The Benefits of Performance Marketing

August 10, 2021

What are the benefits of investing in performance marketing for my brand?

Performance-based advertising is on the rise; for marketers, however, this form of marketing can be difficult to find the right cadence as there are so many types of performance marketing channels and campaigns. Thus, there isn't a "one-size fits all" approach.

Performance marketing is essentially a "pay for performance" process where payment only occurs when there are measurable results. For example, Lendly, an innovative loan product company, transformed into a nearly $100,000,000 business in one year by building brand awareness and efficiently acquiring new customers through using third-party location data, establishing key targets, and leveraged social media, email marketing, and call center services.

Anna Ritchie, head of global digital content strategy and operations at BIC, described the brand's tactics for developing effective performance marketing campaigns that center on consumer needs:

"We do heavily rely on search insights and consumer journey behavior from our media teams to tell us what consumers are actually talking about, thinking about, and searching for. We use that to determine how we can tailor the content.

Other insights could come from ratings and reviews and general social listening. It's more general voice of the consumer that we look at and try to understand — what they're searching for and chatting with each other about — and what those things signal to us in terms of what content might be relevant to them."

The following resources provide insight on successful performance marketing trends and examples.

Best Practices and Trends

The State of Performance Marketing: Strategies, Tactics, and Trends. Ascend2, September 2020.
Ascend2 and its research partners fielded The State of Performance Marketing Survey to analyze performance marketing strategies, tactics, and technology. Most companies that participated in Ascend2's survey said that they will increase investments in performance marketing during the next 12 months, but the amount they are willing to spend varies depending on how they will use the media. Findings include:
Why Performance Marketing Is a Win-Win for Everyone. G2, July 2021.
Businesses find themselves paying the lion's share of their budgets on advertising, nurturing, and finally, generating leads – and it becomes a futile exercise if the leads aren't of good quality. But what if, instead of spending your hard-earned digital ad dollars on impressions and clicks, you could focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that generate actual business results – leads, conversions, and sales? With senior leadership now extremely focused on digital return on ad spend (ROAS), performance marketing is a business model that guarantees that an agency or partner must meet client-defined metrics to fulfill their contract. Simply put, performance marketers must perform, or they don't get paid. Throughout this post, G2 delves into the different types of performance marketing, the benefits of leveraging this business model, and new trends that'll bring you success.
How to Get Started with Performance Marketing. Outbrain, June 2021.
There are so many different types of performance marketing channels and campaigns, so there is no single way to do it. However, Outbrain outlines the main steps to build a performance marketing strategy of any kind and for any audience. Use them as a guide to get your performance campaign running toward success.
What Is the Role of Performance Marketing? Adweek, June 2021.
Performance marketing excels at driving conversion outcomes, such as leads, sales, and installs. These outcomes can be correlated directly to revenue, which ties marketing investment directly to a company's financial growth. Performance marketing makes it easy to prove the value added to a business by its advertising, with ROI being quantifiable and clear. And while this strategy is generally employed close to the sales point, it can also be beneficial across the marketing funnel. Also from Adweek: Here's How Brand and Performance Marketing Intersect.
Brand Advertising vs. Performance Advertising: Which Is Right for You? GreenBook, September 2020.
Deciding between performance and brand advertising has been a long-standing debate. Here Joel Rubinson of the GreenBook provides a framework on better understanding when you should choose one over the other. He includes this table:

Examples

BIC's Journey to Global Digital Acceleration. ANA, June 2021.
With digital trends intensifying over 2020, BIC knew it had to fully pivot from brand marketing to performance marketing. In this session, BIC outlined their "Ws" framework, which utilizes five key "W" questions that allow the team to quickly identify important information and key goals for every campaign that they develop. The framework has been central to the brand's adoption of performance marketing.
Scaling a Startup and Disrupting the Lending Industry. ANA, January 2020.
Direct-to-consumer startup Lendly used a combination of brand-building and performance marketing to establish itself in the competitive financial technology industry. Todd Silverstein, CMO at DRUM, shared the story of how the brand turned an innovative loan product into a nearly $100,000,000 business in just one year by simultaneously building brand awareness and efficiently acquiring new customers.
Building a Performance Digital Media Engine that Drives Business Goals. ANA, January 2020.
As a relative newcomer to a scene of established telecom giants, Visible began its journey by focusing on performance-based digital marketing. Only after it established its foundation in the marketplace did the brand invest in top-of-funnel marketing activity. A combination of performance marketing and brand building have helped Visible make a name for itself in the cell service provider market.

Webinars

Collaborate to Win: How Brand and Performance Marketing Work Together. ANA, August 2021.
This webinar will walk through the key differences of what a brand agency and performance marketing agency can offer, why you need both, and how to create processes and workflows between each to drive results.

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