The digital marketing industry has been growing exponentially year on year. According to Statista, worldwide digital advertising spending added up to $455.3 milling and is estimated to increase to $646 billion by 2024!
Digital marketing is a ubiquitous term and is used to describe a wide range of online marketing activities including Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Affiliate marketing, and Performance Marketing. Of these Performance Marketing is an oft-ignored but highly effective form of digital marketing. A performance marketing agency is your best bet to get the ball rolling. Why? Well, a performance marketing agency makes sure you get the most bang for your buck with carefully strategized campaigns.
So it may be wise to team up with the best performance marketing agency to give you the highest ROI.
What Is Performance Marketing, Exactly?
If you look closely, you’ll find the answer in the name itself. Performance marketing is entirely founded on results. As a marketer, you will have to pay only when your business objectives are met through your specified actions. These can include clicks, impressions, shares, sales, or lead generation.
The money you spend ultimately depends on measurable metrics that tell you how successful your ads have been.
Cool, right? You get exactly what you pay for!
How Does It Work?
You collaborate with an advertiser and put-up ads on a channel –say Google’s SERPs or a social media app like Instagram. Once the ad is up, the money you have to spend on that ad will be calculated based on a specific metric; some of these are:
- Pay per click: costs are calculated based on the number of times users click on your ad.
- Pay per impression: costs are calculated based on the number of times users see or encounter your ad.
- Pay per sale: costs are calculated only when you make a sale. This is how affiliate marketing works!
- Pay per lead generated: costs are calculated based on the number of users that take action, like signing up for your website through your ad.
The cool thing about performance marketing is that your ads can take highly diverse and innovative forms. For example, you can set up banner ads on Facebook and other popular websites – though they’re falling in popularity now to the reign of ad blockers. You can even use sponsored posts on Instagram to make your ads stand out and achieve greater reach than simply depending on your followers.
One of the most popular forms of performance marketing is found in search engine marketing through pay-per-click campaigns. You know when you make a search on Google, and the first one or two results are especially highlighted for you in a box? That’s an ad – the advertiser pays every time a user clicks on it.
Why Should You Consider It?
We don’t need to tell you this: marketing is an expensive endeavor. Performance marketing, however, can be a cost-effective marketing strategy because of how it works. This form of marketing is entirely based on results, so you’re paying for precisely what you’re getting out of it!
Performance marketing can also open up a treasure trove of data about your audience and even help you diversify by giving your reach the extra push it needs through greater visibility.
Picking the Best Performance Marketing Agency
What characteristics distinguish a great digital marketing agency? A few examples include testimonials, a variety of digital marketing services, and cultural fit, but there are many more! In this section, we will discuss how to go about searching for and locating the best performance marketing firm.
- Testimonials: Of course, you should always seek evidence. Although there are good, competent agencies out there who suffer from the “cobbler’s child has no shoes” dilemma, i.e., they are lousy at handling their own marketing because they are busy serving their clients, or they rely primarily on word-of-mouth and referrals, a lack of proof might be a red indicator.
- An Emphasis on Metrics: Any successful digital marketing agency should be concerned with pushing the needle for your company, which means focusing on KPIs and metrics.
Metrics and statistics should be mentioned on the agency’s website, proposal, and talks with you.
- Marketing Strategy: Without a solid digital marketing strategy, digital marketing is wasteful and inefficient. While you may own that strategy in-house, nothing is worse than an agency that doesn’t understand or provide value to your strategy.
The Upshot
Performance marketing comes with many lucrative benefits and opportunities for your business. However, it can also be a little finicky to get right: there are a lot of data-driven factors to consider as you put a campaign together. A performance marketing agency – like AdLift – can help you find the perfect performance marketing strategy and will do all the work for you.
