How to Get Started With Performance Marketing — 10 Proven Tips From Digitalce Experts

According to Statista, digital advertising spending worldwide was $521.02 billion in 2021. This number is growing from year to year and is predicted to reach $876 billion in 2026. However, even though new forms of marketing appear every day, it is getting more and more difficult for companies to choose the most effective and profit-driving ones for them. 

In this guide, we highlight the benefits of performance marketing and describe some tips on how to succeed with it. Moreover, the Digitalce experts provide a comprehensive checklist of what is vital when launching your first performance marketing campaign.

4 Reasons To Apply Performance Marketing Services

First of all, let’s remember what digital performance marketing is. Simply say, it is a method of online promotion in which the company advertiser pays only for the results of the campaign. These results may be different: from clicks and impressions to purchases and subscriptions. However, the essence is simple: the platform or a person who promotes the product signs the agreement with the brand that wants to boost this product, and they agree on the conditions.

A collaboration with an experienced performance marketing specialist can help you take your online promotion to the next level. So, let’s highlight the main advantages of this type of advertising.

It is easy to measure

One of the main benefits of performance-based marketing is that it’s completely measurable and quantifiable. You pay only for the results, so you definitely know how successful your campaigns are. This is especially vital, as such an approach allows businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and change tactics almost immediately. A comprehensive view of your promotion helps make data-driven decisions and enhance your marketing efforts. 

You pay only for targeted actions

Applying a clear-cut performance marketing strategy is a great way to optimize budgets. You don’t need to pay in advance, and can do this only after seeing the success of your advertisement. Companies and people that promote your products are interested in doing this in the best possible way to drive their income. Additionally, as you make decisions based on the recent data from the dashboard, you can improve your ads or test other channels anytime when you see that this is necessary.

It allows you to reach an already interested audience

There are plenty of performance marketing channels that let you show your ads to a variable audience. For instance, there are more than 8.5 billion Google searches every day, and all these people can become your potential clients. However, as you pay only for targeted actions, there’s no necessity to spend money on disinterested users. After running a few campaigns, you will understand what platforms most of your buyer personas use. 

Additionally, identifying the most important keywords and applying other performance marketing tactics will let you catch the attention of customers by highlighting their needs. You can show how your company can solve customers’ problems and, this way, engage the audience that requires your solutions.

It helps reduce uncertainty

Implementing performance marketing into promotional strategy allows companies to eliminate worries about the effectiveness of their campaigns. This is a critical psychological factor that makes the work of most business owners much easier. You no longer need to pay monthly or annually, you can do this only when certain requirements are met. And, by collaborating with Digitalce performance marketing agency, you can easily convert customers into buyers, boost their retention and take advantage of cross-selling and upselling.

Expert Tips From Digitalce Performance Marketing Agency For Your Success

If you only start your way in launching performance marketing campaigns or want to optimize their effectiveness, the Digitalce experts are here to help you. Below we provide some pieces of advice on how to reach new markets, diversify your revenue streams and share risks with your partners. Keep reading to stay competitive and take your brand marketing to the next level.

1. Focus on your business goals

Understanding your company’s objectives is the first step to creating your performance marketing strategy and identifying the most important KPIs. After it, you will definitely know what results you are going to reach in the short and long term and will be able to track your progress. 

Additionally, this will allow you to choose the right channels and approaches that coincide with your aims. For example, if you want to drive brand awareness, promoting your company and its values will be the best option. While for those who focus on selling specific products, it’s better to highlight them in performance promotions.

2. Know your buyer personas

The needs and pains of your target audience determine not only your products themselves, but also the way you promote them. Every experienced performance marketing manager starts from identifying your potential clients’ problems and how your company can help solve them. Then, it’s essential to understand your competitive advantage and how your brand differs from others in the industry.

Digitalce experts usually identify a few segments of buyer personas with multiple requirements. Then we choose the right approach to the promotion of your products to each segment. Starting from pains and persuasive messages and finishing with the most appropriate platforms — we do everything to motivate the target audience to buy from you and come back.

3. Match your customers’ needs

According to HubSpot, 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs. This is especially true for performance marketing services: if you don’t know what your buyers require at different stages of the sales funnel, you won’t be able to persuade them and, consequently, motivate them to buy your products. 

Make your offers as personalized as possible. This will let you drive customer satisfaction and boost loyalty. Moreover, personalization and the ability to align your promotions with users’ needs will make your campaigns more efficient. This way you’ll convert more buyers, turn them into regular clients and improve your ROI considerably.

4. Choose appropriate platforms

Now, that you know who your customers are, it’s vital to identify what channels they use the most often. Choose the ones that offer opportunities for performance marketing and their conditions align with your needs. Digitalce specialists choose various types of platforms according to the goals of your digital promotion.

