Performance Marketing

Marketing, generally

Marketing is about making investments that influence people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. With all the technological complexity that goes into running digital marketing campaigns it can be easy to lose sight of that simple goal, so I find it helpful to recenter around that consistently.

Across all channels, marketing objectives, industries, etc, marketing is about influencing people to think about your brand and your products or services in new ways and ultimately to take actions that they otherwise would not have taken.

Performance marketing

Performance marketing is simply marketing where every campaign or investment is held to clearly-defined goals around impact and ROI. Performance marketing practices still tend to be focused more on ‘lower-funnel’ campaigns intended to drive immediate purchases and revenue, but really all marketing campaigns can and should be held to clear goals around the business impact they drive per dollar invested.

Even investments focused on driving longer-term goals like brand awareness should have corresponding shorter-term KPIs that can be measured and optimized in real-time and that effectively predict the longer-term goals. The clear definition and prioritization of such KPIs, and the alignment of all aspects of every campaign around those KPIs, is absolutely critical to effective performance marketing.

3 core components of performance marketing

Whether optimizing a multi-million-dollar advertising program or just launching initial search or social campaigns, marketing effectiveness can be broken down into three core components: audience targeting, user experience, and measurement.

Those components each need to be aligned with the overall goal of each campaign in order to drive impact and maintain efficiency. It’s a task that can be daunting at first, but which is absolutely crucial to maximizing ROI.

I focus on helping clients build foundational understanding in these core areas while building straightforward, repeatable processes to consistently maximize profitable growth.