How to Provide Affiliates with the Right Creative Tools

Creatives are pieces of content that your brand provides to affiliates for use in their own content. They can include, for example, promotional images, written content going over information about your brand or a specific product, and videos showcasing how to use a product.

Visual assets and other creatives can be incredibly beneficial for affiliates, and that can wrap around to improving your brand identity and sales.

Here’s what you should know about pushing your affiliates to use these.

Why Should You Provide Affiliates With Existing Creative Assets?

The little investment required by affiliate programs is what attracts many brands to them. If the goal is for affiliates to produce the content themselves, brands could be asking themselves why they should spend the time and energy producing content for your affiliates. These are the main justifications for why you ought to be supplying these creatives.

It Helps Reinforce Your Brand Identity

First and foremost, you can strengthen your own brand image by offering affiliates creative assets. A brand's identity may become somewhat diluted when numerous affiliates produce a wide variety of material. Your brand identification can remain strong when all of your affiliates are using the same creative pool, which exposes all prospective buyers to the same general material and visuals.

It Keeps Your Logo and Company Name Front and Center

Your logo and company name are two of the most important parts of your brand, and you may have put a lot of time, money, and thought into them. By making it easy for affiliates to draw on these two components of your brand identity, they’re more likely to keep it in focus, which is great for your brand as a whole.

It Makes It Easier for Affiliates to Create Content

Finally, providing creatives just makes it easier for your affiliates to bridge the gap and start creating content for you. If you’re willing to put in a little bit of work on the front end, then it means that your affiliates may be more inspired to put in their own work on the back end, which can really increase the amount of content produced about your brand and improve your affiliate marketing relationships.

Tips for Providing Your Affiliates With Better Creatives

So, how can you provide a better set of creatives to your affiliates? Here are a few tips.

Design Banner Ads, Photos, and Video Scrolls In-House

One amazing way to provide creatives is to design pieces of content that your affiliates can easily put into their content. It’s important to tailor the creatives you’re designing for the type of content your affiliates are interested in making. For example, if most of your affiliates make long-form video content, you’ll want to focus more on video content; if most of your affiliates are writing blogs, then offer product shots and banner ads.

Offer Media Kits Full of Logos, Brand Content, and Info Sheets

Media kits are another easy way to provide all the information your affiliates could possibly want. Provide large images of your logos and approved brand images, as well as a full list of your brand’s colors and font choices. Include PDFs that give your affiliates insight into your brand as a whole, including your target demographic, for example. Add info sheets that help direct your affiliates’ content.

Share Approved Copy With Your Affiliates

Approved copy is one component of ensuring that your affiliates are using the right messaging for customers. This can be very important if your brand needs to use certain types of language for legal reasons, but even if you just prefer to talk about your brand a certain way, this can help you retain your brand image over many blog posts, videos, picture posts, and more.

Read and Watch Any Content Your Affiliates Put out to See How They’re Using Creatives

Lastly, don't forget to view any anything that your affiliates publish. Keep an eye out for the way they discuss your brand, the connections they make with it, and the particular creatives they use and don't use. This will not only assist you in determining the effectiveness of your brand messaging, but it can also provide you with some understanding of the kinds of creatives that aren't getting as much use and those that you may want to develop more of.

More content from your affiliates is what drives sales, and creatives can encourage them to produce more of it. Your affiliates will understand that you care about their success as well as your own if you're ready to put in a little work to create these written and graphic resources for them. The long-term advantages more than offset any potential shortfall in earnings.