How to Use Performance Marketing to Boost Your Business
For decades, advertisers have struggled to connect their ad spending to actual customer purchases. Paid media streams have the potential to generate more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise value in the United States and to usher in a new era of digital marketing. As a part of such commerce media, performance marketing assists businesses to understand how often consumers interact with them and how purchases are being made. It gives businesses insight into consumer behavior and helps them make better decisions. Given the essential role it plays in business-consumer interactions, it is now more than important to understand: what is performance marketing and how can companies leverage this better?
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing takes the opposite route to the traditional marketing model. Traditionally, businesses would put in money to reach an estimated number of consumers based on advertising campaigns. With this channel, enterprises only pay for guaranteed conversions of consumers.
Why Invest in Performance Marketing?
Now that we have an answer to “What is performance marketing,” let’s understand why we should invest in it. It directly affects business decisions. The ultimate goal for any brand or organization is to reach, impact, and sell to its prospective customers. It is a cost-effective way to market because each click, lead, and final sale can be measured and tracked. Businesses can gauge which marketing tactics their consumers respond to or engage with.
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How Does Performance Marketing Work?
CPC or Cost Per Click
Cost Per Click, also known as Pay Per Click, is the advertising strategy in which a business pays a fixed amount for each click on its ad.
CPM or Cost Per Impression
Cost Per Impression is the cost an advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions or views for a particular ad. This does not require the viewer to click on the ad.
CPS or Cost Per Sale
Cost Per Sale means that the advertiser only pays the publisher for the sales that a certain ad brings in.
CPL or Cost Per Lead
Cost Per Lead is a predetermined cost paid by the advertiser to the publisher for each lead generated.
CPA or Cost Per Acquisition
Cost Per Acquisition is the price paid for a single customer to go through the whole process, from the first point of contact to the sale and conversion.
Top Performance Marketing Channels
Banner Ads (Display Ads)
These are versatile digital posters embedded on a webpage. It usually includes eye-catching design to entice viewers to click on it and direct them to the advertiser’s page.
Native Advertising
Native advertising differs from banner ads as they do not stand out on a webpage. Instead, they resemble the publisher’s content while promoting the advertiser’s product and service.
Content Marketing
This is a widely-used advertising strategy to generate awareness and engagement to build a strong relationship between a business and its audience.
Social Media
Social media marketing refers to using social media platforms to reach, engage, and interact with audiences.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is the term for paid ads that use keywords and show up on search engine results. This allows advertisers to display their ads alongside the search results for a particular query.
How to Get Started with Performance Marketing?
Step 1: Set a Campaign Goal
To start with, the advertiser sets campaign goals such as raising awareness, getting more traffic, getting more leads or making more sales.
Step 2: Choose the Right Channels
Choosing the proper channels depends on your campaign goal and understanding target audience behavior. It can help to diversify marketing channels to expand reach and response.
Step 3: Content Planning
Create and craft content that best appeals to the target audience based on the advertising platform.
Step 4: Optimize your Campaign
It is best utilized at this stage. Analysis of the data collected, traffic on the various platforms, and tracking performance are used to allocate resources appropriately.
Step 5: Plan the Way Forward
Use the information gathered from each advertising platform to review performance and plan the most optimal way forward.
How to Measure the Impact of Performance Marketing?
Impressions
This is the number of times that a person sees your paid ad.
Engagement
Clicks, shares, likes, and interactions together form the total engagement on any ad.
Traffic
Measuring traffic allows you to understand audience preferences to help you evaluate which strategies are working best.
Other Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the Difference Between Performance Marketing and Brand Marketing?
Performance marketing is a narrower, short-term marketing strategy to generate leads and sales. Brand marketing is a comprehensive, long-term, and emotive marketing strategy.
2. What are Some Common Pitfalls of Performance Marketing?
Lack of a sustainable strategy, inadequate data utilization, and marketing to only one group of consumers are some of the common pitfalls.
3. Is SEO Part of Performance Marketing?
SEO cannot be part of performance marketing as one cannot pay for search results.
4. Is Growth Marketing Part of Performance Marketing?
Although growth marketing is not part of performance marketing, the reverse is true. It focuses on optimizing returns on costs spent on ads. With growth marketing, the critical goal is to use long-term strategies to scale the business.
5. What Careers are in Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing manager, copywriter, and digital media manager are some of the most popular jobs here.
As you can see, performance marketing is an integral part of digital marketing. If it interests you, then hone your skills by diving into Emeritus’ portfolio of online digital marketing courses from top universities worldwide.
By Juilee Kamble
Write to us at content@emeritus.org
