The last few decades have been a testimony to the growth of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has great potential to fetch your company high-quality traffic and conversions. It is the most sought-after way to advertise your brand, produce traffic, and attract customers.
But affiliate marketing can give rise to fraud that can cause brand infringement. The safety and protection of your brand are integral components of your organization’s defensive marketing strategy. Brand infringement is a serious issue that degrades your brand’s reputation in its target market.
With the increase in affiliate marketing popularity, the chance of encountering fraudulent practices also increases. It damages your brand’s reputation in varied ways. Trouble arises when the affiliate’s activities are being paid for are fake and real commissions are paid to the fraudsters.
It drains your marketing team’s advertising budget and puts the reputation of your brand at risk. Threat actors leverage brand infringement strategies to their advantage. Affiliate marketing plays a crucial role in boosting your brand’s image among target audiences.
But unscrupulous affiliates may deploy fraudulent strategies to destroy your company’s reputation. Brand infringement is the most common way to mislead your customers and leads. Here are some essential aspects to know about the risk factors associated with brand infringement.
Overview of Brand Infringement
In the digital world, brand infringement refers to using any brand’s trademarked or patented material to attract customers. It is common for threat actors to use your brand’s name, logo, or slogan to attract traffic for monetary gains.
The name, logo, and slogan are the intellectual property of your brand. By using a brand’s intellectual property, the nefarious affiliates mislead your users. Marketing teams should implement affiliate marketing compliance tools to eliminate instances of brand infringement.
The Risk Factors Associated with Brand Infringement
It is common for all prominent companies to use affiliate marketing to achieve conversions. Affiliate marketing is the most preferred marketing strategy deployed by numerous organizations. But brand infringement poses severe threats to your company’s marketing objectives. The nefarious affiliates rely on brand infringement strategies to conduct affiliate fraud at a massive scale. They do so by stealing your brand’s intellectual property like patents, designs, rights, etc. The risk factors associated with brand infringement are as follows.
- Loss of Reputation
The image and position of a brand are integral to its success. Brand infringements by competitors and threat actors can directly degrade the brand’s reputation. You will notice a sudden decline in the overall number of conversions.
- Affects your Brand’s Marketing ROI
Using your brand’s logo and name in promotional campaigns makes it easier for malicious affiliates to attract leads. During brand infringement, your marketing team ends up paying these malicious affiliates instead of the legitimate ones.
- Erodes the Trust of Customers
During brand infringement, the threat actors leverage unfair tactics to collect personal information. Nefarious affiliates redirect customers from one platform to another. In other instances, threat actors steal the personal data of users. These types of activities erode the trust of the customers.
The sales and revenue of your company will be on the negative side during brand infringement.
How do Nefarious Affiliates Cheat Brands?
Any affiliate link which misleads a customer to unseemly domains can misrepresent your brand in the wrong limelight. Ad fraud can destroy the customer journey and steal your marketing team’s budget and ROI. In today’s digitized world, here are some ways in which nefarious affiliates cheat brands.
Typosquatting
It is a type of affiliate fraud where threat actors register domain names similar to your brand. In typosquatting, the threat actors register websites to mimic legitimate sources and trick your customers. The main objective of typosquatting is to collect the personal information of your users. It also aims to drop malware onto the devices of the customers.
Violation of Paid Ads
The nefarious affiliates can hijack paid advertising campaigns on search engines to redirect customers to fake websites. It causes your brand to lose a massive chunk of traffic and conversions. The violation of paid ads affects your marketing team’s bottom line.
Adware Round Tripping
The malicious affiliates steal the legitimate buyers of your brand by redirecting them to their fake websites. The main objective of aware round tripping is to distract your users during their buying lifecycle. Adware round-tripping results in the loss of the reputation of your brand.
Brand infringement with affiliate fraud can destroy your company’s goodwill. Building the reputation of your brand takes a great deal of time. Brand infringement aims to dent your agency’s credibility in the target market.
How does VPT Assist you in Protecting your Company from Brand Infringement?
Some of the most popular brands rely on Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) to ensure brand compliance. VPT will assist you with the deployment of ad fraud detection tools to secure your affiliate network. The brand compliance monitoring tools of VPT are suitable for securing your reputation.