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In today’s fast-paced digital world, with consumers being constantly targeted with endless content, businesses need to find new ways to connect with their audiences in an authentic and engaging way.

At Yamaha Portugal we are aware that, in this context, to combine sales with brand awareness is everything, and in 2024 we had a clear challenge: although our website was running smoothly, our in-house content wasn’t generating the engagement we hoped for and, with a limited budget, we needed a solution to increase sales, visibility and engagement, and strengthening Yamaha’s connection with its customers.

This is why we decided, in a joint project between P&A department and Digital Marketing & CRM team, to create an affiliate marketing programme, offering a unique opportunity for our customers to turn their passion for Yamaha into exclusive offers.

The project was designed with concrete goals: qualitative – increase brand recognition
and credibility, strengthening the relationship with the Yamaha community, testing new creative approaches through influencer-driven content, and increase digital Kando – and quantitative – maximise the ROI, increase sales directly attributed to the affiliate programme and boost affiliate conversion rate to improve our sales funnel.

Our program was launched to the public in January 2025, but we started the project in September 2024, with the market analysis phase, attracting and selecting affiliates. We’re offering a 3-level range of exciting benefits designed to motivate and reward our affiliates, such as commissions on sales, exclusive clothing and merchandise, first-hand testing of new products, and exclusive access to brand events and special activities.

We started out with six talented influencers carefully chosen according to their social media presence and engagement rates, audience demographics, content quality and relation with Yamaha products. Janaina Souza, Jorge Correia, Pedro Sousa, Rita Azeredo, Ricardo Teixeira and Ricardo Oliveira together have more than 850,000 followers across territories such as professional racing, supersports, offroad, beauty & fashion, and delivery services. This selection was key to ensure credibility and alignment with our brand’s values.

Since the beginning of this partnership, we’ve already seen a positive outcome: until the end of January 2025, we registered +200K of reach in our social media, our engagement rate rose from 3,91% to 5,96%, we had more than 1,000 clicks for the affiliate application form and so far, we received 119 applications from potential affiliates. Our sales also improved: 28% of the purchases used an affiliate code, and the average buying value per purchase increased 46% when using an affiliate code.

This initiative is a great example of how an innovative, cost-effective marketing strategy can drive sales. Through this programme, we are providing new experiences to our Yamaha Motor community in Portugal, whilst building a stronger online brand presence. At the same time, this project allows us to collect important consumer data which will allow us to make better decisions for marketing and sales.

Moving forward, we want to expand the programme recruiting new affiliates focused on strategic niches (e.g. sustainable mobility), launch affiliate acquisition campaigns with initial incentives, and integrate with Yamaha CRM and align affiliate data with the customer journey.

As a team we worked very hard to make this program a success, and we are proud to see that our efforts are paying off. We are looking forward to the coming months!

Carlos Paixão, Duarte Silva, Joana Neves and João Luís, Yamaha Motor Europe (YME)