According to a study, there will be over 300 million online shoppers in America in 2023. If you’re doing business in this world, you’ve hit the jackpot, right? Well – almost. The internet has changed the way we shop and do business, and along with it, it has also revolutionized how brands get the word out and advertise themselves. Enter: one of the most impressive gamechangers on the block, the performance marketing agency!
Advertising on the internet comes with immense potential reach – you can reach more people and engage them more personally, more often, and in a more targeted manner. Performance marketing is a form of data-driven digital marketing that keeps a finger on the pulse of precisely how your campaigns are doing.
There was once a time when the returns from traditional advertising – think newspapers, radio adverts, etc. – couldn’t be tracked. Today, however, performance marketing agencies have the technology and access reams of data, which enables them to track performance and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Therefore, the name performance marketing – and its experts, the performance marketing agency.
What’s Special About Performance Marketing?
A number of features separate performance marketing from other forms of advertising. While in traditional forms of advertising, brands usually pay for ad space, costs are not dependent on the success of the campaign. When performance marketing agencies get involved, on the other hand, you have a form of marketing where you spend money based on clear metrics of success such as conversions, transactions, or even actions like subscriptions.
Performance marketing agencies are particularly adept at boosting the brand awareness of businesses in clear and measurable ways using strategies ranging from social media campaigns to content marketing. Many of these fall under the aegis of performance marketing simply because their success can be objectively measured; this is the holy grail for a good performance marketing agency.
Measuring Performance Marketing
The best performance marketing agencies in the field are meticulous about demonstrating the success of their campaigns through calculations and analyses of ROI or returns on investment. These are measured using specific metrics of performance, which, when analyzed, can be used to understand what’s working and what isn’t and optimizing campaigns to get the best possible results.
Key performance indicators or KPIs used by performance marketing agencies to measure returns on investments include:
- CPC, or cost per click; as the name suggests, this figure shows you how much money you have spent on acquiring each click on an ad.
- CPM, or cost per mille (mille, here means thousands); refers to how much money it costs a performance marketing agency as an advertiser to acquire a thousand impressions or views of a digital ad.
- LTV, or lifetime value; refers to how much revenue in total an individual customer can bring in for your business throughout their association with you.
- CPA, or cost per action; measures success based on how many times the target audience of the client of a performance marketing agency does something you want them to do, like subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for a program.
Creating a Winning Strategy: The Basic Steps
As you can see, a lot of industry knowledge goes into understanding and implementing performance marketing – whether you’re doing it yourself or partnering with a performance marketing agency. There is also no such thing as a single perfect way to create a performance marketing strategy; however, there are a few tenets of planning every performance marketing agency swears by. These include:
1. Charting Out Clear and Concise Campaign Goals
Performance marketing agencies can allow you to choose from a whole host of possible goals, such as increased website traffic, increased brand awareness or engagement, or even remarketing or retargeting your online presence to a new demographic of clientele. Your goals can also include more monetary ones, like generating more leads and sales. The best performance marketing agencies are flexible and allow you to choose what you want out of working with them.
2. Choosing the Right Channels
Where you’re playing the game is as important as how you’re playing the game; performance marketing agencies work the same way. They can help you identify as well as diversify the marketing channels you use to broaden your reach. The best performance marketing agencies use a combination of advertising tactics like social media marketing and affiliate marketing based on the individual needs of brands to make the most of the versatility of the internet.
3. Getting Ready to Tackle the Obstacles
If you’re looking for perfection, digital marketing won’t be where you’ll find it. Ask any performance marketing agency, and they’ll tell you no strategy comes without the dangers of obstacles and problems. You can run into a whole host of problems that a performance marketing agency can help you tackle gracefully.
These include important regulations like privacy and compliance and malicious online interference in the form of bots and click frauds. The best performance marketing agencies help you identify the best advertising networks and platforms and use them the right way, so you run into very few problems, even in the long run.
The Upshot
An excellent performance marketing agency like AdLift will give you the reins in your hands while doing the difficult work of driving the horses for you. They can help you measure every aspect of your digital marketing campaigns, from the performance of single ads all the way to optimizing your conversion rates. In a world where holding attention is perhaps the greatest asset any business can lay claim to, data-driven advertising is the most efficient way to understand and implement what’s working for your business – and what isn’t.