Performance marketing is different from display marketing in many ways, but the most important way is that a business can measure the success of a marketing campaign. John Wanamaker, a department store magnate, said that half the money he spends on advertising is wasted, but the problem is that he doesn’t know which half. Scary, isn’t it? But, sadly, it’s not uncommon. With performance marketing, however, it’s a different case entirely: Marketers can customize and track campaigns.
- Geographic targeting
- Demographic targeting
- Behavioral targeting
Furthermore, performance marketing has even more benefit in that it costs the business less money and affiliates use more ingenious ways to market a product.
Financial Benefit: With performance marketing, the business only pays for performance. Whether the business/marketer chooses to pay for each soft lead or for action — a sale — only action is compensated. For example, a business may serve banners to affiliates. The affiliate posts the banner on a web site or in email. The affiliate only gets paid when someone clicks on the banner.
The business/marketer may choose to pay only when a sale has been completed. The affiliate also posts a banner or other form of advertising — text box, graphic box, a line of text. When a potential customer clicks through to the business’s website, the click is tracked. Should the potential customer purchase something, the affiliate gets compensated. If the potential customer leaves the site without purchasing anything, the affiliate does not get paid.
This type of marketing increases the business’ return on investment, and allows the business/marketer to customize the advertising program to better target audiences.
Marketing Ideas and Campaigns: Using affiliates to help market a business’s product has a huge advantage over traditional marketing — other than being financially feasible. Affiliates don’t get paid unless they can produce, so they are more apt to try different techniques. If making a sale calls for standing on her head, an affiliate will learn how to do that, then implement it. An affiliate also reaches niche markets that a business or it marketer may not be able to reach.
Furthermore, businesses and marketers often do not have resources to manage a campaign to target all of the different — and fragmented — marketing outlets. Social media has many outlets, and more are popping up all the time. And, you have to work those outlets. From Facebook and Twitter to Google+ and Linked In, the marketer would have to build profiles. And after building the profiles, the marketer would need to get followers. It doesn’t work just by creating a profile and throwing some information out there — without followers, no one sees the marketing campaign.
Affiliates can also help with specialized services like live transfers. Live transfers take information from people who say they’re interested in a product, and get them in touch with a call center full of employees who can answer questions about it (and sell it to them). Specialized services like these will free up marketers’ times while letting them diversify their portfolio.
Affiliates will post on outlets such as these. Each affiliate could have thousands of followers. Unless you’re Lady GaGa with over 27 million Twitter followers, it’s not going to cut it. The next best thing is to use performance marketing and let affiliates reach out to their followers. Your army of affiliates will reach more people and generate more leads and sales than you could.
Add some go-fast juice to your marketing campaign: use performance marketing to customize campaigns based on demographics, geographic targeting and behavioral targeting. Get rid of that migraine caused by trying to keep up with all the different outlets. Enjoy real-time reporting so you know where to make changes to further target the appropriate audience and save money on advertising. Grab all of the branches of the marketing tree and tie them up into one neat bundle, then enjoy increased ROI and no headaches.
Featured image on home page provided courtesy of haven’t the slightest.
