AFFILIATE EYE
promote their success by tagging the company on social media .
The latter pathway would often mean that the company in question wouldn ’ t even know they were the leading affiliate “ until we tell them that they are ”. As Civin notes : “ I wasn ’ t aware that this secretive group of affiliates were quite as proud of their leaderboard status as they are . But they are – very – and so we get tagged a lot because of the media posts that iGB Affiliate does , commenting with ‘ Look , we maintained our number one position in Argentina .’”
Converting this kind of engagement on social channels into new business is a challenge PartnerMatrix has risen to of late by increasing activity on platforms such as LinkedIn alongside the longstanding data / marketing partnership it enjoys with iGB Affiliate .
Broader challenges
In business as in life , no matter which hurdle you may have just overcome , there will always be another along shortly . This is true for both PartnerMatrix and the wider affiliate sector . Khalatyan is clear-eyed about what the top three challenges are that the company is facing : “ I think for the affiliates , the top [ is ] being able to adapt to the constantly changing regulations , legislations and laws .”
He is sanguine about the effect PartnerMatrix can have here , though : “ There is little we can do to impact this ; we don ’ t have tools for this . But just from my side , I can say that our softwares are fully adaptable in any country and to any set of regulations . We support clients from all over the world .” Further to this there is the ongoing challenge of competition between affiliates . As Khalatyan observes : “ Affiliates need to be constantly working on their websites to retain visibility , be able to attract more players and stay on top of SEO trends , [ something that is ] made more challenging by Google ’ s changing algorithms .”
The final challenge he cites is somewhat less obvious – and it ’ s to do with personnel rather than technology . “[ There are a ] lack of experienced and professional affiliate managers ,” he notes . Their solution ? “ To offer our clients exclusive training programmes from industry specialists .” These masterclasses are run by dedicated account managers , who lead , train and mentor when needed , he explains .
A supporting initiative on Civin ’ s side is PartnerMatrix Intelligence certification for users who have completed a certain number of hours that they can then post on their LinkedIn . “ We believe this will be very helpful for the employees and make them very employable because we have approaching 100 clients who use our system and preferably need employees trained on it already .”
Growing up and growing out
With DeepCI now nestled into the PartnerMatrix fold , eyes turn to where the growth is going to come from . According to a recent survey from Statsdrone , some 17 % of operator programmes use proprietary management technology so there ’ s a rich seam to be mined there . There are also new operators arriving in the market or , more rapaciously ,
68 • iGBAFFILIATE . COM