7 Steps to a Successful Performance Marketing Strategy

8 Min Read

These days, digital marketing is a way of life. Companies across the world have budgeted more of their marketing dollars for online video advertising, social media, and other digital channels over the past few years. While some of these efforts are aimed at generating organic traffic in which people stumble on your brand through internet searches, others are created for specific results, which is known as performance marketing.

Today, we’ll discuss the critical steps you need to take for a successful performance marketing strategy.

What Is Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing is a form of paid advertising aimed to drive a particular marketing goal or metric for both lead generation and demand generation campaigns. You might use performance marketing to increase clicks, boost conversions, or generate revenue.

Benefits of a Performance Marketing Strategy

What are the advantages of performance marketing? Here are the top benefits one can expect from implementing a performance marketing strategy:

• Pay for Performance: In performance marketing, advertisers only pay for successful transactions, which may include leads, sales, or clicks. This reduces marketing costs and increases return on investment.
• Real-time Tracking: Performance marketing allows for real-time tracking of campaigns. Advertisers can monitor and optimize campaigns in real-time, making adjustments to improve performance.
• Highly Targeted: Performance marketing campaigns can be highly targeted to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, location, and behavior, thereby increasing their effectiveness.
• Wide Reach: With performance marketing, businesses can reach potential customers across multiple platforms, such as social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps.
• Transparent ROI: Because every action is tracked, businesses can easily calculate their return on investment and assess the effectiveness of their campaigns.
• Brand Exposure: Even if a user does not complete the desired action, performance marketing still increases brand visibility and exposure.
• Low Risk: Since payment is made only for completed actions, the risk is low compared to traditional marketing methods, where payment is made regardless of the outcome.
• Scalability: Performance marketing campaigns can be easily scaled up or down, allowing businesses to manage their marketing efforts based on their needs and budget.

Now, how about the strategies themselves? Follow these steps to create a successful performance marketing strategy.

1. Decide on Your Campaign Message

Your campaign goals will help you craft your campaign message. You may be interested in building brand awareness, moving more products, or increasing your subscriber count. When you know your goal, you can start tailoring your campaign message.

Why it’s Important

A clear campaign message is the cornerstone of success. When you’ve defined your message, you can better create language and images that resonate with your audience. You can also create powerful calls to action that inspire people to take action. Having a clear message also keeps your marketing team on the same track.

2. Plan Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning refers to how you want your audience to see your brand. Once you have your campaign message down, decide how you’re going to position yourself. You may choose to emphasize your customer service skills, your price, or how you can help your customers address their pain points. Figure out how you want to stand out from the competition and use it to define your brand position.

Why it’s Important

Brand positioning is a key part of your performance marketing strategy. It helps you define your messaging and differentiate yourself from competitors. It also helps you choose a target audience.

For example, if you’re choosing to position yourself as a low-cost option, you won’t want to target people who value exclusivity.

3. Create Performance Targets

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics you can use to determine whether or not your marketing campaign has been successful. Your campaign goal will help you determine which digital marketing KPIs to track. If you’re aiming for more clicks, set a performance target for how you define success. You might aim for an increased percentage of website visitors, a specific dollar amount for a sale, or a conversion rate.

If you’ve done a performance marketing campaign before, use the historical data to set your performance targets.

Why it’s Important

Performance targets set the bar for you. Without them, you would have no way to gauge if your performance marketing strategy had been successful. They also help you set goals and refine future campaigns.

4. Know Your Channel Mix

Regardless of your goal, you should opt for a multichannel approach to performance marketing. Your target audience will likely be gathered in multiple places, so don’t limit yourself to one channel. Once you’ve defined your target audience, choose a mix of marketing channels to find them. Look through various metrics to learn where your target audience spends its time online and use it to prioritize your ad budget.

Why it’s Important

With any campaign, you want to reach the right audience. Even though you don’t pay for performance marketing until you get results, you improve your chances of getting them by choosing the right marketing channels. Diversifying your channels helps you reach more members of your target audience.

5. Get Your Website Ready

Once you’ve run your performance marketing campaign, you will likely see an uptick in web traffic. So, make sure your site can handle it. You also need to integrate your website with the call to action in your ad.

If you want people to sign up for a trial offer or a demo, set up a landing page and include links on other parts of your website. Make sure your Google Analytics account is up and running so you can track clicks on your landing page.

Why it’s Important

A bad website can turn customers off from your business. About 75% of customers judge a company by its website.

If your website is slow to load due to increased traffic or if customers can’t easily navigate through pages, they may lose interest in your company. So even though you managed to drive web traffic through your ad, you lost potential customers with a bad user experience.

6. Create and Launch the Campaign

When you’ve set a performance marketing strategy based around a goal and a specific target audience, chosen your channels and prepped your website, you’re ready to launch. Prepare your creative content including infographics, videos, CTV ads, and copy and tailor it to your chosen channels.

Make sure all materials of your campaign are tailored to the specific requirements of each marketing channel for a smoother launch.

Why it’s Important

This is the part of your performance marketing strategy that will inspire people to take action. Pairing the right creative elements with each channel will improve your chances of success. Once you’ve launched the campaign, you can start tracking metrics right away.

7. Measure and Optimize Along the Way

After you’ve launched your campaign, track your key metrics. If you start noticing that your ads are underperforming, you can reconsider your messaging. For best results, do A/B testing. Create versions of your ad that are slightly different and test them against each other. This can help you refine your messaging or change your target audiences.

If you didn’t run A/B testing before your launch, you can still use metrics to refine your landing pages or tweak your ads if they’re not landing the way you’d hoped.

Why it’s Important

Measuring results along the way will give you a better understanding of what you’re doing well and what you might improve. It can also help you learn about your target audiences. You may have thought most of your customers were gathered on one platform before your campaign only to see much better results from a platform you didn’t think was important.

It also helps you refine your messaging and choose better visuals for each campaign. You learn from your mistakes as much as you do from your successes. So use this data to optimize future campaigns.

Why Your Performance Marketing Strategy Needs CTV

When you drafted your performance marketing strategy, you probably considered the usual digital channels like search engine ads and social media. But consider Connected TV advertising, also known as CTV or streaming TV advertising. CTV refers to television content accessed by apps and streamed over smart TVs or a connected device like an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku that is hooked up to a television.

CTV ads offer more flexibility than traditional television advertising. If you’re advertising on a local TV station or during a national program, your best approach is to create a generic ad that appeals to a broad range of people. CTV lets you target your audience by their viewing habits, their demographics, interests, purchasing behavior, and more.

You can create ads that are more focused on your potential customers and reach them through the shows they’re already watching. Connected TV also lets you see analytics in real-time, so you can learn from each ad’s performance and perfect subsequent ads without waiting for months after your campaign has ended.

Performance Marketing Strategies: Final Thoughts

Sound performance marketing strategies can benefit your business because they give you the opportunity to focus your marketing efforts. Starting with a goal in mind helps you refine your strategy and improves your chances of success. With your goal in mind, you can set your brand position and create targeted ads that are more likely to resonate with your chosen audience.

Video marketing is a powerful performance marketing tool. Creating eye-catching and engaging videos lets you capture your audience in a way you can’t with text alone. Video is a versatile medium. Along with CTV, you can use it on social media or over-the-top (OTT) advertising.

If you’re ready to level up your performance marketing with CTV or OTT ads, contact MNTN. We can help you create conversion-optimized ads that are targeted to a specific audience. Whatever your goal, we have the tools to help you achieve it. Track your successes with our reports which show impressions, conversions, verified site visits, and more.

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