How often have you come across a marketing campaign that strikes you as ill-conceived, slightly out of the times, and generally unimportant in the current climate of marketing and consumer spending. They’re everywhere — unlikely intentionally, but they’re certainly a part of our lives. And while these marketing plans much produce some returns — they’d certainly be canceled or at least modified should they not — they don’t truly connect with us like they could.

Part of this is the massive change in marketing that’s going on currently. With the new methods of communication and message spreading made possible by the social web, companies are desperate to hop aboard the train and get their wares out their and in the open. Twitter, Facebook and other sexy companies are taking up the main view in many marketers’ radars, and entire divisions of companies are being created to decide exactly how to make the most of these innovative new social tools.

The thing is, they’re often poorly planned out. Especially amongst affiliate marketers, the propensity for completely inane and improper social media use is sky-high, and considered a common sense part of our marketing efforts. While it undoubtedly brings around results, much like the relatively poor TV ads of yesteryear, those results are hard to measure in a relative field. How much did your social media campaign really cost you? Not just in terms of cost, since the barrier to enter social media realms is very low, but in terms of the time cost and effort expenditure.

For affiliate marketers, we need to pre-plan our strategies and work around relative results, not just results alone. Opportunity cost should be a huge concern for affiliate marketers, especially if you’re paying other people to work for you. Which metrics bring in the most value and stomp on all the others? Those are the metrics that should be focused on, not those that have the most sex appeal and the greatest amount of attention in the public world.

After all, it’s about sales, isn’t it? We’re all out there trying to boost sales, fight off a lack of spending in a recession, and find the best niches to maximize profits in. But when these diversions and distractions get in the way of finding the most profitable marketing metrics, it’s important to take a step back and take stock of what is and isn’t working. Forcing yourself into a medium that doesn’t sell isn’t the way forward. Finding the most profitable medium, be it SEO, PPC, or social media marketing (or any other) is where the money is.

In order to see truly remarkable affiliate sales results, you need to plan your marketing campaigns to make use of not just the most current and valuable marketing tools, but those that produce highly valuable results. Twitter and Facebook will come and go. What won’t come and go is the customer base that supports you, evangelizes you and keeps on talking.