In today’s world, everything that’s playing around us is online or virtual and online marketing is almost a necessity for every type of business out there. Capturing your desired target audience with personalised or brand related content is the most challenging thing to do. In this Blogpost we will give you an overview how important and crucial performance marketing can be for your business.
Performance marketing is said to be a measurable online marketing model where the advertisers can forecast their reach towards their targeted audience and can quantify the results. It is a constructive way to spend less and wise money with positive conversion rates for your business. According to Interbrand the top three global brands are Apple, Google and Amazon. Among these giants Google comes off as a strong contender in the performance marketing channel, other two brands are not far behind with their own marketing strategies.
Performance marketing KPIs
Performance marketing auditors set their KPI (Key Performance Indicators) keeping specific goals in mind e.g. generating leads, sales, clicks and more. The combination of advertising and innovation of the campaigns help retailers and affiliates reach a certain business goal. If done right, it is one step closer to the success journey.
There are very few channels of performance marketing, among them the popular ones are SEM (Search engine marketing), SEO (Search engine optimization) and Display ads. SEM can mostly be done through search engines e.g Google/Bing/Yahoo,etc.. Google Keyword ads is one of the most widely used features in SEM, as nowadays it’s necessary to search in Google at first whenever someone wants to find information about a product or a service.
According to the funnel diagram on the left, brand recognition works in the following 5 steps. Similarly a campaign should also follow these steps to perform better and drive successful results. Customers will have higher acceptance rate to a campaign if it comes with a story and creates a specific need in the customer journey gap.
A very popular form of performance marketing can be GDN (Google Display Network) banner ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. For small B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce platforms Facebook can also be another way of buying products directly, as it now offers shopping within the platform, which is known by the name of f-commerce. Your website should definitely be SEO optimized relevant to generate more traffic. You can also read “What is SEO and How It Works for Small Businesses” for initial understanding of SEO tactics. Determining the right channel is very important to accomplish the right goals.
B2B strategies for Performance marketing
B2B (business-to-business) marketplaces are not lacking behind to try out performance marketing in their marketing strategies. Advertising through LinkedIn and Xing (in Germany) is also very popular to attract more leads for your business. Moreover, every company checks your LinkedIn company page before going through with any affiliation, acquisition or before closing a business deal.
Best part of Performance marketing
The best part is you can lead your own way around it. From generating more clicks to generating more traffic to your website or channels. You can also adjust the budget according to your plans. Whereas if you focus more on leads which is typically a registration form or sign-up process, you can assign a particular amount per lead by which you can also acquire your customer details. According to invespcro the average ecommerce conversion rate is 2.03% to 3.84%. This also depends on your brand image, goodwill and the product or service the brand is offering. For service oriented brands the conversion can also go up and down accordingly.
Lastly, why performance marketing?
- Low risk of spending money
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) are often lower
- A/B testing for different campaigns
- Measuring revenue driving KPIs
- High ROI (Return on investment) rate
- Accuartely tracakebale
- Connecting more with your customers and clients
Not all organizations turn the right cards on their path to success, but TripAdvisor was one of the companies who played their trump in a timely manner and aced it. They are one of the fewer companies that leveraged heavily on performance marketing to reach out to their desired customers effectively. TripAdvisor is a digital platform where one can find a wide array of information about their travel destinations and also check out reviews by people who have actually been to those places before. Most people don’t get how they are driving profits by selling nothing at all and don’t recognise their various affiliations and acquisition with other travel companies. If you want to learn more about their story, please refer to “The Secrets to TripAdvisor’s Impressive Scale”. There are countless sources online that outlines how they address their customer needs through personalization as well. With all that, it’s not very hard to conclude that companies with unique business models like that of TripAdvisor’s are only one step closer to the path of winning their customers over.