Performance marketing is big business. With the IAB reporting the industry to be worth in excess of £1 billion in the UK alone, generating £14 billion in sales for advertisers as a result, marketers cannot afford to overlook it as simply another form of affiliate marketing.
This explosion, which is in part due to the emergence of the “Internet of things”, and an increasing requirement from marketers to justify their campaign expenditure more granularly to the board, serves as a clear indication that brands approach to data is maturing. Especially the way they use it to interact with their customers.
The messages and creative exchanged during this process is a key part of the journey, but without the relationships in place to support this model of working, businesses can’t expect to reap the same level of return they would get without them.
Technological advancement has had a profound impact on diversifying the variety of tactics and tools available to marketers in the performance channel. Whilst that has bought about a number of challenges, it has had a profound impact in enabling businesses to transform their reputation and the perception their customers have of them in record time.
These innovations, particularly attribution modelling, are enabling marketers to act more strategically and align their ongoing activity with their outputs in other channels, but in order for this to generate true value, marketers need to utilise their traditional tools on a far greater level to unite these together seamlessly for market.
So what do brands need to do to capitalise on this growing and lucrative industry?
For starters, marketers need to understand the traditional stages of the customer journey – from the awareness and consideration phases through to the decision making process. These are still fundamentally in play, but happen in an increasingly non-linear fashion. Not only are there a growing number of devices and channels though which to interact, there is also an abundance of data to dissect and interpret from them.
This data provides vital insight on customer behaviour, which is essential to a successful performance-driven approach to marketing. In order for that to be successful however, they need to be establishing relationships with the right partners, which can not only lead to a mutually beneficial exchange in assets, but also an appreciation and understanding of a shared ultimate goal.
Email, for instance, is just one tool that can have a profound impact in this space. It’s not just a communication tool, it’s a relationship tool, a lead generation asset, a nurturing mechanism and a valuable channel for incentivising and achieving high levels of growth. In each of these cases it can unite a number of key variables together, and drive footfall to key content, websites and bricks and mortar assets. For retailers, this can be potentially lucrative.
As consumers we are continually exposed to advertisements. Whilst innovation can play a vital role in the cut through of campaigns, measurable change can only truly be measured effectively through clicks. Email as an aggregator of rich content therefore is incredibly well placed to help get this content in front of consumers at the right time and moment, track these clicks and be continually updating and evolving in response to the changing behaviour of the recipient.
Effective performance marketing campaigns naturally need to be highly targeted to be successful. As I have articulated before, there is a true science to getting this right, but no other channel offers the same level of potential to brands as email. Emails not only possess the ability to communicate multiple messages simultaneously, they can be targeted to clearly defined segments of customers to the extent that only the most relevant people will even receive specific content, thus immediately cutting out some of the targeting issues associated with PPC campaigns. However for this to be truly realised, marketers need to make sure they adapt their CRM activity in accordance with their partner and affiliate programme, so that all communication materials are in sync and joined-up across all parties.
With advertisers increasingly striving for more data-driven insights, marketers interest in big data as understandably been pricked. The areas where it can have a big impact on performance, are particularly interesting, as the potential future growth for the performance marketing industry is vast.
Those that deploy robust solutions correctly and provide advertisers, publishers and the market place with access to ‘big data’ which can be used to strategically plan online marketing activity in a more effective manner, will be well placed to capitalise on the growth in performance marketing.
