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How does affiliate marketing function when compared to other digital marketing strategies?

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Mumbai: Affiliate marketing is a powerful strategy within the digital marketing landscape, allowing businesses to leverage partnerships to drive sales and generate revenue. By understanding how affiliate marketing functions and how it compares to other digital marketing strategies, businesses can make informed decisions about integrating it into their marketing efforts.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

At its core, affiliate marketing involves a business partnering with individuals or entities (affiliates) who promote the business’s products or services. Affiliates earn a commission for each sale or action generated through their marketing efforts. This performance-based model shifts some marketing responsibilities and risks to affiliates, incentivizing them based on their results.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

The process begins when an affiliate signs up for a merchant’s affiliate program. The affiliate then promotes the merchant’s products through various channels, such as blogs, social media, email, or websites. Each promotion includes unique tracking links or codes that attribute sales or actions to the correct affiliate. When a consumer clicks on the affiliate’s link and makes a purchase or completes a desired action, the merchant verifies the transaction and pays the affiliate a commission.

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Comparison with Other Digital Marketing Strategies

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising involves advertisers paying a fee each time their ad is clicked, with platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads enabling businesses to bid for ad placements. In contrast, affiliate marketing pays for actual conversions, making it more cost-effective. PPC requires upfront investment without guaranteed returns, posing a higher risk compared to affiliate marketing, which minimizes risk by rewarding only successful sales or actions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO focuses on improving a website’s visibility in organic search engine results through content optimization, site structure improvements, and backlink acquisition. Unlike SEO, which requires a long-term effort and continuous optimization, affiliate marketing can produce quicker results through affiliates’ existing traffic. While SEO has indirect costs like time and tools, affiliate marketing incurs direct costs through commission payouts.

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Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable content to attract and engage a target audience. Both strategies require high-quality content, but affiliate marketing often relies on affiliates for content creation, reducing the merchant’s burden. While content marketing builds brand authority over time, affiliate marketing leverages existing audiences for immediate sales. Content marketing has a longer-lasting impact with evergreen content, whereas affiliate marketing’s results depend on ongoing promotions.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing offers several advantages, including cost-effectiveness, expanded reach, performance-based rewards, and scalability. Payments are made only when a sale or desired action occurs, reducing the risk of unproductive spending. Affiliates can reach new audiences that the merchant may not have access to otherwise. The success of the campaign is measurable and directly tied to sales or leads, allowing for better ROI tracking. Businesses can scale their efforts by recruiting more affiliates without a proportional increase in costs.

Challenges of Affiliate Marketing

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Despite its benefits, affiliate marketing also presents challenges. Recruiting effective affiliates can be time-consuming, and ensuring affiliates adhere to brand guidelines and legal requirements can be difficult. Tracking and managing commission payouts requires robust systems and can become complex. Additionally, the popularity of affiliate marketing means competition among affiliates can be high, potentially driving up commission rates.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing stands out as a unique and compelling approach within the digital marketing landscape. It offers a performance-based model that leverages third-party affiliates to drive sales and generate revenue, making it cost-effective and low-risk compared to other strategies. While it presents certain challenges in terms of affiliate management and compliance, its ability to expand reach, provide measurable results, and scale efforts makes it a powerful addition to any digital marketing strategy. By understanding how affiliate marketing functions and comparing it to other digital marketing strategies, businesses can effectively integrate it into their marketing mix to achieve their goals.

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Bartronics India unveils AI-powered voice app to scale agritech platform

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HYDERABAD: Bartronics India Limited is stepping up its agritech ambitions with plans to launch a voice-first, multilingual AI-powered application in March, following a successful pilot across Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

The pilot phase saw strong engagement from farmers, supported by assured produce off-take through partnerships with SNN and Origo Commodities. Drawing on on-ground feedback, the company is now upgrading the platform to enable deeper interaction, data-driven intelligence and scalable adoption across rural markets.

At the heart of the revamp is AI-enabled voice interaction in major regional languages, including English, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada. The voice recognition and conversational agent framework is being developed by Ampivo Smart Technologies, aimed at transforming the app into an intuitive digital assistant for farmers.

Once launched, the platform will offer voice navigation, real-time alerts, contextual advisories, educational tools and interactive knowledge support, designed to improve decision-making across the agricultural value chain.

The application will also capture consent-led farmer data to connect users with electronic mandis and wider marketplaces, while enabling participation in sustainability-linked initiatives such as carbon credit programmes.

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Bartronics India managing director Vidhya Sagar Reddy, said the voice-first approach reflects how rural communities naturally engage with technology and forms the foundation of a broader rural intelligence layer under Project Avio Agritech. The company aims to onboard 20 million farmers over the next three years.

Bartronics India currently operates across nearly 5,000 villages, delivering last-mile banking and digital financial services, and is expanding into integrated agritech and agri-trade solutions through its Project Avio platform.

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Messi magic kicks off in India as immersive football experience lands

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MUMBAI: When football dreams need a passport, Lionel Messi is ready to stamp it. The Messi Experience – A Dream Come True, the internationally touring immersive exhibition dedicated to one of sport’s most influential figures, is heading to India this March as part of its 2026 world tour. After successful runs across Buenos Aires, Puerto Rico, Panama, Beijing, Chicago, Mexico City, Miami, Los Angeles and São Paulo, the exhibition will make its India debut in Mumbai on March 20, 2026, before moving to Bengaluru from June 19, 2026. The shows will be staged at Century Mills in Lower Parel, Mumbai, and Bhartiya City Mall in Bengaluru.

