You might have already set up a referral marketing strategy to boost direct traffic to your brand’s website. Still, it’s not always clear how to increase referral traffic—which requires having loyal affiliate partners willing to refer potential new clients or customers to your brand—most effectively. A robust referral marketing strategy is essential to optimize results.
If you’re wondering how to boost website traffic by improving your referral marketing strategy, check out this list of methods you can use, tried and tested by yours truly!
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7 Result-Backed Methods to Increase Your Referral Traffic With Ease
Referrals don’t just come because you have an excellent product or service; you’ll need to dedicate efforts towards strategy, depending on your industry.
Over the years, at Vivian Agency, we’ve helped e-commerce brands build their referral traffic strategy from the ground up, generating over a million in accumulated revenue for them.
I’ll share with you the exact methods we use and how you can implement them.
1. Use Social Media Influencer Networks
Influencer networks are easily one of the best means to drive referral traffic to your affiliate programs. As a matter of fact, I’ve found great success using this method for several brands, like DOD Outdoors.
First, you’ll have to find and categorize the top influencers in your niche, providing them with a unique referral code, tracking ID, or discounts, as the case may be. Consider your brand’s size and budget while doing this, as it’ll help you determine how many influencers you can work with.
When we designed DOD Outdoors’ affiliate program, we were able to select over a thousand top influencers in the camping, hiking, and adjacent niches.
The idea of using as many influencers as possible is to build a vast network that ensures your affiliate offers or products turn up on the feed of your ideal customer, so much so that they can’t ignore it.
Here’s a post from an influencer for DOD Outdoors on Instagram:
The affiliate influencer can include a referral code or link to your content or promote your brand more organically, like in the post above.
This improves your brand’s visibility and automatically drives massive traffic to your product.
2. Streamline Your Campaign Management
When your brand works through multiple channels at once, it can be hard to create a consistent, unified campaign strategy that fully covers every channel. The importance of such a strategy can’t be overstated, though—it can save hours of work per week while keeping the campaign results on the same level.
The greatest challenge here is to set up a software solution capable of streamlining all your campaigns. You can do this either through a pre-built campaign management software or by working on your own in-house solution.
3. Take Advantage of Social Media Communities
Social media traffic is a useful way to gain referrals, not only by onboarding influencers as affiliates but also by directly marketing your brand on social media platforms. This is the approach we went for when launching OneWayFly’s referral program.
Aim to post your marketing content in relevant Facebook groups and other topical online communities, such as online digital nomad communities like in our work with OneWayFly.
The posting strategy needs to remain consistent, active, and responsive—rather than posting promotional spam, your brand representative needs to become an organic part of these communities.
Incorporating referral codes and special offers into your community posts will also drive additional traffic toward your brand.
Right now, OneWayFly reports 120 active affiliates and is close to $40k in revenue.
4. Use Automation
Automation offers an opportunity to cut down the time spent on setting up and running a referral campaign.
Instead of spending time on routine tasks, you can use your saved time to improve your referral strategy to attract new leads, or individually nurture your affiliate relationships to increase retention. This helps you keep a higher number of referral partners, directly increasing referral traffic.
Also, automation can accelerate relevant technical procedures, such as contacting and onboarding new affiliates, which directly increases your referral network.
You can automate your referral campaign using dedicated referral marketing tools with built-in automation features, or by setting up these automations yourself with the help of various workflow tools.
While working with Prep Expert, we decided to automate their existing referral program, allowing it to go on smoothly while shifting the focus to growing the network. Within a single year, the revamped network program brought $136k in sales, while the in-house platform brought in over $337k.
5. Define a Broad Target Audience
Spreading your target focus out too thin is always a mistake, but introducing some variety to your existing customers’ niche can bring potentially qualified visitors who could have otherwise missed your brand.
This approach is twofold: branching out to adjacent niches plus covering all potential demographic bases. We did this while working with the outdoor food brand Tactical Foodpack, covering adjacent niches such as sailing, as well as looking for affiliates across Europe.
It’s worth using a tool such as Google Analytics to look at your web traffic and analyze various demographics you could pick out influencers from and expand your marketing to by noting the ones that show sufficient interest.
6. Set up a Long-Term Content Strategy
An effective outreach strategy that focuses on quality over quantity can bring in some of the top names in the niche—this happened with Native Pet, where our help with content strategy brought some of the biggest names in the game and an extra $10k in revenue per month.
You can adopt an SEO-informed content marketing strategy aimed at boosting your search engine rankings. This is done by researching relevant keywords and analyzing your competitors—you need to be able to approach the topic with an original twist or otherwise offer a greater quality of work than your competitors.
Taking advantage of online directories is also helpful for gaining further visibility and web reputation, which will further improve your position on search engines.
After boosting search traffic to your websites and gaining a strong organic presence, you can reach out to potential affiliates for cooperation—something like a guest blog post offer is always appreciated.
7. Create Attractive Affiliate Offers
Affiliates value generosity but also insight and flexibility. Stay aware of your (potential) affiliate partners’ needs and wants rather than going for a one-size-fits-all approach; you’re bound to increase retention and attract some fresh faces.
I’ll tell you why. Resumeble is a client who was interested in using affiliate marketing to spread brand awareness to build a long-term competitive revenue source.
We approached this with a multi-target activation campaign, offering hybrid collaborations and individually tailored affiliate offers.
Particular focus was given to affiliate nurturing—we helped Resumable expand its Terms and Conditions and add a comprehensive FAQ, clearing any dilemmas and addressing common questions.
We looked into each particular affiliate’s performance, offering consistent support and resources to aid their success.
The result? Doubled sales and a growing network of over 500 affiliate partners in only four months, along with building a strong brand presence on four channels rather than just a single one.
Get More from Your Referral Efforts
By looking at these methods, it’s clear that increasing referral traffic demands you to go far and go broad—you need to cover multiple strategies at once while simultaneously trying to get the most out of each one.
To make the job easier on yourself, I recommend you get ahold of a referral marketing software tool, which will make your job of juggling between several referral strategies much less of a nuisance.
Even then, it’s easy to get lost. Feel free to schedule a call with me or message me. We will discuss any questions or issues that you may have, and I can help you come up with a long-lasting marketing strategy that may be the one small thing your business needs to fully shine.
