The trade publication for a market nobody had covered. Built entirely from a gap.

Four or five years ago when I had the idea, the drivers were clear. E-commerce was going to grow no matter what happened in the market, and we are going to keep seeing e-commerce adoption grow globally. The second, sitting at Partnerize and looking at the data of what people were buying online, was that the things being bought online were going to get more expensive and more complex from a sales-process standpoint.

Ten years ago we all bought shoes and books online. Now people buy healthcare and mattresses, things you would have assumed had to be in-store or had to be long-cycle. Follow the trend line and the end point is enterprise software. At some point people will read reviews of enterprise software companies and use those reviews to make purchase decisions. When that arrives, I want to have been in that space with a brand people trust.

Martech Record covers commerce, media, and affiliate marketing. We do reviews of technology platforms that track, report, and pay in the affiliate space. We cover how publishers build their products and go to market. The role of a trade publication is to grease the wheels of commerce by creating trust between a buyer and a seller. Anytime you do trade or B2B you have a niche audience. It is more important that they are engaged and communicating with each other than that the numbers are big.

CEOs are very good at taking a question and reframing it so they say whatever they want to say. The perfect person, the person I want, is somebody who has just been promoted to Vice President. They have authority and things to share, but they have not been media-trained yet. They will tell you the truth.

That is how you get great content: by asking the right people. The right person is rarely the CEO. The CEO is too trained to answer the question I am genuinely trying to get answered. So you build trust with the teams and the people in the market so that the right people end up in the room.

Avocado Green Mattress put their affiliate person on the product team rather than the marketing team. The reason is that partners, reviewers, and commerce editors need to know about product changes six months ahead of release so they can plan how to write about them and incorporate them into their future editorial. The affiliate person on the product team ensures that knowledge moves.

That is different from the rest of marketing, where you create the ad, put it out, and look for brand lift six months later. Affiliate is about the long-cycle relationship with the reviewer, not the campaign-cycle response of a brand ad.

I asked their head of marketing how much of their revenue was affiliate. She said, well, only 3% of my revenue is even digital. I asked what she was doing on the panel. She said: if you are going to walk into store and buy Health-Ade Kombucha, you have probably spent significant time researching gut health and reading reviews about which products impact it. So even though a tiny percentage of sales come through affiliate or digital channels, a huge percentage of the brand awareness of the problem the brand is trying to solve comes from the reviews written by commerce editors. The CMO who is not treating affiliate as a brand investment is wrong.

Affiliate marketing is the last relationship-based industry. You are handing your brand to another publisher and saying sell this for me. It is closer to a sales channel than a marketing channel. Think of an affiliate partner like building up a salesperson: train them, make sure they understand the value proposition, make sure they are excited, incentivise them right.

Once you have done that with a good salesperson, you are off to the races, but the investment up front is real. The biggest mental change for a non-affiliate marketer entering the space is that this is not the high-frequency trading of search and social. It is relationship-based. Either hire someone yourself who knows what they are doing or get yourself an agency that knows what they are doing, commit six months to learning and failing and building, and you will be successful. If you need it to work as quickly as search works, that will not happen.

A client we have called Connecta. They know who their target audience is, they know what the problem is (lack of awareness), and they understand they have to be patient. They built a campaign with us where, once a week, they were in the newsletter. We purposely said: for the first three months, do not say anything interesting.

Then start sending the sales team to the right industry conferences. Then upgrade the ads to talk about benefits. Then turn on lead capture once those three things are in place. Target audience, positioning, a media plan that is consistent over time, enough reach and frequency to accomplish the mission. It is not brain surgery.

Affiliate tends to pay on last click. There are constant efforts to get away from that, and they are not really happening, because the alternatives are not necessarily better. Last click will probably stick around in some form forever.

That does not mean you cannot acknowledge what affiliate adds in other ways. Reviews drive brand. If you treat affiliate the way you treat brand ads (target audience, positioning, the discipline you apply elsewhere) the results follow. The ROI may still be paid on last click. That is fine. The affiliate work is doing more than the last-click number says it is.