Introducing the Brandformer Method: all marketing is performance marketing

Traditionally, performance marketing has been identified as a type of advertising that a client only pays for when there are measurable results achieved and it’s almost always direct marketing. (Think pay-per-click campaigns where the client only pays when a link is actually clicked.) However, at The Brandformer, we believe any type of marketing can be considered performance marketing. That’s because we believe in adopting the mindset that all marketing should be measured, even if it’s not measured directly. All marketing efforts have elements that can be measured, including their impact on brand awareness and marketing return on investment (ROI).

Any B2C or B2B company can benefit from performance marketing, especially when you stop thinking about it only in terms of direct marketing and embrace a more holistic view of it. As our resident performance marketing expert Liran Kabilo says: “Ultimately, traditional performance marketing reaches a point of diminishing returns, where additional investment no longer yields significant improvements. Despite this, the mindset of performance marketing should be carried forward into non-direct response campaigns.”

New Avenues Beyond Direct Marketing

Typical definitions of performance marketing will state that it involves affiliates and trying to get people to perform a specific action, like filling out a form or clicking a link at which point the client pays for that action. However, this type of direct marketing has its drawbacks, as noted entrepreneur and author Seth Godin points out:

“Open-system direct marketing (where just about anyone can carry a link or run a banner) inevitably destroys the media that gets hooked on them.”

He gives the example of a podcast that pushes a discount code to a sponsor’s site with increasing frequency so the podcast can get paid more for their affiliate marketing efforts. In a world that’s awash with links, banner ads, and influencers peddling all kinds of products, people eventually just ignore the direct marketing efforts (or worse, they abandon the affiliate that is pushing the link/code/form).

At The Brandformer, we agree more with Godin’s definition of marketing in general, which he says is “storytelling and promise making/keeping.”

Performance Marketing Core Concepts

With that in mind, we believe that any type of marketing can and should be considered as performance marketing. After all, you’re always trying to get prospective customers to perform an action and you are always measuring the results of your marketing campaigns to reach goals and improve your marketing ROI.

The Brandformer method of performance marketing involves:

• Defining marketing goals and objectives
• Planning and tracking campaigns
• Analyzing and optimizing marketing efforts

​​Defining marketing goals

Performance marketing is all about being able to measure the performance of your marketing efforts. In order to measure performance, you need goals to attain.

Essentially, goals are what you want to accomplish. Attaching a number to your goals will make them easier to measure and discern whether you’ve been successful or not. A goal may be generating 10% more revenue next quarter as compared to the current quarter, or the same quarter as last year.

In addition to providing you with something to achieve, setting these goals will also help you improve your marketing ROI as you track and optimize your marketing campaigns.

To achieve the goals you’ve set, you will need objectives to reach along the way. These objectives act as milestones to help you reach your goal. The objectives you set will depend on your audience and what you know about them, along with some extrapolations. For example, going back to our goal of generating 10% more revenue than the previous quarter, you may have found out through your research that the majority of your sales come through website visits and your newsletter readers. So, some objectives you may adopt could be increasing your website visits by 20%, raising your newsletter signups by 15% and boosting your brand searches by 10%. If you reach each of these three objectives, it stands to reason that you will have a good chance of attaining your ultimate goal of bumping up revenue by 10%.

Objectives can take virtually any shape. They will depend on your audience research and how you believe improving a given aspect of your business will affect the goal you are trying to reach.

Campaign planning and tracking

Decide what would be the best avenues to reach your objectives. This involves figuring out what platforms to use, who to target, and how best to reach your audience. These are the steps you’ll need to take to plan your marketing campaigns.

Through your market research, you may find that your target audience prefers watching YouTube tutorial videos. So, you may start a YouTube channel featuring your own in-house experts providing tutorial videos on a weekly basis to target this particular audience. You’ll want to track how many views you get, how many viewers click the links you have in your video description, and how many of them end up becoming leads and ultimately clients.

If you do not have a straightforward metric to measure (like an increase in the number of leads) you should instead measure the metric that best reflects how the campaign’s performance contributes to its ROI. For example, try to find out how much the campaign has impacted searches for your brand, as this directly relates to the campaign’s ROI.

You can find out more about measuring brand awareness with this Brandformer article: How to measure brand awareness: Start with this framework.

Logging your efforts and tracking their performance is also crucial for knowing if they are helping you to realize your objectives and goals.

“Creating a log for your activity and setting up a proper tracking process is the foundation for great measurability,” Kabilo says.

Tracking campaigns is a subject we will elaborate on in a future article.

Analyze and Optimize

Analyze your results regularly so you can optimize what is working well so it works better. This will also allow you to drop what is not working well so you aren’t wasting money on it. This kind of optimization and pruning will benefit your marketing ROI overall.

If you have attained the objectives and goals you originally established and your marketing ROI has improved, then you know you’ve set the right targets. However, if you attain your objectives and goals, but your marketing ROI has not improved, this is an indication that your original goals may have been erroneous.

For example, if you do actually increase your revenue by 10% over the previous quarter, but you had to invest more in marketing than you actually generated, this is an indication that either your goal was misplaced, or your objectives were too costly to reach or didn’t actually contribute to reaching the goal. If this happens, you’ll need to reevaluate your goals, objectives, and campaigns to see where they may have gone wrong.

Performance marketing benefits

Since performance marketing puts an emphasis on measurability and optimization, treating all your marketing efforts as performance marketing gives you a way to measure all your efforts to ensure they are contributing to your overall marketing ROI.

“Adopting a performance marketing mindset across all your marketing initiatives instills a sense of efficiency in budget management,” Kabilo says. “This approach involves examining all your efforts collectively, with a focus on ROI. It’s not an overnight transformation, but by consistently applying this process, you will eventually see the rewards of your investment.”

Adopting a holistic performance marketing mindset will also aid your budgeting efforts.

“When budgeting and forecasting for the upcoming year, managers should first consider what brought in the lowest vs. highest ROI in terms of marketing efforts,” Ryan Carroll, founder and CEO of ecommerce business development agency Wealth Assistants, says in a Forbes Council article. “This can make for some easy first cuts and increase ROI out of the gate moving into the coming year.”

Performance marketing and brand

Of course, the ultimate goal for any company is to have its brand be top-of-mind for customers and prospects who require its products and/or services, as opposed to its competitors. Adopting a performance marketing mindset for all your marketing efforts benefits your brand by putting the emphasis on measurability and how your marketing boosts your brand awareness. In addition to frameworks for measuring brand awareness that we’ve linked to above, The Brandformer also suggests specific tools for measuring brand awareness, which you can see in our Brand awareness tracking tools article.

Conclusion

While it’s primarily seen by most as applying only to direct marketing, The Brandformer believes all marketing efforts should be considered as performance marketing. This establishes measurability of individual campaigns and measurability of how those campaigns affect your marketing ROI as the key facet of your marketing efforts. It’s all about improving marketing performance and gaining a better ROI for your marketing spend.

By establishing goals and objectives, developing well-researched and data-driven campaigns to attain them, analyzing and optimizing them, and measuring both the results of the individual campaigns and how they affect your marketing ROI, companies can use a holistic performance marketing mindset to their brand’s advantage.