GoGet Targets Wider Outreach For Brand Awareness Via Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the effective marketing tools that is proving to work for all stakeholders. Top brands are seeing an increase in revenue, affiliate marketers who promote products of these top brands are earning commissions, and consumers are being enlightened with the best deals and discounts in the e-commerce world.
If you are a top brand looking for new and effective marketing strategies, we recently talked to GoGet Malaysia’s Head of Marketing, Bartholomew Tu Han Shion who shared about GoGet’s approach to marketing in this pandemic-driven business climate, and how affiliate marketing is an effective marketing strategy for them.
GoGet is a community platform that provides reliable part-time help to businesses and consumers while offering opportunities to people looking for trustable jobs. Founded in 2014 by 3 co-founders with the idea of connecting the city with on-demand help, the founders believed in mobile technology that was getting more affordable with time.
Over the years, more than 300,000 community members, 5,000 businesses and 30,000 part-timers known as ‘GoGetters’ in the Klang Valley, Penang and Johor Bahru have connected via the GoGet platform. Today, GoGet is the first digitally-enabled and community-powered platform for all-rounded manpower solutions.
Let’s explore GoGet’s take on affiliate marketing and how it helped them to re-strategise and adapt to the changing business climate.
Meet Bartholomew, GoGet’s Head of Marketing
As the Head of Marketing at GoGet, Bart oversees the marketing function and is responsible for the brand, marketing channels, and performance.
What is your recent launch or top-selling product?
We recently enhanced a feature that allows customers to select or add their Favourite GoGetters to a customised list making it easily accessible for faster and more personalised experiences with their GoGetters.
GoGet Business Accounts can also train their own pool of GoGetters with personalized requirements and manage the team directly on our platform, which is also mobile-friendly!
What is your go-to marketing strategy currently?
Our go-to-marketing has been predominantly relying on B2B partnership and digital marketing. We have plans to go broad on mass channels and above the line when footfall is allowed again.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect your marketing strategy?
When the pandemic hit, GoGet’s services became more essential than ever, and more people started knowing about our services. However, the prolonged lockdowns along with its uncertainty have forced us to revisit our priorities with mass marketing channels like above-the-line marketing and printed collaterals.
Instead, we focused on strengthening our internal marketing engines and diversifying into digital channels like affiliate marketing in the effort to optimise for a healthier marketing cost of acquisition.
We have also partnered with shopping malls like IKEA and Ikano Centre to provide personal shopper service to bring the shopping experience online to the public who needed to stay at home. We are also engaged with Lazada to provide a third party delivery solution to fresh produce sellers or grocers.
Agencies like eJamin have also used our service for booth promoters, instead of hiring full-timers. Internally, GoGet also depends on auxiliary teams of GoGetters for support agents and sales/marketing callers who are paid by the hour, and we hope to replicate this to businesses who might be facing challenges with traditional hiring during the pandemic.
Why did you choose affiliate marketing as a marketing strategy?
Affiliate marketing fits well with our internal objective of having a clearer optimisation path towards channel fit, given its straight-through pricing model anchored on conversions, be it leads or sales. Advertisers only pay per result, without having to work with noises like poor traffic quality, wrong interest targeting, or low conversion rates.
How has affiliate marketing boosted your business?
We have seen promising results in terms of leads contributed to the business in the past 4 months since onboarding. The campaign traction has grown steadily with quality leads ever since and we are looking to maintain a healthy relationship with the publishers.
What is your vision/target for affiliate marketing?
We are looking forward to this channel to contribute to our top line, and if the cost can be maintained where it is today, I am hopeful it will make a significant percentage of our channel mix in terms of budget.
What has been the biggest stumbling block in affiliate marketing?
The stumbling block is that advertisers have very little visibility of the content that publishers have created for the brand. As a brand, we are not aware of when and where the content created is being published. We will only know when our Accounts Manager informs us through manual follow-up. It will be great if the contents created by affiliates/publishers are fetched automatically on advertisers’ dashboards for vetting purposes.
How do you find the best talents for affiliate marketing?
Currently, it’s reliant on communications with our Accounts Manager, and internal analysis. Our Accounts Manager always works very closely with the Publisher Team to make it happen.
Will you keep affiliate marketing as a long-term marketing strategy?
Yes, for now. Online marketing is still a major channel for GoGet marketing, hence affiliate marketing will likely stay in our portfolio.
What do you foresee in the future of affiliate marketing and your brand?
With tighter privacy and tracking policies imposed on iOS users, retargeting or personalised ads via Facebook or Google will be tougher. Brands with a longer conversion journey might find it more useful to be on multi-channels, rather than overly specialised on one. We hope to be associated or affiliated with publishers in the area of recruitment or human resource.
How has ACCESSTRADE Malaysia contributed to your affiliate marketing strategy and target?
ACCESSTRADE Malaysia has contributed to a greater outreach for awareness of our services through its network of more than 7000 publishers in Malaysia. We are looking to double the target for this channel in 2021, and currently, we are on track.
What is your advice to brands looking to explore affiliate marketing?
Brands must be open and willing to experiment with new channels. As affiliate marketing might not be as well known in Malaysia and there aren’t as many networks in Malaysia as compared to countries in the West, it could mean lower saturation and opportunity. Patience is needed especially in the first two months of setup.
What is your advice to affiliate marketers who want to promote brand products?
Do it with passion. Promote and write for the brands as if you are the proud owner of the brand. This will be beneficial for you as an affiliate marketer to acquire more results.
To know more about GoGet, visit GoGet’s official website, Facebook page, Instagram page, and LinkedIn page.