Produced and promoted by Bookmyshow Live, the experience promises to pull fans inside Messi’s journey, not just his match highlights. “I am thrilled to see this project come to life and bring fans even closer to me both on and off the field,” Messi said, adding that the exhibition would allow Indian fans to relive the most unforgettable moments of his career.

Designed as a 75-minute, multi-sensory walkthrough, the exhibition unfolds across nine themed zones, blending artificial intelligence, immersive environments and exclusive content. Visitors can train like Messi, step into recreated match moments and explore personal stories that shaped his rise from his early days in Rosario to lifting the World Cup trophy in Qatar.

Bookmyshow chief business officer for live events Naman Pugalia said the India debut marks a milestone for football fandom in the country. He described Messi as a global cultural icon whose story transcends sport, adding that the exhibition reflects the company’s ambition to bring world-class immersive entertainment to Indian audiences.

Beyond the storytelling, the experience also features an official merchandise store and an activation zone, extending engagement beyond the exhibition halls. Whether for lifelong fans or first-time followers, The Messi Experience aims to turn football history into a walk-in memory, one that lets India play along with a living legend.

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Work stress tops India’s mental health talk, not heartbreak or headlines

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MUMBAI: When India opens up about mental health, the conversation keeps clocking in at work. A new conversation analysis by Consuma, an AI-native consumer insights platform, shows that workplace pressures are the most frequently discussed trigger in online conversations around mental health awareness in India. The study analysed 136,695 public conversations across Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Instagram between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Within a focused subset of 20,272 conversations that explicitly discussed what triggers mental health awareness, nearly half 49.72 per cent pointed to work-related stressors, making employment the single largest trigger category online.

The findings echo concerns flagged at the policy level. India’s Economic Survey 2024–25 has already warned that hostile work environments and long working hours can hurt mental wellbeing and productivity. Online conversations suggest employees are feeling the strain long before policy catches up.

Among work-related triggers, poor work–life balance dominates the discussion at 24.37 per cent, followed by general workplace stress at 21.85 per cent and toxic work culture at 15.90 per cent. Long working hours account for 9.57 per cent of mentions, while job insecurity features in 7.50 per cent.

The numbers are backed by sharp, candid commentary. One user writes, “Most Indian employers overcomplicate employee wellness. Let people work async. Let them go for a run in the afternoon. Let them sleep in when their body needs it.”

Consuma notes that these findings apply only to conversations that explicitly discuss triggers for mental health awareness, not the entire universe of mental health discussions online.

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The data shows that mental health discourse in India is overwhelmingly driven by adults in their prime working years. People aged 25–34 contribute 50.51 per cent of conversations, while those aged 35–44 account for 34.35 per cent. Together, they represent 84.86 per cent of the discussion.

Work stress, however, is not acting alone. Societal and educational pressures make up 33.98 per cent of trigger conversations, including societal expectations (14.42 per cent), academic pressure (13.92 per cent) and parental pressure (6.09 per cent). One widely echoed sentiment reads, “Indian parents will raise you with a roof over your head, food in your stomach, and shame in your soul.”

Taken together, the data points to a compounding “pressure stack” faced by working-age Indians balancing career demands alongside cultural expectations, education-linked anxiety and family pressure, all while chasing conventional life milestones.

Interestingly, the conversation is not limited to venting. Of the 26,311 conversations analysed for broader mental health themes, discussion is almost evenly split between core challenges (48.05 per cent) and solutions or support systems (43.81 per cent).

Mental health crises dominate the challenge cluster at 32.58 per cent, followed by stigma and lack of awareness at 20.27 per cent. On the solutions side, people lean towards culturally familiar, self-directed approaches rather than institutional pathways. Holistic practices such as music therapy and spiritual wisdom account for 17.34 per cent, practical stress management for 13.72 per cent, celebrity-led awareness for 7.64 per cent and government initiatives for 6.51 per cent.

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The shift suggests that people are not only asking “what’s wrong?” but increasingly “what can I do?”even if the answers remain personal and decentralised.

Consuma’s analysis also zooms in on women’s health conversations, where mental wellbeing outweighs physical health topics. Among 1,934 women’s health conversations analysed, mental health accounts for 51.14 per cent, surpassing reproductive and gynaecological health at 37.07 per cent.

Younger adults dominate this space, with 18–44-year-olds contributing over 81 per cent of the discussion. In women’s health awareness triggers (3,489 conversations), societal factors lead at 45.2 per cent, closely followed by mental health drivers at 41.7 per cent.

Healthcare-related challenges appear less frequently at 7.4 per cent, but the tone is striking. Misdiagnosis and medical gaslighting recur as trust-breaking themes. One user notes: “Going to doctors is useless in India as a woman. First, they tell you to lose weight… Then they tell you that you are imagining it or that you are sensitive.”

The report was generated using Consuma’s AI-powered Rapid Research Platform. The dataset was cleaned for noise and duplicates and classified using a multi-coding methodology. Source-wise, the conversations came from Youtube (77,544), Twitter (41,121), Reddit (9,283) and Instagram (8,747).

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In a digital space often crowded with noise, the findings paint a consistent picture, for India’s online audience, mental health conversations begin not in therapy rooms or hospitals, but at the workplace and the clock is still ticking.

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