Affiliate or Influencer Marketing? The Case for Using Both

When it comes to marketing, we’re faced with dilemma after dilemma. 

There are so many options for how to spend our limited marketing budgets. 

Which one should we choose?

Case in point: Most articles you’ll read about affiliate marketing and influencer marketing pit them against each other. The assumption is: you must choose one and only one, and you can’t afford to make the wrong choice about where to invest your precious time and dollars.

That’s a lot of pressure. But what if the answer is much more forgiving? 

What if affiliate and influencer marketing are stronger together? 

In this article, we’ll explore how to combine these two marketing techniques and the strategy behind why you’d want to. We’ll share data that can give you insights into both, and recommend a couple of tools to make running influencer and affiliate marketing campaigns a dream. 

But first, let’s talk about what affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are, and the differences that set them apart. 

Affiliate vs. Influencer Marketing: Understanding the Differences

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In affiliate marketing, you pay other people a commission when they sell your products or create some other response.

These marketers are not your employees–they market your products on their own, and you pay them based on the amount of sales they generate for you. 

Affiliate marketing commissions work in one of the following ways:

• Cost per sale. Every time someone sells one of your products for you, you give them a cut. Generally, it’s a fixed percentage of goods sold, although you can change this if needed. It’s generally the preferred model for ecommerce companies.
• Cost per lead. Every time someone brings you a new lead (email list signups, free trials, etc.), you pay them a fixed amount of money. This is only a good idea if you have a robust pipeline that converts leads into paying customers. 
• Cost per click. Every time someone clicks an affiliate link, you pay your affiliate a fixed amount. This is good if you’re trying to grow your reach and/or exposure, although influencer marketing may be a better choice in some cases.
• Cost per action. This encompasses any other actions you might want to incentivize that aren’t covered by the previous three types of commissions. For example, you might want to direct traffic to a sales video and pay affiliates every time they send someone to your video, and they watch it in full. 

For most of this article, we’ll assume you’re using a cost-per-sale affiliate model. But no matter which options you choose, there’s one thing you need to make your affiliate marketing campaign a success:

You need to track where your sales are coming from 

You’ll usually choose one of the following options:

1. Referral Links. Use software to generate trackable links to your sales or product pages. Each affiliate gets a unique link that you can use to track sales and payouts. 
2. Discount codes. Create and assign unique discount codes for each of your affiliates. When a customer uses their discount code to make a purchase, your affiliate earns their commission.

A word of advice: make sure to use affiliate marketing software that makes it easy to track your affiliate sales and payouts, like Tapfiliate. If you don’t, these campaigns will take a LOT of time and energy to manage. 

If you need help with tracking, we at Tapfiliate can guide you with your affiliate and influencer program from start to finish. Want to check out what Tapfiliate can do for you?

Get a 14-day free trial here

What is Influencer Marketing?

In Influencer marketing, you pay people with a significant social media following (influencers) to promote your brand and products. They make content for you and recommend your brand to their audience. 

For best results, pick an influencer in your niche. For example, if you sell software for small businesses, you’ll need to pick a small business and entrepreneurship influencer. But there’s another factor to consider–audience size. 

Influencers are often defined by their follower or subscriber counts, as follows:

• Nano-influencers (1K-10K followers). Nano-influencers are just starting their influencing journey, and they have niche audiences who trust their recommendations. They’re generally the best choice for driving engagement and sales. 
• Micro-influencers (10K-50K followers). Micro-influencers are generally the best value for your money–they can drive significant engagement and sales, a little reach, and they have loyal audiences. 
• Macro-influencers (50-500K followers). Macro-influencers know how to draw a crowd. They’re best for reach or brand awareness campaigns. However, their audiences are slightly less engaged and loyal. 
• Mega-influencers (500K+ followers). Mega-influencers are a good choice if you want to expand your brand’s reach, exposure, and brand awareness. Mega-influencers are basically celebrities, so their recommendations carry a lot of weight.

