How affiliate marketing is helping Yellow Brick Road find the right customer leads

Having a well-known media personality as your founder and CEO can work wonders around brand awareness. But when that brand is looking to reach specific market segments, bulk publicity can generate a lot of unqualified leads and prove counterproductive to sales conversion.

This is the problem that faced wealth management company, Yellow Brick Road. Founder and CEO, Mark Bouris, is known to many Australians through his frequent television appearances, which when combined with extensive above-the-line advertising, has led to high brand recognition.

But according to online marketing manager, Athina Rozos, high brand recognition was not necessarily translating to a high volume of qualified leads.

“As the face of the company, Mark is on TV quite a lot, so we do get a lot of leads that come through organically,” Rozos says. “But we can’t rely heavily on TV ads and having him out in public. And we can’t put all our eggs in the Google basket, because prices go up and bidding can become very expensive.”

To help with this problem, Yellow Brick Road turned to Byron Bay-based digital agency, Jack Media, to develop its affiliate marketing program. Jack Media founder, Andrew Crawley, says his firm’s approach starts with understanding who its clients are trying to reach, then creating campaigns with relevant publishers.

The key to success is putting in place a feedback loop with the client. “It’s really about close communication, about what is working and not working, and how we can adjust and tweak that,” Crawley says.

Jack Media has also invested in platform technology that Crawley says makes it easy for advertisers to alter campaigns.

“Most marketing managers are pretty hamstrung by design and tech teams,” he says. “Over the last couple of years, we have built and rolled out a platform that lets us do one integration with a client, then we can then work with the marketing manager outside their typical dev and design queues and create agility.

“When we see something is not working, because we have the lead capture process sitting on our platform, we can adjust it and tweak it and refine it.”

Crawley says Jack Media has the capability to create custom landing page content, which is fundamental for lead generation.

“We have clients who at any one time can have 50 or 60 landing pages in market, going into different subsets and variations and versions,” he says. “We can go as granular as we need to slice it and dice it further.

“A big part of what we have started to do is help clients with the lead nurturing process. A lot of clients over the last couple of years have started to realise they can buy media on a lead basis, but fail to understand what that means or how they need to do it to make it work effectively.”

Rozos says working with Jack Media has had a noticeable impact on the quality of leads.

“Whenever we need to switch it on we can, and they always have enough publishers we can go out to,” he says. “Our branches have said they are really happy with the quality. We are relying quite heavily on their leads, and the quality is almost as high as a paid specific lead source.”

The next stage will be to tap into Jack Media’s capabilities around custom landing pages.

“There are niche markets that we need to tap into, like doing campaigns to mothers, where we are speaking directly to them about their problems and issues and then coming up with a solution through our copy,” Rozos says. “People don’t want to be told what to do, so you almost have to put enough content out there so that subconsciously you are teaching them something, and hopefully converting at some point.”

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