in the affiliate terms and conditions.
Consider reading this post to understand how affiliate marketing works, how to start, and how affiliate marketers make money.
What is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a broader term for promoting a business online. It is an all-encompassing concept for marketing a business, products, or services online.
It involves using various marketing and audience channels and strategies to promote a business to a targeted audience, aiming to create more brand awareness, generate leads, and sales, and make more revenue.
As a digital marketer, you explore various marketing channels, such as SEO, social media, email marketing, video marketing, advertising, etc., to reach a target goal(s).
5 Key Differences Between Digital Marketing vs Affiliate Marketing
Digital marketing and affiliate marketing are essential tools to promote an online business.
While digital marketing is a broader concept, affiliate marketing is a business or revenue-sharing model within the digital marketing landscape.
This section shows you the key differences between affiliate and digital marketing.
Business Model
Primarily, affiliate marketing involves partnerships between businesses and bloggers (always referred to as affiliates). The affiliates’ job is to help business owners generate more sales in return for a predefined profit share.
On the other hand, digital marketing isn’t a partnership agreement or a specific business model; it is a way of driving awareness, generating visibility, and promoting a business digitally.
In essence, digital marketing is another way to describe or say internet marketing. It involved several marketing strategies like inbound marketing, content marketing, PPC, search engine marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, viral marketing campaigns, lead generation, Webinars, etc.
Focus
The main focus of an affiliate marketer is to drive the right traffic to the merchant’s products, generate sales, and get their share of profits. Affiliate marketers always look for trending products and services to promote.
Most affiliate marketers’ tactics or strategies focus on generating more clicks on their affiliate links. The more affiliate link clicks, the greater the earning potential.
For digital marketing, the focus is always on building brand awareness, customer acquisition, sales, and revenue, etc, through several available marketing channels.
Digital marketing allows businesses to expand their focus, dream big, invest in significant projects, and drive massive outcomes.
Title or Profession
Affiliate marketing is, in fact, a profession or business type. Your expertise lies in helping other people or businesses generate sales.
When you identify as an affiliate marketer, you simply say your job is helping companies, business owners, or individuals find more potential customers.
If a customer you refer to the merchant website makes a purchase, you get a profit cut.
However, anyone identifying as a digital marketer may need to provide more information about their online marketing or business activities.
As mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a broad term or concept. It requires that you go more in-depth, as per your area of specialization in digital marketing.
SEO professionals, online business coaches, consultants, ecommerce store owners, and YouTubers can claim to be digital marketers. This is because their business operations are digitally present.
Strategy
Strategy is another difference between digital marketing and affiliate marketing.
If we talk about affiliate marketing strategy, we refer to specific marketing tactics that help an affiliate marketer achieve a particular goal within the context of affiliate marketing.
But if we discuss digital marketing strategy, we may discuss a wide range of marketing tactics or digital tools to establish an online presence.
Not necessarily talking about marketing ideas tailored to a particular internet business model or goals.
Digital marketing strategies encompass various marketing ideas and tactics a business can try to reach its desired goal.
Context
Context brings more clarity to an ambiguous discussion or something.
Affiliate marketing, in any context of discussion, refers to the practice of affiliates helping another business find more customers who buy their products or services. In return for the affiliate marketer’s efforts, the business shares a percentage of the total profits with the affiliate.
Digital marketing might mean different things in different contexts.
For example, digital marketing could describe an enterprise business that focuses on bringing its own products or services online and selling to other businesses or consumers.
Such instances are when you say Hubspot is a “digital marketing company” specializing in software development and tools, and offering services to other businesses.
Another instance of a different context is when you consider that Microsoft (a technology-driven company) uses digital marketing strategies as tools to drive the company’s growth.
Which Approach is Best For You?
This question isn’t necessary if you’ve been following the explanation in this post.
By now, you should know that digital marketing isn’t a specific business type. Rather, it is a way of doing business on the Internet.
We can also say a digital marketer is anyone (including affiliate marketers) specializing in using digital channels to promote a business, products, and services.
So, if you request my humble opinion on this question, my answer is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a viable business type that requires well-thought-out digital marketing strategies, tactics, and execution.
When you’re into affiliate marketing, your content ideas, process, promotional tactics, and traffic-generating methods are all tied to one common goal: drive sales to the merchant website to earn more commissions.
The approach to affiliate marketing is different from business owners who sell goods and services. Likewise, e-commerce store owners will approach marketing differently.
You can monetize your platform through affiliate marketing if you have an established website or online presence. It is one of the easiest ways to start making money online without the high cost.
FAQs
Is Affiliate Marketing Still Relevant in the Digital Marketing Landscape?
Absolutely! Affiliate marketing remains one of the most popular and reliable online businesses. It allows a business to expand its reach, get more leads and sales, and increase revenue. A business can leverage the partnership of several affiliates to reach its yearly goal, while affiliates earn more money from products they value and are not involved in their creation or handling.
Is Affiliate Marketing Good for Everyone?
Like any business, affiliate marketing may not be a good option if you can’t work on something for the long term. Making life-changing income from affiliate marketing requires consistent, long-term efforts and investment. Plus, you must be committed to learning, playing by the affiliate partnership rules and guidelines, and being able to analyze data, build authority, and earn the trust of your followers.
Can I Combine Digital Marketing and Affiliate marketing?
You definitely must use both. In fact, there is no way you’ll be successful with affiliate marketing without leveraging digital marketing strategies or tactics. Most marketing practices for a successful affiliate campaign are within digital marketing.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, digital marketing is a general term used to describe online marketing. For example, if someone asks you what you do for a living? You can simply say, I’m a digital marketer.
This signifies that you’re using the internet to sell goods and services. You rely on several digital advertising channels to bring awareness to your business.
Affiliate marketing is a profession within digital marketing that allows for collaboration between an individual, agency, or even business to help another business get more sales, leads, or other required outcomes.
Here is a helpful guide on affiliate marketing if you want to learn more.
