The allure of performance marketing is unquestionable; it brings with it accountability and transparency due to its integration with technology, that allows businesses to track effectiveness, make immediate changes, adjust budgets, and tweak media plans on the fly and across the performance marketing funnel. Unlike traditional marketing tactics where businesses pay media channels for space at a perceived value; in performance marketing, businesses pay for a specific action to occur (i.e. for a desired outcome - be it a click or a lead, or a sale).
Performance marketing has changed the way businesses advertise and sell products, how marketing companies, affiliates, and publishers are compensated, how customers are targeted, and also how communication is created and disseminated.
Additional Reading: Leveraging Activism for Loyalty, Creating Communities to drive purpose and growth, Marketing Truths in a World of Cynicism, Performance Marketing for Effectiveness, Packaging Designs that Sell, The Power of Music in Campaigns, Negotiation Strategies for any situation, Augmented Reality Marketing, How to Sell with Emotions, Crafting Your Customer Journey Map Masterpiece, Public Relations that Works, Immersive Customer Experiences with Experiential Marketing,
Would you like to download our 'Marketing Acceleration' Playbooks?
-
14 Strategies for Business Success During Difficult Times
-
24 Lead Generation Strategies To Drive Awareness and Engagement
-
26 Simple Ways to Measure Effectiveness in Marketing for Powerful Growth
-
36 Powerful Marketing Tactics That Actually Energize Growth In Your Marketing Funnel
-
Ways to Unlock Irresistible Customer Value With Your Brand's Archetype
How is Performance Marketing Different from Other Forms of Advertising?
Traditional forms of media (eg. TV, Print, Outdoor, etc.) are offered at costs to advertisers based on a payment model tracked for and by Time/ Duration, Frequency, Circulation, Reach, Opportunity to See, etc. The advertiser pays a fixed cost to display their advertisements, regardless of the outcome.
Performance marketing works on a pay-for-performance payment model that ensures measurability, transparency, and control for the marketer. Here campaigns can be scaled up or scaled down or changed or stopped depending on the effectiveness of the campaign, the objectives and goals of the business, the budgets available, and the focused location of the target audience, amongst other variables. The power of performance marketing towards achieving Return On Advertising Spends (ROAS) is unquestionable.
-
Performance Marketing focuses on driving specific customer actions and is measurable because it is driven by data and focuses on achieving immediate results.
-
Brand Marketing focuses on building brand awareness and perceptions. It leverages on storytelling, customer emotions, building relationships and connections, and long-term strategies to build brand images, attract prospects and retain customers.
-
Content Marketing focuses on creating and distributing relevant, consistent, and valuable content to attract and retain a specific target audience.
-
eMail Marketing serves various business purposes including brand awareness, driving website traffic, and promoting products. Because it involves some form of lead nurturing and has an end goal of conversion, it is a subset of Performance Marketing.
-
Affiliate Marketing involves creating partnerships between brands and affiliates (for example, bloggers, influencers, and industry experts etc.) to promote the brand. It usually does not include tactics like paid search, social media advertising, and email marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a subset of performance marketing.
-
Social Media Marketing/ Social Media Advertising is the creation and sharing of content (pictures, text, videos, etc.) on social networks to build brand awareness, increase customer engagement, and drive marketing goals. It is a tactic within performance marketing when it is used to drive specific actions.
-
Search Engine Marketing works towards increasing the visibility of a business’s website using paid advertising, SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), PPC (Pay-Per-Click), and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It is a subset of Performance Marketing.
-
Native Advertising/ Sponsored Content is advertising that resembles/ seamlessly integrates into the platform on which it appears, thereby making it less intrusive. It is a subset of Performance Marketing.
-
Programmatic Marketing is an automated buying and selling of online advertising used to streamline the transaction process for efficiency and effectiveness. It is a tactic within performance marketing.
The Role of AI and GPT in Performance Marketing
Performance marketing gets turbocharged when used in tandem with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), as these technologies not only have the ability to analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns (be it trends, behaviors, purchase preferences and history, browsing patterns etc.), but also change the way brands understand customers. Language prediction tools like GPT make reshaping and creating content creation quicker, more engaging, and more consistent. Content is personalized, written in the brand tone, human-like and created across media platforms at the click of a button. Performance Marketing + AI + GPT is a game changer, as it will move businesses to include and integrate with ‘The Power of 3’.
