Affiliate Marketing for Interior Designers
Original photography posted at Unsplash by Mathilde Langevin.
Original article posted at Design Manager by Margot LaScala.
There are an increasing number of ways that interior designers can generate additional revenue on top of their traditional business models. One of those is affiliate marketing is one of these methods that allows businesses not only to grow their brand and increase exposure to a wider audience, but to also make passive income.
In this article, we will dive deeper into what affiliate marketing can do for your interior design business and what we can expect from affiliate marketing programs in the future. We will also talk about the 1stDibs designer affiliate program, the first luxury interior products company with an affiliate marketing program that also offers sleek interfacing and a variety of visual options to integrate your company’s mark. Let’s dive in.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting the goods or services of others on your website or social media platforms, and making a small commission for doing so. That commission is usually awarded once someone buys a product after finding it through your promotion. It is a very popular marketing strategy on social media, but is also a key way that reviews and product-recommendation websites monetize their editorial content.
There are three key benefits to affiliate marketing
Making a highly visible connection to another company, which you can promote through your own social media and can negotiate to cross promote with the external brand, you are widening your audience. You can also use hashtags in your promotional posts to cast your potential client net even wider.
You will make passive income: every time someone buys a product using your affiliate link, you will make a portion of the profit from that sale. Note that each affiliate program has a different payout structure, so do your research before signing up to be a partner to any external brand.
If used carefully, affiliate marketing can elevate your brand. However, because affiliate marketing is so new in the interior design space, there are limited opportunities to partner with luxury product companies. More on that below.
Affiliate Marketing for Interior Designers: The Good and the Bad
The benefits of affiliate marketing for interior designers are the opportunity to align yourself with like-minded brands and producers. And, of course, the opportunity to make additional income. Those two benefits are nothing to sneeze at.
The downsides are largely related to the fact that this is still a pretty new territory for the interior design industry.
Depending on the type of interior design you do, it can be difficult to find existing affiliate programs that suit your brand due to the limited number of luxury retailers that have entered the space. According to 3Hundred, a marketing company focused exclusively on content monetization strategies, some of the most lucrative product companies interior designers can work with as an affiliate marketer include, with their profit sharing amount:
CanvasVows - 25%
One Kings Lane - 20%
Joybird - 15%
Great Furniture Deal - 13%
Neiman Marcus - 10%
Another thing to watch out for is that each affiliate program comes with its own set of user terms, payouts to participating designers, and parameters designers must work within, and you may or may not find those terms agreeable.
You may find a brand you align with in spirit, but not in branding and marketing approach, and find that partnering with them given that disconnect cheapens the look of your social media when adding the product company’s logo and link to your pages. These are important considerations, because protecting your brand should be your number one priority.