There are multiple benefits to influencer marketing:

• Authenticity. Influencer content shows your products in everyday, authentic settings. It’s one thing to hear a list of the product’s features–it’s another thing to see someone you already follow using and enjoying it. 
• Reach. Influencers can expand your social media reach by introducing your products to new audiences. People follow influencers in your niche who would never follow your brand on their own.
• Social proof. This is related to authenticity, but when people see influencers using your products online, it helps them trust your brand. It’s one of the main reasons why influencer content is so valuable.

Key Differences and Overlaps

Obviously, there are several ways that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing overlap. 

In both cases, you’re paying someone else to promote your products. Influencers can become affiliate marketers for you–and vice versa. And they’re both buzzy digital marketing strategies.

But there are also several differences, like: 

• Affiliate marketing pays based on measurable results. You pay affiliates based on agreed-upon measurements of success. So you guarantee that you’ve gotten what you were looking for before you pay a dime.
• Influencer marketing pays based on the size of the audience. Influencers charge based on their audience size and potential reach, so you don’t know exactly what the results will be before you pay them for their services. The process is very similar to buying traditional media ads.
• Affiliate marketing is performance-based. Your best affiliates will be the ones who deliver on your campaign goals, usually sales.
• Influencer marketing is relationship-based. Your best influencers will be the ones who can leverage their relationships and authenticity to bring interest and attention to your brand.
• Affiliate payouts are open-ended. As long as the affiliate continues to drive results, you generally keep paying them. 
• Influencer marketing costs are fixed. You’ll negotiate the price with influencers (including any licensing fees), pay them in full, and then you’re done. If you want to work with them again, you have to start the process over.
• Affiliate marketing impacts the bottom of your funnel. If you want to generate a ton of sales, affiliate marketing is a great way to go. 
• Influencer marketing impacts the top and middle of your funnel. Influencers are perfect for turning cold audiences into warm audiences. And you need warm audiences if you want to sell anything.

What the Data Says

You may gravitate toward either influencer or affiliate marketing more. But let’s see what the numbers say about affiliate and influencer marketing. 

• Affiliate marketing is currently a $10 billion industry and is expected to reach $16 billion in three years. This growth indicates that brands see value in it, and that you’ll have an advantage if you get in now before it grows larger.
• According to a 2022 study by Forrester Consulting, 81% of advertisers had already attempted to run an affiliate program. If you’ve tried and found it hard to keep up, it could be that you weren’t leveraging the right affiliate marketing tools. 
• Amazon Associates is the largest affiliate network, followed by ShareASale. If you need help finding affiliate marketers, look for marketers who already use these popular platforms.
• Influencer marketing is on the rise. The global influencer marketing is more than triple what it was in 2020 and is projected to reach $33 billion this year. It’s a popular and established marketing channel, which should give you confidence running your campaigns.
• Statista found that the early half (47%) of businesses spend 25% or more of their marketing budgets on influencer marketing as of January 2025. The most popular percentage was between 10 and 15% of their budgets. Either way, influencers are a budget priority for brands.
• Social Cat found that influencers get 90% more engagement when products are integrated into their normal content, rather than being outright promoted with sales-focused language and narratives. This leaves a gap that shows the need for both influencer and affiliate marketing in your brand’s strategy. 

Why You Need Both Affiliate and Influencer Marketing in 2025

At its core, influencer marketing does a very different job than affiliate marketing. That doesn’t mean that you can’t combine them, or that influencers and affiliates can’t do the other job. 

It just means that you need both strategies to grow. 

Influencer Marketing Builds Awareness and Trust

You cannot sustainably drive sales if you aren’t feeding the top of your funnel. 

To do that, you need to be able to build two things: 

• Awareness of your brand
• Trust in your brand

Influencers are the perfect solution for building the top of your funnel:

• They have built-in audiences that trust their recommendations.
• They can expand your reach.
• They’re skilled at making polished but authentic content.

The data above indicated that overtly salesy influencer posts don’t perform as well as posts where they seamlessly integrate products. While that’s not good if your goal is sales, it’s fine (and maybe preferable) if your goal is to build awareness of your brand at the top of your funnel.