Performance Marketing - A SWOT Analysis for Brands
Strengths:
Performance marketing gives brands a measurable and cost-effective approach to engage with their ideal customers. With its precision targeting algorithms, high levels of personalization and optimization in real-time contribute to higher conversation and better ROAS (Return On Advertising Spends).
Weaknesses:
Performance Marketing generates vast amounts of data that must be managed and analyzed. This leads to customer concerns on data privacy, data control, and reliance on third-party platforms.
Opportunities:
Adopting and integrating AI and machine learning tools offers brands new opportunities to leverage and enhance marketing efforts.
Threats:
Data privacy regulations, a dynamically evolving digital marketing landscape, aggressive competition, and ever-changing customer preferences and biases constantly add pressure on brands to innovate, adapt and re-strategize if they want to stay ahead of the curve.
Conclusion:
Brands seek out more performance marketing simply because it allows them to align their marketing efforts directly with their business objective. Furthermore, its pay-for-performance ensures transparency, accountability, efficiency, effectiveness, better ROAS, and removes the guesswork from Marketing.
Performance Marketing - A SWOT Analysis for Agencies
Strengths:
Performance Marketing campaigns are better built by external agencies that bring specialization, expertise and resources to manage, optimize, and provide strategic insights, creative solutions, and advanced analytics.
Weaknesses:
Performance marketing is a specialization and therefore generic agencies may face challenges in proving their value and demonstrating clear ROI to their clients. They need to build capabilities and expertise to keep up with the rapid pace of change in digital marketing.
Opportunities:
Agencies are not all equal as they are usually built to address problems and find answers or solutions to questions that their existing clients face. For these agencies to differentiate themselves they need to identify and specialize in certain areas of performance marketing or develop proprietary technologies so that they too can expand their services.
Threats:
In-house client marketing teams and DIY marketing tools remove the level of mediocrity, therefore creating a need for highly specialized agencies that bring more value to the table and can drive business outcomes for a client’s business.
Conclusion:
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, agencies are strategically shifting towards building performance marketing capabilities to not only create additional value and offer additional services to their clients but to also be able to deliver tangible outcomes that their client businesses need.
Performance Marketing - A SWOT Analysis for Media Platforms
Strengths:
The plethora of media platforms available today allows marketers to better target customers in various advertising formats, options, and tactics including performance marketing.
Weaknesses:
Media platforms continue to face challenges and questions related to customer data and security. Furthermore, since they are dependent on advertising revenue, their continued existence depends on fleeting customer preference and the ability to deliver outcomes.
Opportunities:
Data collection and analysis allows for platforms to innovate not just in personalization and experiences but also in ad formats and targeting capabilities to attract, engage and retain customers and advertisers.
Threats:
Constant changes of user attitudes towards ads and breaches in data privacy can have a big negative impact on brands, agencies, and customers.
Performance Marketing - A SWOT Analysis for Customers
Strengths:
Customers can discover better and more relevant products and services with Performance Marketing. This in turn can also help brands understand pain points, competitive advantages, trends and purchase patterns.
Weaknesses:
Concerns with data privacy and the onslaught of personalized ads can become overwhelming to customers very quickly.
Opportunities:
Providing customers with better control over what they see, and how often they see it, will open up opportunities for stronger customer preference, engagement, experiences and loyalty for brands to innovate and refine their performance marketing strategies.
Threats:
Ad fatigue is real and often is often accompanied by negative perceptions of the brand. Over-targeting and intrusive ads are threats to the ongoing relationship between brands and customers.
Conclusion:
Performance Marketing has enhanced the customer’s experience with a brand’s products and services because of its customer-centric nature. Customers receive valuable personalized content from brands because brands use data-driven insights to understand behaviors, preferences and interests before creating and delivering content across media and platforms.
How to Set Up a Performance Marketing Campaign
Setting up a performance marketing campaign requires considerable planning and effort to deliver business growth objectives.
