Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are converging to create powerful opportunities for brands and content creators alike. With budgets tightening amidst economic challenges, brands are focusing on profitable acquisition models, while influencers are looking for new ways to monetise their content. In this interview, ShopMyInfluence CEO Gregory Bocquenet shares insights on the dynamic relationship between these two marketing approaches, why authenticity is key, and how brands should adapt accordingly.
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The market is evolving rapidly. In France there are around 170,000 creators with more than 5,000 followers. This gives brands a huge choice in the selection of profiles. While influencer marketing budgets have increased overall, the economic climate is forcing brands to reduce marketing budgets. You see this across all the brands. This is driving greater selectivity; not everyone will get a brand or affiliate marketing deal.
Affiliation is an acquisition lever that is profitable by definition. The brand defines its acquisition cost – the commission on sales generated - or ROA, by setting remuneration at 10% of the sale, for example. Generally speaking, budgets are not limited because it is profitable for the brand to generate traffic and sales. That makes it a very important new source of monetisation for influencers.
It may seem risky, but in reality, affiliation works particularly well in times of crisis. Brands prefer to invest in profitable levers. With affiliation, they retain control over profitability because they define the acquisition cost. Some brands still set annual budgets, but they often favour influencers who create prescriptive and affinity-based content, rather than collaborating with cashback or voucher sites.
Authenticity is crucial. An influencer must offer products that correspond to the expectations of their community. An influencer will avoid promoting high-end products if she knows that her audience has limited purchasing power. In affiliation, the influencer plays the role of prescriber: he or she reassures, advises and speaks the truth. If the content isn't authentic, it won't work.
Another advantage of affiliation is that it offers a great deal of freedom. An influencer can spontaneously share a product they've bought themselves, generate an affiliate link in a matter of seconds and share it with their community. It's a much more flexible model than paid collaborations.
Often macro-influencers think affiliation is not for them. They prefer sponsored posts even when they are not completely aligned with the brand. But with affiliation, apart from making a commission, influencers can see the sale made in real time, and therefore if the brand has resonated with their community.
It’s difficult to say. We're still dependent on the political and strategic decisions made by the platforms; they may decide tomorrow to stop allowing the sharing of external links to drive traffic to their own shopping platforms. But I'm confident that affiliation will continue to adapt. Brands and influencers benefit so much from this model that it's not in the interest of the platforms to put the brakes on its development.
It all depends on how the influencer approaches it. Those who specialise in good deals share links on a daily basis without saturating their community, because that's what their audience expects. Others have to strike a balance between organic content and advertising content. Transparency plays a key role: when influencers explain to their community what an affiliate link is and how it helps them monetise their content, it's generally accepted by the community.
When the influencer marketing law came into force in France in 2023, we were pretty worried. There was a concern about the impact on communities once they realised that products were gifted and posts were sponsored. But in the end, it was not a problem. Today, everybody is educated on the subject, everyone knows how influence works.
Influence now affects all the pillars of marketing: branding, acquisition, PR, etc. This requires a great deal of internal coordination to ensure that influence is used in a complementary and coherent way. Marketing departments need to adopt a holistic vision, combining brand awareness and performance objectives, with appropriate tools to measure a variety of indicators such as engagement, sales and reach. This is an essential development if we are to maximise the impact of influence in the overall mix.
In France, we've noticed over the last four years that different marketing teams — PR or influencer teams — often get upset about the encroachment of affiliation on their activities. The secret is transparency and coordinating the influence strategy — which ultimately cuts across social, media, PR, community management — so that affiliation does not cannibalise the branding influence strategy, but is complementary.
Another trend we see is influence departments launching affiliation programmes on the brand side to create an additional business model. Being transparent about the sales influencers generate helps to keep influencers loyal to the brand. Many influencers suffer because they have no idea how much they generated for a brand; brands may deliberately hide this information from them to prevent them from renegotiating their remuneration upwards.
We work with brands and their PR agencies to make sure that KOLs who receive gifted products know there is an affiliate programme, because this will motivate them to create content. Because the point of being a content creator is to monetise your networks and earn money like everyone else.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
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