Leave Your Marketing Woes Behind You with Performance-Based Marketing

In preparation for your last digital marketing campaign, you carefully planned every detail, thoroughly researched keywords, chose specific advertising locations, and crafted some great content. However, despite your best efforts, the campaign still produced underwhelming results. Does this sound familiar?

Don’t worry — anyone who has ever tried their hand at traditional digital marketing has been there. Fortunately, you can stop paying for marketing campaigns that do not deliver by leveraging the power of performance-based marketing.

Intrigued? Then join us as we explore this effective but underutilized digital marketing tactic.

What Is Performance-Based Marketing?

Performance-based digital marketing is a specific virtual advertising and brand-building strategy that has been praised by enterprise-level businesses, national news publications, and everyone in between.

Put simply, performance-based marketing is a style of marketing that you do not pay for unless it produces measurable results. 

Unlike passive marketing structures that charge you for “renting” ad space, this approach allows you to define what performance criteria you want to pay for. Your performance-based marketing campaign can be centered around measurables such as:

• Ad clicks
• Ad views
• App installations
• Sales
• Social media engagement

For our example, let’s say that you choose “ad clicks” as your performance-based marketing metric. 

If a user views your ad on a social media platform or search engine results page (SERP), but does not click on it, then you are not charged for that exposure. However, if they do click on your ad, then that interaction will be deducted from your daily budget, which you get to set yourself.

When setting rates for performance-based marketing campaigns, ad platforms such as Facebook or Google will charge a higher rate for more involved tasks. For instance, the per interaction charge for ad clicks will be lower than the billed amount for app installations.

How You Can Win at Performance-Based Marketing

Performance-based marketing is a highly effective way to generate buzz about your products, services, or brand. However, if you want to get the most out of your performance-based marketing efforts, then we recommend that you:

Set Clear Goals

Goal-setting is an essential component of performance-based marketing. Before setting up your campaign, sit down with your team and lay out what you hope to accomplish with your advertising efforts. After you have done this, determine which measurables best align with these goals.

Keep in mind that performance-based marketing should be a component of your overarching growth and outreach strategy. It cannot serve as your entire marketing plan but should supplement other efforts, such as incorporating SEO content onto your site.

Carefully Select Your Keywords

As with standard digital marketing campaigns, performance-based ads are triggered when users search for designated keywords or key phrases. Therefore, you must carefully select which keywords you want to bid on.

When you are first starting out, don’t be afraid to try some long-form keywords that are available at a lower rate. Remember, you are only charged for interactions that align with your defined performance criteria, so you have virtually nothing to lose.

Monitor Your Campaign Performance

While performance-based marketing is an excellent way to engage in paid online advertising, it is not a “set it and forget it” strategy. 

You must closely monitor your campaign performance in order to identify what is working and what isn’t. This approach will give you the opportunity to salvage an underperforming campaign by making a few simple adjustments.

Leverage Professional Performance-Based Marketing Services

If you want to skip the trial and error phase, we recommend taking advantage of Insights ABM’s performance-based marketing services. Our team of experts knows how to craft custom performance-based marketing campaigns that produce real results.

When you are ready to make your brand stand out  in the increasingly crowded digital marketplace, Insights ABM can help. Contact us today to learn more.