Marketing is one of the few areas of business that simply never stops changing. Take any long-standing establishment you can think of, and I bet you also think of something that place has done the same way for 30+ years. Marketing on the other hand doesn’t really have that luxury.
Though the goal of the marketing mediums might be similar now to what they were 30 years ago, the approach to these markets now looks like a vastly different playing field, and the maneuvers we see in today’s marketing strategies keep getting more creative. With so much more potential for companies to find new outreach it becomes challenging to know what channels to attack, or how to attack them. That’s where performance marketing agencies come into play.
Performance Marketing vs Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing was all the rage for those wanting to make a splash online. For a while, the power of SEO and paid media together could bring thousands of people to your doorstep through paid and organic search, but there was always a problem with the digital marketing strategy, it wasn’t actively focused on what mattered. Instead of focusing on specific KPIs or actionable information, the general digital marketing business would focus on vanity metrics like traffic per month, and that leads to a lot of explaining anytime an algorithm tanked search traffic. Whether conversion and overall sales went up or down, the drastic dip in traffic was always the red flag that put a whole in the digital marketer, whether they were doing well or not.
Performance Marketing focuses on far more actionable KPI-based triggers to get paid, and it’s turning into a way better marker for quality marketers to make money based on the results related to bottom-line KPIs.
The “bottom line KPIs” are items like:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Conversion rate
- Customer acquisition
- Customer retention
- Lead generation
- Lead quality
- Sales
- Revenue
- Conversions
- Downloads
- Referrals
What is Performance Marketing’s Focus?
The focus of performance marketing is bottomline KPIs. That means the strategy and channels attacked are looked at by how they are performing. The initial focus of performance marketing campaigns is to see what piece of outreach content does the best. The variations of the same piece of content is spread across multiple channels like the internet and TV, and the results of the initial campaign are used to guide the future choices of the campaign.
A good example of this is insurance commercials. Insurance companies tend to make multiple versions of the same ad and test them to see which one is the highest performer. After they have determined the highest performer based on bottom-line KPIs, the campaign will shift to push the best piece of content to the user while the others fall off the campaign. Since performance marketing is based on actually making a sale, it’s important for the analytics to drive the changes for the further success of the campaign.
What is the Performance Marketing Methodology?
The performance marketing methodology is based on making the customer money. Oftentimes, you’ll hear performance marketers ask questions like, “If I made you 10 million dollars, would you give me 1 million of that?” This is the basic methodology of the performance marketer:
“If You Make Money, I Make Money.”
It’s really that simple and is helping marketers around the world reshape how they approach business situations for digital campaigns. By focusing on metrics that matter to the bottom line of a business, you can avoid all the talks about how a Google update tanked your traffic if your conversions and profits are still going up. It is 100% possible to see overall traffic decline while sales go up, and it’s generally a sign your performance marketing team is making waves for you in your market.
Performance Marketing is Pay for Performance
Performance marketing is the new kid on the block, but its impact on the modern digital marketer is already being shown in the market. As people start to change their ideas on marketing online, popular key performance indicators are starting to shift to areas they actually matter, the bottom line.
