Partner Spotlight: Meredith Dot Dash #14

Hey all,

Hope you had a great weekend and your year is off to a great start!

Wild that we are approaching the final month of Q1 for many - time flies!

Why am I sharing this?

It only takes ONE PARTNER to turn around your business.

In baseball, just one season starting anew, one run, one hit.

Fun little scene from Bull Durham about what one more hit can do. Yes, it is the best sports movie of all time 🔥

I love the promise of new opportunities.

Recruiting new affiliate partners is a great example of that and one of my favorite aspects of affiliate partner influencer marketing

So with out further ado, this weeks partner spotlight...

Meredith Dot Dash

Talk about a poster child for what DTC EComm brands want and need right?

HIGH. QUALITY. CONTENT.

They are the antithesis of the low quality and lower funnel perception some marketers have about affiliate marketing.

What is it? 🧐

America's largest digital & print publisher. Some might call them a media house. They own dozens of properties like: Health, Parents, Investopedia, Eating Well, Food & Wine, Martha Stewart, Magnolia, InStyle, Travel+Leisure, People, and Entertainment Weekly to name a few.

They plug into leading SaaS providers like Impact to track performance and monetize with hundreds of leading advertisers.

Their reach is 200M people in the US 🤯

• 76% of all adults

• 90% of all women

• 84% of non white women

• 45 different publications

That means each of us has either read, seen, or interacted at some point with one of their properties. It truly is ubiquitous.

Why does it matter? 🔮

If you are seriously considering content commerce (a good framework from Impact) and having a heavy content mix in your affiliate program you will want to take notice.

FYI a 2021 Digiday survey revealed that over 60% of publishers use affiliate links in their content commerce strategy.

If you are looking to add an incremental 20% of revenue to your DTC Ecomm business read further. If you don't, sit this one out. (Let's see who stops now 😜)

Why you don't know about it? 🤔

You have heard of Meredith Dot Dash-owned magazine and digital brands, but likely not the parent company.

Also their name is not Google, TikTok, or Meta, yet each of these properties has audiences that are build via the internets gateways and gatekeepers.

How can you leverage it? 🤝

Contact them directly or better yet work with a team that is very familiar with them personally, sees them at all the affiliate marketing shows, has worked with them in the past, and is working with them on existing deals for DTC e-comm brands like yours.

How you can go wrong ❌

Pricing.

Some of the more popular destinations and enthusiast audiences are not cheap to reach. You need to treat it like any other media buy, considering factors like:

• CPM

• audience relevance

• past tests/experiments

• recent performance

• seasonality

• your offer

• content

• the placement

All of these factors MUST be used and considered rigorously to determine if this pairing will likely yield any ROI for your brand.

Similar to our discussion last week, you need to have your attribution ducks in a row as well.

If you are solely crediting partners on last click, you might be discounting more discovery platforms like content partners like Meredith Dot Dash and content affiliate marketing business models.

💥 Conclusion: Dot Dash Meredith is just one of thousands of partners in the affiliate marketing ecosystem that are often overlooked.

1. Find 1-2 relevant publications for your brand

2. Reach out to Meredith and get pricing on up front fees.

3. Depending on your growth brand and their willingness to test you can aim for additional exposure for negotiated commission increases.

4. Likely will require some up front guaranteed fees due to their reach, quality, and given they nail CONTENT.

5. Measure CPM with comparable media buys in programmatic and relevant high traffic high quality content sites for your brand run a test with them!

6. Work with their editorial team to make a post as organic and resonant as possible with your customer prospects and THEIR audience.

Get with them or get with the right team that can manage it for you so you can build a thriving high quality full funnel affiliate program and drive an additional 20% of revenue for your DTC Ecomm Brand.

Done!

Email me if you have questions or need anything.

Tye