Are you looking to bring greater return to your online marketing endeavors?
If you are in charge of designing new, more efficient marketing strategies, it is important to know which channels will most improve your site’s traffic and how to implement it correctly to meet the businesses’ objectives.
Though the term has been in vogue for several years now, there is a lot of confusion about performance marketing and how brands can utilize it safely even today.
To discuss this, we have taken valuable insights from entrepreneur and digital marketing expert Caleb Ulku. He is the founder and CEO of Ulku Logistics, a full-service digital marketing and SEO company, boasting a diverse range of clients from fortune 500 names to local small businesses.
Performance marketing is based on achieving specific user actions. The goal is to obtain measurable conversions, tweak the user experience, and improve user experience further. This form of marketing can be turbocharged with an organic branding or notoriety campaign such as SEO.
Brands that utilize this form of marketing must set goals in advance. Often these goals are set by the number of users registering to a website, becoming subscribers, and performing qualified visits and sales.
Ease of Measuring the ROI of Actions
The classic CPM and CPC models offer a cost linked to results, but how the results are measured can be a grey area. In the case of CPM, it’s possible to know that a specific advertisement has been seen a certain number of times, but it is not possible to ensure a real person, and not a bot or algorithm, has seen it.
In CPC-based actions, you can learn how many users have landed on your website after clicking, but this does not measure what the user does next. If they immediately back out of the site to continue searching, businesses are still charged for the result.
Alternatively, performance marketing enables businesses to track all their channel actions with cookies or pixels and learn exactly what each user does and the path they take on the website. These are scenarios where you can directly measure the conversions and analyze the path the user took to get there, improving your sales funnel.
Conversion-Based Branding Goals
All companies ultimately want to increase their sales revenue so they can continue to grow and expand. Performance marketing allows these businesses to integrate conversion optimization with other online strategies, opening new channels and respond to the needs of their users’ experience.
Your ads cannot focus on establishing a brand presence without the right strategy accompanying it. No matter how brilliant the approach is, without a prior audience or inbound marketing campaign, simply advertising alone cannot make a brand or generate results.
If you set clear performance indicators, however, you will be able to analyze whether your marketing channels have achieved their objectives and in what ways they need to be tweaked and improved. With a strong analysis of your KPIs, you can achieve the perfect balance between performance and branding marketing, optimizing your conversions once users are on site.
Further Optimizing the Path to Conversions
Part of improving conversions means improving your KPIs. This will help you consistently optimize your campaigns, allowing your strategy to flex as your users’ needs do. If you are willing to tweak the funnel to give better results frequently enough, you will be able to determine which pages should have the main improvements made, over pages that do not convert or show low interaction.
In performance marketing, the result is not a specific goal or destination, but a journey of constant improvement. Performance marketing involves measuring responses in real-time and can help you establish continuous refinements of a certain funnel or stop a campaign when it has finished.
When analyzing the effectiveness of performance tweaks, you must be able to see the whole funnel, not just a small part of it. Where did the user begin their journey on-site, and where did they come from? Where did they end up, and what path did they take to get there?
Finding areas where users consistently drop off is a key focus area for improvements.
Opportunity Costs Eliminated
Once you have successfully improved conversions through performance marketing, the opportunity costs are eliminated. Gone are the days where you have to invest a large amount of money into a single campaign without knowing what the result will be.
With performance marketing, the risk is minimized and allows you to prepare estimates of how much each campaign will cost, and the acquisition cost of each individual lead across any of your marketing channels.
This method of marketing optimization allows you to deploy a full range of inbound marketing strategies, allowing you to build a better brand personality that is more focused and oriented towards providing value and results.