Everything you need to know about performance marketing

• Introduction
• What is performance marketing?
• How to create a Performance Marketing Campaign?
• Performance Marketing Platforms
• Strategies for Performance Marketing
• Types of Effective Performance Marketing
• Performance marketing tips
• Conclusion

Introduction

Performance marketing has been leaving a mark in the world of Digital Marketing for years now. The popularisation of such kind of marketing has been a direct result of new technologies emerging in the field of digital marketing. Some of the examples would be innovations in gathering traffic data and campaign performance data. 

Performance marketing, also known as performance-based marketing, is a combination of innovation and advertising that helps advertisers grow or boost their business in the most effective ways. However, this kind of marketing is not new to the marketing world. It has been around since the 90s and with the beginning of Pay-Per-Click campaigns. It then evolved to become better and more popular as years passed. 

So, what exactly does performance marketing mean in the modern world? Let’s find out. 

What is Performance Marketing?

Performance Marketing is a comprehensive term used to describe marketing/advertising where they pay when there is a result. These results could be a click, a generated conversion, a sale, etc. The marketing is targeted in such a way that everyone can be successful. Performance marketing, if done right, will create win-win opportunities for both advertisers(retailers, merchants, etc) and advertising companies(publishers, affiliates, etc.). We know in other kinds of marketing, the fess for the campaigns is paid upfront without considering the success of the campaign. Performance marketing lets advertisers save some bucks by only letting them pay when there is some success. It allows for real-time measurement of ROI and has successfully reversed the traditional value proposition of advertising. 

How to create a Performance Marketing Campaign?

The process for creating a campaign for performance marketing is as similar as other marketing campaigns. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Decide on a specific goal and marketing platform: Decide on who your audience is, how much audience you want to target, and their behavior, and decide on your budget. Understanding and deciding on all these factors will help you decide which marketing platform to select for running your campaign. 
2. Curate your content for launch: After you decide on the platform, you will have to curate content for the campaigns accordingly. It could be a blog, a graphic for display ads, etc. 
3. Monitor and Optimise your campaigns: It is important that you monitor and analyze the campaign when active. It will help you gain insights and also make the campaign more effective.
4. Evaluate the results: After the campaign ends, evaluate the results and compare them with your expected results. Try to find new ways that could have helped the campaign perform better. 

Let’s now find out more about the performance marketing platforms and how they work. 

Performance Marketing Platforms

Performance Marketing Platforms are a subset of channels that own these platforms. These channels have a specific audience and different advertising platforms to reach them. Some of these channels are: 

1. Google: It displays your ads on the search results page and across the Google Ads Network. 
2. Meta(Facebook): This is a leading social media channel that offers you a variety of options to show your ads on Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

No platform/channel will show all your advertisements to everyone, all the time. Hence, the platforms use various factors to decide when to show the ads and whom to show them to. These are:

• Bid: The Ad Display is decided based on the bids being placed to show the ad at a specific time, place, and target audience. 
• Target Audience: Most of the platforms provide you with ways to decide your target audience for the ad.
• Ad Quality: An Ad’s performance is affected by the reviews it gets from the audience. Your ad might be shown more if it receives good reviews and less if it receives bad reviews. 
• Conversion: The ad gets shown more if it yields more results. This is because the network gets paid only if the conversions happen. 

Strategies for Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is all about paying based on the action. The most commonly used strategies for these actions are:

1. Cost per Impression: The cost the advertiser pays the ad publisher per thousand times their ad is shown. 
2. Cost per Acquisition:  The cost the advertiser pays the ad publisher when a specific action like a sale, a form submission, a click, etc., occurs. 
3. Cost per Click: The cost the advertiser pays the ad publisher when the audience clicks on the ad.  
4. Cost per Sales: The advertiser pays the ad publisher per sale generated through the advertisement.  
5. Cost per Leads: The cost the advertiser pays the ad publisher per sign-up they recieve through the advertisement. 

Types of Effective Performance Marketing

1. Sponsored Content: You can co-create content alongside an expert in your niche and captivate your audience and their interest. This kind of content must solve a user’s problem and be creative and compelling at the same time. 
2. Native Advertising: Native ads are helpful in re-targeting the interested audience and keeping them informed or interested. They don’t look like ads as blend in the site by adapting to the form and function. 
3. Social Media Advertising: This kind of advertising is very effective because of its vast user base who are willing to consume content. Advertisers can easily decide their platform as each of them caters to a different audience, for eg- Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, etc. This kind of advertising helps in brand awareness and to gain online traffic. 
4. Performance Partnerships:  This can be also termed as Influencer marketing which is becoming a hot topic in today’s marketing era. Influencers are playing a major role in shaping the audience’s interest and driving purchases. Advertisers can partner with their niche influencers and drive performance marketing campaigns to gain better sales. 

Performance marketing tips

1. A potential lead would go waste if the landing page is bad. The visitor might bounce off and the lead would be a waste. So, focus on making the landing page as compelling and engaging as possible. 
2. A good offer on the landing page would easily help you convert your lead. A bad offer however would result in wastage of a potential lead which in turn will also cost you money. 
3. Always be open to try and optimise the campaign with different startegies and techniques. You can try A/B testing. This will help you better understand your audience and gain more conversions. 
4. Keep tracking your campaign to gain insights on what is working and what is not. 
5. Be compliant with the FTC (Federal Trade commission) guidelines.

Conclusion

Here, we come to an end to the blog on Performance Marketing. We hope you loved the blog. If you did, please share the blog as much as possible. The future of Performance marketing seems fresh as it will evolve the way marketing is done. There are speculations that it will be popularised in Display Marketing and that search marketing will become a conversation. Do you feel the same? Let us know in the comments below. Keep Learning!