If you’re looking for a cost-effective marketing tactic to increase your return on investment, look no further than performance marketing! This type of marketing allows you to truly get the most bang for your buck and maximize your marketing budget. Read on to learn everything you need to know about performance marketing and how you can get started!
What Is Performance Marketing and How Does It Work?
Performance marketing is a catch-all term that refers to marketing and advertising in which brands pay based on a specific action being completed. Actions involved in performance marketing involve clicks, sales, leads, downloads, bookings, and more. Odds are that you’ve seen performance marketing in the past, but didn’t identify it as such.
For example, a shoe company advertises their best-selling sneakers on a large social media platform. Instead of paying for the ad space in and of itself, the company only pays based on how many people actually click on the ad and follow through to their website. The cost-per-click varies depending on the type of ad and the platform used. Let’s say that the shoe company is paying $0.10 a click, and they get 2,000 clicks — they will end up paying $200 for the campaign.
How Does Performance Marketing Differ from Other Types of Marketing
If performance marketing sounds like a familiar concept to you — it’s probably because it is! In fact, many different types of marketing and advertising that you may have heard of before tend to fall under performance marketing.
Take affiliate marketing, for example. This type of marketing involves affiliates sharing a link to a product on their platform or channel. From there, the affiliate gets paid a commission from the original seller whenever a sale is associated with that link. Since you’re paying per sale, it’s a type of performance marketing.
Social media marketing and search engine marketing also fall under performance marketing as you only pay for the ad if someone clicks on it. This means that advertising on big platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram can be quite cost-effective for smaller brands, as they only pay for clicks while setting an overall campaign budget.
What Are the Benefits of Performance Marketing?
Although we have briefly discussed some of the benefits of performance marketing, it’s definitely worthwhile to cover them more in-depth so that you can truly appreciate the value of this tactic!
- Low cost and low entry barriers: Performance marketing is affordable and can be effectively utilized by small companies with small marketing budgets. Many smaller companies assume that they can’t afford to spend money on marketing, but perhaps a better question is can they afford not to?
Performance marketing is a great area for smaller businesses to start out in because of the low barriers to entry. You don’t have to spend a fortune on fancy graphics or high-traffic ad placements while still guaranteeing a good return.
- Easily measured: Performance marketing can be easily tracked and measured to ensure that you’re really getting the best return on investment. After all, if something isn’t working, you don’t want to be wasting time and money on it. However, with the right data and insights, you can pick out what’s not working and make appropriate changes to get your campaign back on track.
- Easily managed: Performance marketing is easily managed in terms of budgeting since you really do get what you pay for! Since you’re paying for clicks rather than impressions, you can easily set a budget for your campaign and be confident that your money is being well-spent in terms of churning actual sales. Again, this is ideal for smaller businesses who need to be smart about what they spend and where.
How to Get Started in Performance Marketing?
Perhaps the hardest aspect of performance marketing is simply getting started! When you’re starting from scratch, it can be hard to figure out what you need to do. Thankfully, this isn’t our first performance marketing rodeo, and we are here to outline the different steps you need to take to get started.
- Think about your goal: Before you do anything, you need to figure out what your goal is. Are you trying to increase sales? Engagement? Lead generation? Website traffic? Your performance marketing campaign will look different depending on what your end goal is.
- Think about your customers: Once you have your campaign goal in mind, you need to think about your customers. Who are they? What are their browsing habits? What content would appeal to them? If your campaign isn’t tailored to your customers, then it won’t be very effective.
- Choose your channels: From there, you can start doing research in terms of different channels, platforms, affiliates, etc. Make sure that the options you choose go along with your original goal and your target customers as well.
- Create your content: The last step of performance marketing involves actually creating your content. As you know, there are many different types of content involved in performance marketing — so feel free to get creative! Just be sure that your content is tailored to appeal to your target customers while accurately portraying your products and brand at the same time.
Best Practices for Successful Performance Marketing
Even though performance marketing can be extremely beneficial, that’s only the case if it’s done right! If you aren’t sure what it takes to build a successful performance marketing strategy, here are some tips and tricks to help you out:
- Be deliberate: You don’t want to just throw together a landing page and a link and call it a day. You need to be deliberate about the offer, the link, and the landing page in order to be successful. This means coming up with an enticing offer that will appeal to customers. Then you need to make sure that the link actually works. Finally, you need to ensure that the landing page is eye-catching and trustworthy to give the customer the final push to buy.
- Use data to your advantage: When it comes to performance marketing, you don’t want to just set a campaign and a link and then forget about it. Instead, you need constantly track and monitor the results of the campaign to avoid wasting time and money. The right data can give you the insights you need to tweak and optimize your campaign for better results.
- Consult the experts: Digesting all of this information can be confusing for those who aren’t necessarily performance marketing experts. The good news is that there are people out there who are performance marketing experts and can help you navigate this arena effectively.
For example, Greg Gillman specializes in omnichannel growth strategies for direct-to-consumer brands to help them increase visibility and revenue. In fact, Greg Gillman has helped his clients generate nearly $4 billion in annual revenue thanks to his expertise — and he can do it for you too!
Final Thoughts on Performance Marketing
As you can see, performance marketing is a very beneficial tactic for businesses to use to improve brand visibility, increase audience engagement, and decrease your marketing budgets all at the same time! Based on all these benefits, this is definitely something that you’ll want to get started on right away. For the best performance marketing advice, be sure to contact Greg Gillman for solutions and strategies that are tailored to your brand.
Sources:
Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Marketing | Entrepreneur
The New First Place: Targeting Position Zero In Search Results | Forbes
