We’ve talked about performance marketing before, as well as how it differs from brand marketing.
Essentially, this is a type of marketing that’s focused on measurable outcomes. It’s about marketing focused on figures like sales, sign-ups, and the like.
Today, we’ll go deeper into it. Specifically, we’ll talk about how you can begin doing your own performance marketing for your business.
But before that, of course, we’ll talk about why you should bother in the first place.
Why do performance marketing now?
If you’ve read the article we linked to above (the one comparing performance marketing to digital marketing), you may ask why we’d even advise doing this type of marketing now.
After all, with the increasing shift towards privacy in the digital space, the second-party and third-party data that performance marketers normally relied on will soon be unavailable.
But there’s still data to be found, of course. Broad-level, aggregate data still exists.
Moreover, performance marketers still have a lot of other techniques and tools they can use to achieve their goals.
Most importantly, performance marketing is arguably more worthwhile than ever.
There’s still a lot of economic uncertainty thanks to events headlined by the pandemic.
For instance, while the global ad market has bounced back this year, it wasn’t too long ago when a freeze in ad spend hit the market for around 6 months.
It’s worth watching where your marketing resources go in situations like these… and performance marketing offers a pretty good way of doing that.
How to Start Doing Performance Marketing
There are a few basic steps to cover when building a performance marketing campaign.
Here, we’ll take you over the core ones:
1. Establish your objectives based on your goals
In case you missed our article on how to drive traffic in marketing, “objectives” are the metrics that help you assess how close you are to your actual “goals”.
For example, let’s say your goal is to raise consumer awareness of your website.
A possible objective for your campaign based on that is a 25% increase in site visitors by month’s end.
The key here is that objectives are measurable, precise, and relevant to your aims.
With the right objective, you can truly make the most of your digital marketing resources for the best returns.
2. Select the appropriate channels
Now, with your objectives in mind, you should select the channels to use for your campaign.
This just refers to marketing platforms, by the way. Hence, channels can refer to websites, email, PPC ads, social media posts and ads, etc.
The article we mentioned earlier (the one on how to drive traffic) goes into more depth on channel selection, but in sum, here’s what you need to know.
You have to pick the channels where you’re most likely to reach your target audience and where they’re most likely to be receptive to your message.
As much as possible, you also want to use more than one channel.
This helps you reach more people while also making you more ubiquitous, and thus front-of-mind for your audience.
3. Craft a campaign to suit your objectives for each channel
This is pretty much a blanket step, of course. A lot of work goes into crafting a campaign.
You have to develop content, work within the limits of each channel, possibly do A/B testing, figure out ad scheduling, and more.
The gist of it, however, is that you need a strategy that can appeal to your specific audience and whose results can be measured reliably.
Again, feel free to go over our article on The Marketing Flow for more detail.
4. Monitor and tweak your campaign based on your data
This is where the real beauty of this type of marketing comes in.
Because it’s so focused on measurable marketing performance, you get a wealth of data that you can use to further optimise your campaigns or even build new ones.
And since you can see the actual results in numbers, you know whether or not you’re moving in the right direction when you implement tweaks.
Does a new posting schedule for a video get you an uplift in site visits or views, for example? That’s clearly a change worth making.
Does an adjustment to your audience parameters for an ad lead to fewer conversions? Simply readjust, then.
A Final Word on Your First Venture into Performance Marketing
Performance marketing can be more complicated than our overview above describes, of course.
There are a lot of things to account for as you start upping the ante in your efforts, from ad fraud to retargeting.
It’s often a lot to handle for those new to digital marketing. You have to juggle so many metrics, multiple channels, and more than one campaign, in most cases.
As such, it’s perfectly fine to take it slow and not try to bite off more than you can chew immediately.
There’s also no shame at all in seeking aid from those with more experience. We’d be perfectly happy to help you get started on your performance marketing if you need assistance, for example.
Just reach out to us and let us know what you’re looking for. We’ll help you figure out how to reach your goals.
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