Performance Marketing: The new road to a brandâ€™s success

Authored by Mayank Kishore, Delivery Lead, SEA

In the ever-competitive digital world, performance marketing has emerged as one of the most effective and influential strategies to enhance businesses. With an ability to enhance reach, involvement and conversion of new buyers, the unique online advertising strategy has been credited for getting the job done at a much-reduced cost, significantly lower risk and a much higher return when compared with other marketing platforms.

Over the ages, conceiving impactful marketing strategies are directly correlated to the rapid growth of your company. This, in turn, allows firms to reach out and connect with their target audience, increasing brand awareness, cementing brand loyalty, and influencing consumer behaviour. Akin to a road map, such strategies pave way for business owners to meet their respective objectives and achieve long-term goals. But, performance marketing is arguably the one that stands out among the rest.

Apart from marketing strategy, SEO, paid advertising and other key techniques, performance marketing continues to rise to the evolving challenges, owing to its ability to help businesses promote themselves and strike a chord with potential customers. On the other hand, performance marketing can also be used for smaller promotions to extract immediate insights which can further be used to devise long-term strategies.

In a bid to track the reach, monitoring page views and tracking social media followers has almost become a necessity for brands. Similarly, a business owner can track every metric of their performance marketing campaigns, including clicks, conversion rates, bounce rate, and more, to stay on top with the changes in the market.

Planning is an essential part of this process as it allows brands to gain a better understanding of the customer experience. Enabling brands to pay only for the outcomes, performance marketing is noticeably cost effective when compared to other techniques.

Building brand loyalty and interacting with customers is imperative for marketers. It will insure that the efficiency on their initiatives continues to grow. Forms of payment, for instance, remain a key consideration for firms in a bid to appeal to the consumers online. Ascertaining the possibilities that resonate the most with consumers allows brands to provide more options and enable an easier path to buy.

When trying to target localities, marketers need to keep privacy protection differences in mind. Furthermore, leveraging the consumer data can turn into allegiances, more effective methods, and stronger personal appeal to individuals. That's exactly why brands must reach and target their audiences in a better manner through a range of channels, including retargeting.

A performance marketing strategy entails keeping all of the marketing plans and tools in sync in order to keep the campaigns optimised and constantly at scale. Checking across channels provides business owners with a comprehensive view of their respective program’s efficiency. This further allows them to maximize interaction and, thereon, outcomes.

Metrics are everything in performance marketing. Determining the right KPIs allows brands to focus on driving the most important results, such as sign-ups, conversions, or purchases.

Here are some of the performance marketing KPIs:

ROI (return on investment) (ROI)
Rate of conversion
Customer acquisition and retention
Lead generation
Quality of leads
Sales
Revenue
Conversions
Downloads
Referrals

Through testing and transparency, performance marketing allows organisations to optimise their media expenditure, resulting in a higher ROI and more substantial business results. With a focused strategy to programmatic and display advertising, campaign metrics on how, when, and where people interact can be easily accessed by the brands.

Brands can use performance marketing to take a scalable, targetable, and data-driven approach to OTT advertising, which is expected to reach 147 million US adults by 2020. OTT can be the icing on the cake for a multi-channel strategy that makes a unified audience experience, from retargeting to retention, across all channels.

Affiliate marketing connects brands with influencers and publishers on the target audience's preferred platforms. Combining affiliate marketing with paid search and social media also allows brands to concentrate on long-term revenue growth rather than short-term gains.

Performance marketing, with the right strategy and partners in place, means that brands will only need to shell out for proven results. The ability to think clearly and devise successful tactics is critical to every company’s success in the future. Marketing, like all business skills, can be learned through practice, experimentation, and making mistakes.