-
Defining Objectives: What is the primary objective that the campaign must deliver to (for example - increasing website traffic, retargeting, remarketing, engagement, generating leads, boosting sales, or improving brand awareness). Ensure that the campaign goals are in alignment with the business objectives.
-
Set KPIs and Benchmarks: Business Goals are accompanied by numbers (for example - Cost per lead, Number of leads, Cost of acquisition, Average order value, ROAS, etc.). Defining benchmarks can also help you set a minimum level of performance success that must be achieved for a campaign to be successful.
-
Set a Performance Marketing Budget: There are a few ways a budget can be set for performance marketing: A common rule of thumb is to allocate a percentage of revenue between 5 % to 15%. Another way is to consider the industry and market in which your business operates. Highly competitive marketplaces will require more spending. Another way is allocating some portion of available funds towards the activity. While Performance Marketing has the word “performance” in it, it still requires marketers to spend money before they can make money.
-
Identify the Target Audience: Who is the target audience - their demographics, interests, behaviors, online habits etc. Create your customers persona profile either based on your existing customers or from market research data or from your Ideal Customer.
-
Choose the Platform(s): Not all platforms are equal so you need to choose the right digital platforms based on their strengths and ability to deliver the objectives: For example - search engines, social media, email, affiliate networks, etc.
-
Create quality content that also engages: Brands need to create content that is engaging, relevant, and valuable to attract and retain the target audience’s attention. Elements like Visual Design, Copywriting, Storytelling, Personalization, Call to Action (CTA), Multimedia Elements, User Experience (UX), Videos, and Website landing pages all need to be created and have to be A/B Tested.
-
Use tools to Track and Measure: Anything that is not tracked cannot be measured. So to measure the success of a campaign incorporate tools that track, analyze, decode and measure data (for example - Click Through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CR), Cost Per Conversion (CPC), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) etc.) in real time.
-
Monitor, Optimize, Adjust, and Test: Performance marketing is all about testing different strategies, analyzing results, tweaking content and creatives, adjusting targeting and optimizing campaigns across platforms.
Common Pitfalls in Performance Marketing
Like any other marketing tactic, Performance Marketing brings with it its own challenges and pitfalls. Marketers often encounter the following hurdles on their journey to performance marketing success.
-
Brand Placement: Marketers need to be vigilant on where their performance marketing campaigns are displayed alongside other content. A brand does not want to be placed alongside content that could harm its reputation or appear offensive or controversial.
-
Regulations & Compliance: Marketers need to be aware of rules regarding data privacy, consumer protection, advertising standards etc., especially across different regions.
-
Privacy Regulations: Countries like USA and Europe have very strict laws and severe penalties for marketers who collect, store and use consumer data and who misuse or lose that data.
-
Click Frauds and Bot Traffic: Marketers need to leverage advanced tools to detect and filter out fraud clicks as these clicks not only drain the advertising budget but also do not result in conversions.
-
Placement Transparency and Published Fraud: Marketers must conduct due diligence on publishing partner platforms to ensure that their content is actually visible to their customers during their campaign.
Conclusion
The role, relevance, importance, and integration of Performance Marketing into a business’s marketing mix cannot be overstated. With an ever-changing digital landscape that is both complex and more dynamic than ever before, companies need to leverage performance marketing into the marketing mix as it allows brands to better target and retarget their buying customers at the right time and with the right message, thereby delivering better marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, higher conversion rates and better ROAS (Return On Advertising Spends).
Additional Reading: Leveraging Brand Communities, Storytelling, Building Trust, Value Propositions that Sell, The Power within eMail Marketing, Why personalization matters, Product Pricing Strategies, The Why’s and How’s to Marketing Automation, Better Business with Customer Profiling, Video Assets for Increased Engagement, Copywriting for Sales, Paid Media Marketing, Multi-Channel Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Why Marketing Research Matters, Marketing Funnels for Business Growth, The New Marketing Mix, Driving E-commerce Traffic, Customer Insights for Action, Mastering Marketing Budgets, Customer Centricity Pays, Making Affiliate Marketing Work, Chose Influencer Marketing to Win, Redefining Creative Copywriting, Outcomes Vs Output - What are you chasing?, AI Tools, Tips & Tricks, Customer Journey Maps, Stop Selling Products and Start Selling Emotions.