So you want to embrace performance marketing for your business? Well, let’s get right into the ‘what’s’, the ‘why’s’ and the ‘how’s’ to ensure that you know everything you need to get started and begin to build your future marketing strategy with a performance-based focus.

What is performance marketing?

Performance approach entails only paying for your online marketing and advertising when your objectives are completed. This could be a conversion, lead, sale or click, for example. It relies on a combination of skills from both advertising and an innovative approach to marketing. Your performance-based strategy should be regularly updated, amended and changed to fit changing objectives and consumers attitudes.

Why is performance marketing different from traditional advertising?

Performance marketing has turned the traditional approach to value proposition on its head, allowing for the capability to measure ROI in real-time and make changes to improve chances of conversion.

In comparison to other marketing approaches, performance focusses on conversions primarily, whereas many wider marketing techniques focus more on building brand visibility and trust and in return grow the consumer’s awareness of the service or product. This, although equally important when considering your marketing mix, should be complemented by a performance strategy.

Rather than a specific technique, performance marketing is a holistic approach to optimising your efforts. Within this, you may create content, run ads or design email marketing campaigns, as you would normally.

The difference is that you will typically test each of these channels through different approaches such as language, timing and imagery used then utilise this data to create the optimum campaign. This ensures that your likelihood of conversion is increased, in comparison to measuring traffic or engagement on social media, which displays the growth or decline in brand interaction and awareness.

Examples of performance-based marketing

App installs

A company has created a brand new gaming app. within which the levels gradually increase in difficulty. The launch campaign claims that users who download and play the game for the first two weeks will receive 50 in-app credits which can be used to skip levels, purchase in-app boosters and skin packs. The metric for success for this is the number of app installs within the designated time, with the app company only paying for the results they actually achieve.

Interacting with a submission form

A recruitment company is trying to increase their mailing list of new clients and job seekers. They capture information through an online submission form. They task their marketing team with increasing the number of detail submissions and enquiries by 10% over a 3 month period. The team build out an awareness campaign, which includes useful tips and information, based on personas they have built for the people they are targetting. They aim to educate and differentiate the company from competitors through their customer service and success rates. The company only pay based on the number of form submissions received during the time period.

Product purchase

A company has created a series of jumpers for pets and owners. The campaign focusses on gathering information about potential customers, testing out the types of content which is more likely to result in a click-through and what elements inspire the highest CTR. Using this research and testing method, the marketing team design a highly-optimised marketing approach which is paid for based on the number of sales of the line of jumpers.

Should you invest in performance marketing?

Performance marketing is already highly efficient, but with the developments in improving data collection and AI, it is likely to improve even more still. Increasing precision through fewer errors and improved capability to offer value by analysing deeper data makes AI the perfect counterpart to performance marketing.

Smarter algorithms allow marketers to better understand their audience and progressive learning means that they will only see an increase in the data available to them in the future. Reducing the need to test and test again, AI has the capabilities to analyse data and provide insight which can influence how to optimise a campaign to be most successful and removes some of the guesswork.

Performance approach to marketing offers a highly trackable and low-risk option for brands looking to streamline their capabilities and focus on a particular conversion. It has the opportunity to offer high ROI, through setting commission rates for affiliates based on the desired results.

Finally, with the necessity to test and analyse everything, in order to achieve that all important conversion, a business is more likely able to calculate accurate profit margins.

If you’re looking for a performance marketing agency to optimise your strategy, get in touch today!