Performance Marketing is defined as “a comprehensive term that refers to online marketing and advertising programs in which advertisers and marketing companies are paid when a specific action is completed, such as a sale, lead or click.” With performance marketing you can measure and track results to meet your goals. Leads, opportunities, clicks and sales are all measurable outcomes.
With so many facets of ‘performance marketing’ out there, you need a quick Cheat Sheet so you can do a pre-flight check list of all your digital efforts. This will provide a simple overview of what you should be checking quarterly, annually or when you are new within an organization.
Standard Metrics include:
Cost Per Lead (CPL): You only pay when an individual becomes a lead by giving filling out a lead generation form or giving you their contact information as a result of interacting with your advertisement.
Cost Per Click (CPL): With CPC, you only pay when an individual clicks on your advertisement. This is common across a variety of channels, as it requires less effort from the consumer and is one of the first steps of engaging with a brand.
Performance Marketing Channels:
- SEM
- Paid Social Media
- Display Advertising
- Programmatic
- Native Advertising
Check list to evaluate your performance marketing channels:
1. Evaluate All Paid Digital Campaigns
- Are your digital ad campaigns continuing to drive leads, sales and form fills? Probably not at the rate you need them to perform so it is best to audit performance based on your KPIs to see where improvement is needed the most. LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B organizations, but it can be difficult to wield and navigate. Unless you are skilled in the main forms of digital paid media (Google Ads, FB/Insta, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) you need an independent audit to see if these efforts can be improved. If current campaigns are struggling, pause the underperformers to reduce waste in ad spend and give us a call.
2. Optimize Your Email Campaigns
- For every $1 you spend in email marketing you get $44 back, how is your email program performing? Email has been around longer than other performance marketing tools yet is the most overlooked when looking for improvements.
- Personalize your email campaigns. Not just name, but more importantly by content. Send customers and clients what they want, and you will increase your conversions. Eliminate links and create clear CTAs in email to improve CTR. With iOS 15, focus on clicks more than opens and consider adding a SMS solution to your mix to augment your email campaigns.
- Test, test, test. Continue to test subject lines, CTAs, emojis, send times, video and images. Video dominates engagement so include video when possible and relevant. When you stop testing, your email and marketing automation platforms are significantly less effective.
3. Optimize Your Website
- Notice I didn’t’ say rebuild it. A rebuild is not in the budget and most website are underperforming so a quick tune up is all you need to make some initial progress.
- Optimize for mobile. Speed kills, especially online. If your website is not mobile optimized, your losing traffic you didn’t know you had. 60% of all searches are on mobile and low mobile site speed is the number one website abandoning metric. Is your site slow – you need to find out.
- Keep calls-to-action above the fold. Sure, you created a glorious and beautiful website some creative director could put int their portfolio, but does it get results. 50% of your website visitors won’t scroll below the fold. Video websites load slower on mobile, but beyond that – why are people visiting your website and why are you making your CTAs more obvious? Need help, use a heatmapping tool to identify website UX and visitor activity and you can make effective changes quickly.
4. Evaluate Your SEO
- As noted above SEO efforts can mitigate poor site speed but it can also improve your organic Google rankings by improving your website code and content. Talking about metadata, schema, and title tags, among other SEO work. These efforts are necessary and can offset some costs of ongoing paid campaigns.
Anvil Media can help you refine and improve your performance marketing efforts. Simply contact us at mike@anvilmedia.com