• Native ads. Successful promotions don’t look like ads, so they mimic the peculiarities of the environment and come in the form of suggested content. You can observe native ads as suggested posts and articles at the bottom or within the main newsfeed. Digitalce marketers prefer these ads as users consider them less intrusive and are more likely to engage with such promotions.
• Display ads. We observe these ads on the side of the main feed and their aim is to motivate users to click. By promoting engaging videos, pictures, or designs with promising statements, marketing companies help their clients advertise products on the websites preferred by the target audience. 
• Targeted ads. Almost every performance marketing specialist has used this way of promotion at least once. Targeted ads allow companies to choose the KPI they want to track and pick one from different pricing methods, such as cost per click, cost per view, cost per subscription, cost per impression, cost per sale, etc. 
• Search engine marketing (SEM). According to Oberlo, 84% of respondents use Google 3+ times a day, which makes SEM an impressively effective way of online performance marketing. You can focus on cost-per-click (CPC) advertising to drive the number of visitors to your website and boost sales.
• Affiliate marketing. This term means the process of advertising your products by external publishers (such as bloggers, influencers, or common users). When consumers follow their links and buy something from your brand, promoters earn a commission for each purchase. Affiliate marketing is one of the top performance marketing channels, as people that promote your products are interested in every sale, so they do their best to earn their percentage.

5. Identify the most important keywords

After choosing the channels for brand performance marketing, Digitalce specialists identify keywords people use to describe your product. It is especially vital for search engine marketing. Think about the words consumers google while they look for products similar to yours. You can take advantage of performance marketing tools, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to conduct a clear-cut keyword analysis.

Once the most appealing phrases are identified, it is essential to test them while launching promotional campaigns. Sometimes you can discover that definite keywords work better than others, or you need to completely change your strategy over time. This shouldn’t be a problem, just keep testing without worries, as you pay only for the results.

6. Make content align with the stages of the sales funnel

Performance marketing strategies can be built for various stages of the sales funnel. You can acquire new customers, boost brand awareness or use opportunities for cross-selling. At this step, you should already know what objectives you have, so it’s time to create appealing content.

Think about the peculiarities of the platform, the formats your audience prefers, and what special requirements they have at this stage. At Digitalce, our content writers thoroughly analyze each particular situation before writing persuasive texts, while our designers create pictures or videos that will be engaging and eye-catching for your buyer personas.

7. Work on your digital presence

While collaborating with performance marketing agencies, you need to understand that it isn’t enough to launch a promotional campaign. Did you know that, on average, it takes 7 “touches” before customers act upon your call to action? Thus, a strong digital presence is required to engage more users and persuade them to purchase your products. 

Digitalce experts always build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that allows businesses to boost their clients’ brand awareness and educate them about the services offered. This way, performance marketing becomes only the last step that helps companies motivate users to buy and upsell them effortlessly.

8. A/B test your campaigns

All successful performance marketing campaigns start from testing. To make your promotion more efficient, try various tactics and approaches. Sometimes even a line of text or a CTA on a button makes a difference. It is quite easy to measure performance marketing according to your KPIs, so this is especially applicable to this way of advertising.

Digitalce marketers recommend you conduct at least several tests before launching a campaign. This way, you’ll be able to identify the top performance marketing channels that work efficiently and provide you with the best ROI. Also, you’ll discover what aspects of creatives need to be optimized and improve them accordingly.

9. Track your KPIs

A specific business goal should always be supported by definite KPIs you keep track of. They can vary greatly depending on your marketing campaign, but there are a few categories that you should be aware of while launching your promotion:

• Lead generation;
• SEO;
• Paid advertising;
• Website efficiency;
• Social media success.

Digitalce marketing experts usually track plenty of KPIs. Below we provide the most important ones and give some pieces of advice on how to improve them.

• Cost-per-lead (CPL). The key to optimizing this metric is engaging content and the right choice of platform. You need to catch consumers by highlighting their pain points and explaining how to solve them.
• Click-through rate on PPC advertising. Consider what types of promotions work best for your audience, and increase the budget and time spent on them. Try different channels to understand where users are more engaged.
• Website visits per marketing channel. Motivate customers to visit your website right by clicking on the ad. You can provide helpful materials or a discount for them to do it now without hesitating.
• Cost-per-conversion (CPC). This KPI highly depends on how well-organized your marketing strategy is. You need to lead a user from the awareness to the conversion stage, providing a positive experience and covering their needs across all the touchpoints.

10. Combine various digital instruments to promote your business

We’ve partially highlighted it in the section about digital presence. To make your performance marketing more efficient, we recommend building your online reputation on various channels. For instance, you can run social media accounts to increase trust, optimize your website according to SEO requirements to take advantage of organic marketing and launch paid advertising campaigns to generate more leads.

When collaborating with our performance marketing agency, Digitalce experts conduct a thorough analysis of your buyer personas and competitors and build a strategy that covers all the channels you need to use. This combination will let you reach profit-driving results and boost revenue significantly.

Wrapping Up

Now you understand more than the performance marketing definition and its peculiarities. You are ready to launch your own campaigns to acquire new leads and boost sales by converting prospects into clients. If it seems difficult for you to build a comprehensive promotional strategy, we recommend hiring a trustworthy vendor that will do everything for you. 

By collaborating with Digitalce, you will save time and resources on managing your marketing, while getting profitable results. Get in touch with us to estimate your goals during a free consultation.