Awareness or performance? Authenticity or conversion? Brands and e-tailers are often torn between influence and affiliate marketing. Yet far from being in competition, these two levers can be complementary.
In this comprehensive guide, our experts explain what each of these terms means, what they can do for your e-commerce business, and the major differences between them. Get ready to understand, choose… and combine intelligently.
Influence and affiliate marketing: definition
Influencer marketing: a strategy based on trust and emotion
Influencer marketing is the art of partnering with a content creator (blogger, Instagrammer, youtuber…) with a well-engaged community.
The objective? To bring your brand to life with its audience.
This lever is based on trust,authenticity and storytelling. Whether through a tutorial, story, product placement or unboxing, the influencer tells a story, humanizes the brand and forges a connection.
For your online business, influencer marketing :
- Quickly increase visibility.
- Work on brand awareness, trust andimage.
- Generate valuable content: visuals, videos, UGC (user-generated content).
This strategy is particularly useful in visual sectors (fashion, beauty, lifestyle, decoration) where emotion and style play a strong role.
Affiliate marketing: A performance-based strategy
Affiliate marketing involves paying partners (affiliates) only if they generate a defined action (sale, registration, lead, etc.).
The principle: tracked link, promo code, conversion tracking
Affiliates can be bloggers, comparison sites, influencers, specialized websites… Their mission? Promote your products through their channels. You only pay them when the desired action is carried out.
Thanks to a well-established affiliate program :
- You pay for tangible results. It’s a low-risk, high-reward strategy.
- You can collaborate with new affiliate partners, test and optimize their performance.
- It’s possible to have a measurable ROI and transparent KPIs (clicks, conversion rate, revenue generated).
This approach is recommended for accelerating sales and controlling marketing costs.
Affiliation Marketing at your fingertips
THE KEYS TO MAKING THE MOST OF THIS BOOMING LEVER Download the guide!Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing: what are the differences?
It’s true that influencer marketing and affiliate marketing share the same objective, which is to develop your brand. However, there are differences in their approaches, remuneration methods and performance indicators.
To help you see things more clearly, here’s a chart comparing the main distinctions between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing.
| Criteria | Influencer marketing | Affiliate marketing |
| Main objective | Awareness, trust, brand image | Sales, performance, conversions |
| Compensation | Fixed price, product offered, fixed + variable mix | Performance-based commission (sales/action) |
| Content type | Authentic, narrative, creative | Informative, conversion-oriented, links/promo codes |
| Relationship | Personalized collaboration with a designer | Contractual partnership with an affiliate or network |
| Duration | Short to medium-term, targeted campaign | Often long-term and recurring |
| Measuring success | Engagement (likes, views, shares), less quantifiable | Conversions, clicks, rates, ROI |
| Message control | Less control, creative freedom for the influencer | More control, content often validated or standardized |
| Leading sectors | Fashion, beauty, lifestyle, emotions | Tech, SaaS, e-commerce, easily measurable products |
| Scalability | Limited by the number of influencers involved | High, via an affiliate network |
Which strategy to choose for your brand objectives?
Before deciding between influence and affiliation, it’s important to go back to basics: your marketing objectives.
Turn to influencer marketing if :
- You want your brand to be the talk of the town, to be associated with inspiring designers.
- You work in a visual/emotional environment (fashion, lifestyle, beauty).
- You prefer to measure success via reach,engagement, mentions.
Here, the key is repetition. Several engaged micro-influencers will often have more impact than a single star.
Turn to affiliate marketing if :
- You want to generate measurable sales, control costs and manage performance.
- Your product or service lends itself to conversion tracking (e-commerce, SaaS…).
- You want to analyze success via click-through rates, CPA (cost per acquisition) and sales figures.
In this case, test several affiliates. Measure their performance and keep the most profitable ones.
If you want the best of both worlds, opt for performance-based influencer marketing.
Can you combine influence and affiliate marketing?
Why choose when you can combine? What’s exciting digital marketers today is the possibility of combining these two strategies. The influence + affiliation mix is the winning combination for successful brands today. How to proceed?
Turn your influencers into affiliates
It’s a winning duo: the influencer’s trust, the affiliate’s measurement.
- Invite your influencers to join your affiliate program.
- Give them a tracked link or a personalized promo code.
- Structure a hybrid remuneration scheme. Set a fee for content creation + commission on sales generated.
- Keep the affiliate influencer’sauthenticity while tracking performance.
Choose a hybrid model
Pay, for example, a fixed amount for the influencer campaign + 30% commission on sales generated via this partnership.
The aim of this model? To encourage influencers to create content with a high conversion rate.
Result: You combine awareness and performance.
Use the right tools
Influencer or affiliate platforms are at your disposal. Take advantage of their cutting-edge technology and powerful tools for tracking links, codes and conversions. Don’t forget
Synchronize your campaigns
For product launches, start with an influencer campaign to createengagement. At the same time, activate your affiliate/influencer network to capture
Case studies: draw inspiration from successful campaigns
A few case studies will help you understand how these two strategies can transform a brand’s visibility and sales.
H&M: using influence to enhance brand image
For its holiday campaign, H&M relied on the power of influencers to embody the spirit of its end-of-year collection. The brand collaborated with several popular designers who produced a series of visual content (video teasers, stories, Instagram posts) all gathered around the hashtag #hm.
The aim is to boost brand awareness and image, drawing on the creativity and personality of influencers.
The result: over 12 million consumers reached and a strong emotional resonance with the public.
However, although the campaign was highly qualitative in visual terms, it had no direct impact on sales. This illustrates the strength (and limitation) of pure influencer marketing.
Amazon Associates: affiliation on a grand scale
In contrast, Amazon has perfected the performance-based affiliate marketing model. With its famous Amazon Associates program, the brand enables thousands of designers, bloggers and partner sites to share links to its products and earn a commission on every sale generated.
Objective: boost online sales on a large scale, with no fixed costs, just performance-based sales.
The result: a well-oiled, profitable and sustainable machine. Amazon paid out over $7.5 billion in commissions to affiliates worldwide.
But this ROI-driven model often lacks an emotional or storytelling dimension. Consumers buy via a link, not a story.
Revolve: the perfect balance between influence and affiliation
Revolve is a pioneer among brands that have mastered the art of combining influence and affiliation. The brand collaborates with hundreds of influencers, inviting them to exclusive events every year. Each influencer receives a promo code or a traceable affiliation link.
The aim: to build a strong, desirable brand while concretely measuring the impact of each collaboration.
As a result, the Revolve brand has maintained annual revenue growth of 22%. Almost 70% of its sales come directly from its network of influencers.
Influence and affiliation: a winning duo for performance
You’ve got it! Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are not mutually exclusive. One seduces, the other converts. By combining the two strategies, you can cover theentire customer journey : from discovery to purchase.
A brand can work with an influencer who creates “high inspiration” content, then provide them with a unique promo code to integrate affiliation.
Result: engaged audience + measurable conversion.
Today, emotion is nothing without measurement, and measurement is nothing without emotion!
Connect influence and performance with Casaneo.
To optimize your marketing strategy, read also :
How to integrate influencer marketing into affiliate marketing?
The Affiliate Marketing guide to developing your e-commerce site.
5 influencer marketing best practices to know
Influencer marketing: a practical guide for your e-commerce business
