Performance marketing.

Imagine that you’ve paid a landscaping company to transform your backyard from a patch of land that looks like a tornado has run through it into a horticultural masterpiece. You hand over your money and wait for the contractors to get to work. Only, they keep telling you that they need to delay until, eventually, they stop calling altogether. The company disappears off the face of the earth and you’re left feeling like you got scammed.

Sadly, that feeling is familiar to a lot of business owners who’ve tried to market using digital channels, only to find themselves chasing the money they’ve spent down an online rabbit hole. The lack of appropriate tracking and results measurement in traditional digital advertising is one of the reasons many smaller businesses don’t go digital.

Performance marketing differs because it demonstrates the ROI you achieve via your various advertising platforms. It’s for that reason that many companies want to increase their performance marketing budgets (often by working with performance agencies), as these stats from Marketing Charts show:

In this survey of 274 marketers, 60% (nearly 165) say they want to increase the budget they dedicate to performance marketing by at least 20% in the coming year. Compare that to the 11% that say they’re going to reduce their budgets and it’s clear that most marketers recognize the value that proper tracking of performance metrics offers in helping them to maximize performance.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re 10 years old again. It’s been snowing (unfortunately, not enough to cancel school), and you can’t wait for recess so you can play in the snow. Finally, the bell rings and you charge outside. Within seconds, you and your friends are hurtling snowballs back and forth without a care in the world.

But one of your snowballs goes awry. You put too much power into the throw and your aim was off, meaning that thrown globule of solid snow and ice goes flying toward a teacher’s face. All you can do is watch in horror, unable to change a thing, as the snowball smashes all over the teacher.

Off to the principal’s office you go.

As fanciful as that little story may be, it perfectly encapsulates how many business owners feel when they launch digital marketing campaigns. They hope that the campaign will go in the right direction, but when it doesn’t, they feel like there’s nothing they can do to change the trajectory.

Performance marketing changes all of that by giving you real-time insight into a campaign’s performance and, crucially, equipping you with the tools you need to make changes on the fly. And that real-time capability is critical in today’s digital landscape, as this chart from Econsultancy shows:

An enormous 84% of companies say that real-time marketing (made possible by tracking performance) leads to a better customer experience. Nearly three-quarters (72%) say they get more conversions when they can tweak campaigns in real-time, with about half saying those tweaks also help with customer retention.

Unlike performance marketing, you often have to set and forget with your traditional marketing efforts. By bringing the ability to make real-time changes into the mix, performance marketing maximize the dollars that advertisers pay for digital campaigns.

No matter who you speak to about online marketing, “S”, “E”, and “O” are usually the first three letters that come out of their mouths. That’s no surprise because SEO has been one of the most effective tools for customer acquisition for over two decades, as this chart from WordStream highlights:

Even with the introduction of a raft of other online marketing techniques, 49% of marketers will tell you that climbing to the top of search engine rankings is still the highest ROI digital activity your company can use.

But if you dig behind all of the keyword research and content tweaks that SEO requires, you get into the stats. And those stats often look something like this screenshot of a Google Analytics account, courtesy of Smart Insights:

It’s here, deep into the numbers, that performance marketing demonstrates its effectiveness. Even if you’ve mastered the mechanics of SEO, you can’t maximize your results unless you can interpret the numbers. It’s like driving a car but having no idea how to fix basic mechanical issues. Everything’s great until something breaks down and you’re left scrambling for a way to fix the problem despite having the wrong tools in your hands.

NEWMEDIA’s SEO services get the car running, show you where it needs repairs and carries out the mechanical work needed to deliver exceptional ROI.

Pulling our attention away from search engines for a moment, performance marketing also focuses on the social side of things. But far from posting the occasional picture or story on social media, NEWMEDIA tracks the performance of every post so you can tweak your approach to get more clients.

Why bother doing that? According to this stat from Oberlo, almost three-quarters of companies point to social media marketing as being “somewhat effective” or better for their business:

But just as we see with SEO, the data behind social campaigns can be a nightmare to navigate. Social Media Examiner makes that clear with this screenshot of a Facebook analytics dashboard:

Don’t fear if those pages of stats look intimidating. NEWMEDIA cuts through the numbers to help you see exactly how your social media marketing performs, ensuring it can become yet another ROI-generating feather in your digital marketing cap.

If you’ve ever read a piece of content that kicked off with a disclaimer like the following:

“We receive payment if you purchase any of the products mentioned in this article using the links provided in the article.”

…then you’ve seen affiliate marketing in action. As the name suggests, affiliate marketing opens up the marketing of your product so that other people (be they companies or individuals) can advertise your product to their audience. In return, your affiliates get a slice of the pie, meaning you pay them a percentage of each sale made via their affiliate links.

It works a lot like sponsored content, and can be tracked in the same way, too. You create the links your affiliates use, meaning you can track the progress a lead makes from clicking the link to buying your product.

And it works, as these stats from Kinsta demonstrate:

According to this survey of marketers, over half (54%) rank affiliate marketing as one of the top three channels for customer acquisition. A fifth of those surveyed (20%) say it’s the top channel, beating SEM, social media marketing, and even organic search.

A good performance marketing campaign takes advantage of the power of affiliate marketing, in addition to tracking the metrics so you can see which affiliates produce results.

As any sportsperson will tell you, all of the preparation and training in the world won’t matter if you don’t perform when the bright lights are shining down on you. The same goes for your website, as you could spend years writing content and creating campaigns, only to find yourself flushing money down the toilet if you’re not tracking performance.

NEWMEDIA is the ideal performance marketing agency to provide your business with digital marketing services, and these are the reasons why:

• Our results speak for themselves, as we’ve generated over $3.5 billion in revenue for clients during our 25-year history.
• We count major brands among our clients, including the YMCA, Delta Airlines, and CBS Television.
• The industry recognizes our excellence, with Expertise.com, Clutch, and SEOBlog all calling us one of the best digital/performance marketing companies in America.

We’ve got the credentials, and you need a performance marketing agency that delivers results. Get in touch with our team at [email protected] and we’ll talk about how we’ll get your digital marketing campaigns operating at peak performance.