Breaking Down B2B and B2C in Affiliate Marketing – A Chat with Chris Walker

I’ve been listening to Chris Walker for years on his B2B Revenue Vitals podcast. I think it is one of the best B2B podcasts that covers sales and marketing. Chris is a well respected thought leader in B2B and he has over 135,000 LinkedIn followers at the time of writing.

So I had a theory or hypothesis that Chris Walker’s teachings in the B2B space could be applied to affiliate marketing.

I didn’t quite just ask the question, I invited him on the podcast not knowing the answer and Chris didn’t get any of the questions in advanced and even said it was better that way to be more organic.

Can we apply teachings of B2B concepts of demand generation, demand capture, personal branding, self-reported attribution and podcasting to the B2C affiliate marketing space?

Without telling you all the answers, I wasn’t sure if this was so clear cut. What Chris ended up doing was analyzing affiliate marketing on a level nobody’s ever articulated before. I believe Chris doesn’t have a lot of experience in affiliate marketing but he knows marketing on all levels.

Word of mouth in affiliate marketing

Chris had a solid point of word of mouth marketing. Before the internet, you could promote something to someone and hope you could get a 1 on 1 sale. Now today, you can promote that same product in a single post in social media like LinkedIn and even share it on TikTok. The end result is the possibility that your post might get over 100,000 visits in a short period of time.