Affiliate Marketing Drives Measurable Conversions

However, once you have that brand awareness and goodwill, you need to be able to convert those good feelings into sales. 

That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.

You need marketers who are highly motivated to make a sale, and an affiliate commission can be the perfect motivation. 

You can sometimes convert influencers into affiliate marketers, but this will depend on your relationship with the influencer and how comfortable they are in selling for you. If they love your products and their audience responds well to your brand, it’ll likely be a great fit. If not, you can rely on other affiliate marketers to close the deal with warm audiences. We’ll discuss some tips for that later in this article. 

Together, They Create a Scalable Growth Funnel

This is the crux of the matter: You don’t need to choose affiliate marketing or influencer marketing. You’ll see the best results if you choose BOTH.

Influencer marketing introduces potential customers to your products. They show that your brand is fantastic and trustworthy.

Then, after influencers have sufficiently warmed up an audience, affiliate marketing can move potential customers to the end of your funnel. 

If you want to close the deal yourself, use a cost-per-lead affiliate strategy to move the warmest customers to your email list. But you can also use cost-per-sale affiliate marketing to have other marketers work on your behalf. 

As long as you have enough warm leads, either of these affiliate marketing strategies should work. 

How to Combine Influencer and Affiliate Strategies

Now that you know you need both, how do you combine influencer and affiliate marketing? 

Here are our top 5 tips, plus some mistakes to avoid: 

1. Offer Influencers Affiliate Deals 

If influencers are getting exposure and engagement for your brand, it might be time to mobilize them as affiliate marketers.

Talk to influencers who’ve gotten good results for you over multiple campaigns. This shows that their audience is interested in both what they have to say and your product. 

After a few successful collaborations, ask them if they’d like to promote your products on a cost-per-sale affiliate basis. That way, the more sales they make for you, the more they get paid. 

Here’s an example: 

In this example, the influencer has an affiliate link to send to her interested followers. 

Remember: the influencers who are most likely to have success as your affiliates are the ones who already have good metrics for posts about your products. If you’ve never worked with an influencer before–or if their posts don’t perform well for you–there’s a good chance that their audience isn’t warm enough for you to see significant sales from affiliate marketing.

2. Ask Affiliates to Create Influencing Content

On the flip side, if you find that your affiliate marketing is underperforming, the problem could be that you’re neglecting the top of your funnel. Your affiliate marketers may be doing a great job, but not enough people are familiar with you and your products to make a purchase.

If that’s the case, don’t give up on your affiliate marketers right away. Instead, ask them to make some non-salesy content for you–just showing how they use your product, for example, or creating a genuine review. Pay them for this content as if they were an influencer. If they have over 1,000 followers on a social media platform, ask them to post it as if they were an influencer. 

You may get some pushback here. Just explain that you are taking the time to build out the top of your funnel, to create warm audiences for them to sell to. Reinforce the idea that you love their affiliate work, and that you want them to be part of the entire process. Then, after you’ve paid them for a few pieces of content, encourage them to try doing more affiliate promotions. 

3. Flood Your Niche

Of course, there are advantages to specializing. Influencers are great at creating brand awareness, and affiliate marketers are skilled at generating sales. If you’d like to keep things separate–or, if your influencers and affiliate marketers are resistant to the idea of creating different kinds of content and changing up the pay structure–then you have another option.

Flood your niche. Be everywhere. Make your brand so recognizable that, by the time someone comes across an affiliate marketer selling your products, they feel like they’re already super familiar with your brand.

Searching #hoka on Instagram shows posts from tons of different running and fitness influencers

To do this, you’ll have to collaborate with multiple influencers. This can get expensive, but you can make adjustments for your budget by narrowing your niche and working with micro- and nano-influencers.

Let’s pretend you’re launching a new skincare product. Instead of trying to flood the skincare niche–which is huge and quite pricey–focus on a smaller niche within the skincare bubble. For example, if your product is an anti-aging serum, collaborate with skincare influencers who are over 50. If it’s vegan, collaborate with people who are in the cruelty-free skincare niche. 

