When does Marketing become Performance Marketing?
Creating a campaign with the sole purpose of generating tangible, measurable results for your clients in the form of metrics such as sales, conversion, leads or click-throughs falls under the Marketing purview of Performance Marketing. The other end of the spectrum is an awareness-driven campaign wherein the intent is more on the lines of creative showcase and engagement. Agencies often draw a distinction between the two for the purpose of efficiency but now when the lines between ATL, BTL, mass, targeted, Digital and Mainline are getting more and more blurred by the day and literally everything on the internet is getting measurable, the question arises, ‘Shouldn’t everything Digital be Performance Marketing?’
For certain business models such as Dealerships, you would expect the go-to strategy to be Performance Marketing with a major chunk of it being Affiliate Marketing. But what if you could achieve both Brand Awareness and Sales-funnel metrics by selectively playing the ‘Performance’ card to your brand-centric content? If the thought behind everything you churn out is ‘Everything that I create should not only sell but also help in Brand Building’, a fine balance can be struck between the numbers and applauses.
The best campaigns for number-driven clients are those that have a Call-to-action built into them. Behind the veil of your value proposition should very apparently be the very apparent intent to sell.
Make the best of the mundane. If your messaging is going to be direct as directness comes then make the best of it; we’re at the disposal of a vast multitude of content formats and we can comfortably pick out the one that’s perfect for us and manipulate it to our creative needs.
Grab every opportunity to convert a prospect. Social Media offers brands a plethora of channels to directly interact with clients that may invariably become sales channels. At times, the correct ORM can turn prospects to buyers and buyers to advocates.
Present value propositions to your customers wherever possible. By giving your customers options and reasons to buy, even in your hygiene, you can at least plant the seed of consideration in the customer’s mind.
Even if your mandate requires you to sell and do nothing but selling, you have to generate relevant content to support your intent. In other words, add duality to your messaging — sell and also tell your audience stories.
Do not compromise on your creative execution. An ad or post is only as good as it looks. Often agencies lose sight of a creativity in order to make the transaction happen but it isn’t any good if can’t catch eyeballs. From the very inception of the idea to the end execution, the designers and copywriters must be as involved as the marketing people.
