Home > Our Thoughts > Everything You Need to Know About Performance Marketing
Everything You Need to Know About Performance Marketing
Image via Freepik
Performance marketing can be a powerful yet versatile tool to help businesses reach their goals. Now more than ever, it’s imperative to know how to get your audience’s attention effectively. Having an in-depth knowledge of how performance marketing works will help you stand out among the rest, bringing you leads, traffic, and conversions.
We’ve put together an easy guide to help you better understand what performance marketing is and why it is still relevant today.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Image via 99Designs
Performance marketing is an online marketing term where advertisers and marketers can showcase ads to their target audience and only pay when a specific action has occurred. Some of these actions could include clicks, sales, traffic, generating leads, and so much more.
Performance marketing professionals advertise their products or services on a wide range of channels including:
- Social Media Advertising
- Search Engine Marketing
- Sponsored Content
- Native Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
These channels are one of the many ways that performance marketers use to reach their audience. It’s important to remember that different channels have unique requirements and styles of advertising that help them achieve their intended goals.
Types of Performance Marketing Channels
1. Social Media Advertising
Image via Freepik
Arguably one of the most popular advertising channels, social media advertising offers a wide range of robust methods for targeting your desired audience. Companies can reach their customers by advertising to them through their preferred social media platform with social media advertising.
Whether your main goal is to increase sales, clicks, or engagements, social media tech giants use complex and unique algorithms to help show adverts to people who are most interested. Advertisers can select a demographic they think would be most interested, ranging from age, gender, location, income and so much more to help get the best results possible.
With almost 2.8 billion users monthly, Facebook is currently the most popular website for social media advertising. Over the past 15 years, Facebook has acquired 78 companies, most notably Instagram and WhatsApp. This helps companies of all sizes from small businesses to global corporations run campaigns to reach their target audience.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Image via Freepik
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) offers a powerful way to reach your target audience. Thanks to Google AdWords, it’s been the most effective performance marketing channel for decades. In SEM, keywords are the foundation for creating successful ads, and selecting the right keyword requires research and diligence.
SEM is an often-overlooked way to get people interested in your business. You may have heard of the term “pay per click” (PPC) and wondered how it works. Still, SEM operates differently than PPC advertising because advertisers bid on keywords instead of paying for each ad they want to be displayed alongside search results.
This means that every time someone enters a search query into Google or Bing, multiple ads will pop up as options with their corresponding bids next to them. This way, you could theoretically win by bidding less!
3. Sponsored Content
Image via Freepik
Sponsored content is often used by social media influencers. They use their social media following to promote brands in return for compensation. They reach highly engaged customers through sponsored content by promoting that particular product or service through a post.
Suppose an influencer can show that they have a dedicated following to match the brand’s target audience. In that case, marketers can use their popularity to their advantage to generate sales, traffic, and conversions. It’s become a lucrative market for advertisers as they can reach audiences who have a higher form of trust for their influencers who are willing to support them.
4. Native Advertising
Image via Freepik
Native advertising is a type of paid media that has been around for decades and has only recently become mainstream. It resembles the form and function of websites where it appears as advertisements when really they just blend with everything else on the site.
Unlike traditional forms such as banner ads or display ads that stand out from what you would normally see while browsing, native advertising allows companies to invest in this approach by speaking directly with their target audience without seeming intrusive at all.
Native ads are characterised by not looking like typical advertisements. Instead, they follow the look and feel of the sites on which they’re placed on, such as social media platforms or news portals. This can be shown in the form of an article, infographic or video that aligns with the website they are placed on.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Image via Freepik
Affiliate Marketing is a process where affiliates earn commissions by marketing another company’s brand or products. The affiliate can search for a particular product they want to promote and earn a percentage of the profit for every sale they make.
Since you handpick the affiliates, it can ensure that the traffic to your site is from individuals who find your product or service useful. This is because affiliates that resonate with your brand will most likely have individuals with their area of influence that’ll find your brand useful.
Affiliates are usually paid in three main ways.
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Pay Per Sale (PPS)
- Pay Per Lead (PPL)
These metrics usually follow under sections such as coupons, loyalties, product reviews and incentives to get users into the affiliate marketing platforms.
Final Thoughts
Performance marketing can be a powerful tool to skyrocket your business to success. With the advent of eCommerce brands, merchants and retailers alike, It’s been steadily growing in popularity and has been recognised as a great way to generate website sales and traffic.
It can also help scale engagement, conversions and reach new markets at a lower cost with a higher return on investment (ROI). There is always something new to learn and improve no matter where you are in your performance marketing field. Unravel Digital Marketing provides a detailed and comprehensive performance marketing campaign to help reach your business goals.
Feel free to reach out to us for more questions relating to performance marketing and other services we provide.