If you can flood a smaller, highly relevant niche with your brand and product, your ideal customers will find you. And they’ll discover your affiliates, too, which makes closing the deal much easier. 

4. Plug Influencers in Sales Messaging

Another way to reap the benefits of influencer and affiliate marketing simultaneously is to use influencer content and endorsements in your sales and affiliate marketing messages.

There are several ways to do this. First, ensure you have the proper licenses to use an influencer’s name and content in all sales messaging. Then, you can use one or more of the following options to bring their content into your sales process:

• Integrate influencer content into your sales and landing pages. That way, when affiliates send people to your website, the influencer content is there to increase trust.
• Have a file of quote graphics, photos, and videos with influencer endorsements that your affiliates can use as needed. This can help them build credibility.
• Encourage your affiliates to share influencer content about your brand, with their affiliate links attached – for example, on Instagram Stories or as a stitch on TikTok. 

Perfect example of the kind of content you could embed on a sales page or encourage affiliates to stitch on TikTok

5. Create Customized Landing Pages for Affiliate Links

Integrating influencer content into your normal sales and landing pages is a great first step, but you don’t have to stop there. Consider making custom sales pages for top-performing influencers and affiliates. This gives you a way to offer exclusive deals or discounts through their affiliate links. It also enables you to customize the experience for your audiences, which may increase sales and convince influencers to give affiliate selling a try. 

If you’re going to create customized landing or sales pages for specific creators, here’s what we recommend:

• Make it unique to them. If you create a landing page for a specific marketer, feature them prominently with the product on the page. You can include some reviews from other people to add credibility, but the majority of the images, videos, and endorsements should be from the person in question. And, everything above the fold should indicate that this is a unique experience for people who clicked the link. 
• Don’t make any exclusive deals or discounts that you might later regret. It can be tempting to give a high-performing influencer or affiliate whatever they ask for. Don’t. It’s better to be upfront about what you can and cannot do in the long term. That way, you don’t end up changing your mind and losing the trust of that group. 
• Only do this for special cases. Keeping track of all of these landing pages and updating them as your business changes can be a pain. So, only do it for your highest performers. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Of course, the tips we’ve already listed in this section only work if you already have healthy influencer and affiliate marketing tactics. Here are the top mistakes to avoid when it comes to combining influencer and affiliate campaigns:

• Don’t treat influencer marketing campaigns as one-offs. If you only work with an influencer one time, you’re going to miss out on most of the benefits. It’s hard to trust someone’s recommendation if they only talk about a product once, after all.
• Don’t ignore performance metrics.  Continue collaborating with influencers and affiliates who perform well for your brand, even making them brand ambassadors, if appropriate. Don’t invest further in marketers who don’t deliver results. With influencer and affiliate marketing, you have access to tons of data. Keep tabs on it and use it. 
• Don’t forget to nurture high-performing influencers and affiliates. Don’t just continue to pay the influencers and affiliates who perform well for you. Build a relationship with them. Tell them how much you appreciate them. Give them access to events, new products, and whatever else you can think of to make their lives better. Customers can sense when someone is genuinely excited about a product, and you want your spokespeople to be genuine. 
• Don’t assume you can do it without a tool to manage attribution and payouts. Trying to do it without using a tool to track everything is a HUGE mistake. It only takes a couple of collaborations to make a big mess, so invest in tools that make affiliate tracking and influencer marketing easy. 

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing have different strengths and weaknesses. 

On the one hand, affiliate marketing guarantees that you get results for the money you’re paying–but you may have to work with a lot of affiliates before you see an increase in sales. Unless you have the right software, this can be a frustrating process.

On the other hand, influencers are often effective in ways that don’t produce immediate sales. They’re building priceless awareness for your brand, but their strongest engagement and reach will be on posts where they don’t push your brand too hard. Plus, running influencer campaigns isn’t easier than affiliate campaigns either–you need tools to help you recruit, communicate with, and pay influencers, too.

However, when you have tools (like Tapfiliate, Social Cat, and others) that make the process nearly frictionless, they’re both worthwhile.

And together, they can be the key to a winning digital marketing strategy. 

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