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Performance marketing: 5 tips and trends to propel your strategic plans

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Performance marketing is a major focus for driving lower funnel goals to propel business forward. Here’s a quick breakdown of the key trends and what they mean for successful marketing strategies.

Think first-party data, well, first.

Marketers realize that the best source of data is their own. So, whether you’re looking to cross-sell products, create loyalty for your brand or build look-alike pools for marketing, collecting first-party data on your customers and targeting consumers will no longer be a nice-to-have, but rather a need-to-do. Retailers, for example, are already looking at ways to capture more data at point-of-purchase or upon entry to locations as part of these first-party data sets.

Segmenting the data you collect will also be key for successfully developing and reaching out with personalized messages. Knowing what a user has purchased, signed up for, or requested more information on should help define them as a target and allow you to build a stronger relationship with them.

Make it personal.

Personalized experiences aren’t just becoming the norm. Consumers will come to expect that messaging aligns with their specific wants and needs. So, consider improving the purchase experience on site by collecting data and building one-to-one informed suggestions of what shoppers want to see next and where they are in the buying cycle.

As part of this move, email marketing will be necessary. Build out strategies to test personalized emails to measure performance and acquisition and define parameters like frequency and messaging.

Listen to the podcast (data).

Thanks, in part, to quarantining during the pandemic, consumption of podcasts surged. And so did ROI. A recent survey by Podsights, an attribution company, found that podcast campaigns delivered an average return of $2.42 on ad spend.

Since this trend is likely to continue, marketers must create strategies that will leverage advertising opportunities with this type of media and integrate them into marketing strategies to optimize results.

Fall head over heels with OTT.

OTT is also a trend worth watching. Since marketers are now able to attribute engagement, leads, and sales from OTT ads, it is likely to put pressure on the connected TV space. So, developing a strategy that not only looks at awareness, but also accounts for lower funnel goals will be key for building out OTT marketing plans as well as traditional TV strategies. 

Move forward with agile content marketing.

With our ever-increasing digital world, the need for agile content marketing is becoming greater. The ability to get messaging in market in a timely manner that not only aligns with customer wants and needs but is also in sync with the current environment is key. Brands need to do a better job of anticipating the conversation and getting messaging in market on a proactive, not reactive, basis.  

This means:

Build an increased presence on social media. Create shorter, readily consumable content that resonates with target audiences to help fill the marketing funnel and create more touch points with core audience targets.

Test different types of content to see which ones drive greatest engagement. Leveraging tech to get the right content in front of the right individuals quickly and efficiently will help drive lower funnel goals.

Optimize media plans for multi-channel attribution.
Optimizing media to follow either a last-click or last-touch model continues to be the norm. Unfortunately, that approach only assigns credit to the final channel that drove the conversion. It does not account for all the others that had a hand in getting consumer to that point. So, although it can drive slightly higher conversion rates in the short-term, it will eliminate the pool of prospects and limit success over the long term.

Instead, leveraging a tech-based attribution solution that allows for marketing mix modeling will be uber important moving forward. Despite the added cost and time, this approach allows for the most concrete picture of what is driving sales and how each portion of the marketing funnel is working together. Specifically, it:

  • allows for a much more complete picture of what is driving efficiencies and provides insight into economic conditions, competitors and anything that could be influencing consumer behavior.
  • provides a clearer picture into things like profitability and LTV, allowing for optimization around products and places that are driving highest engagement and profit.
  • is key for clients with several marketing channels, online and physical locations, and a diverse selection of products.

For more insights on how you can leverage performance marketing for more strategic planning, contact Tommy Shaw at tom.shaw@adamsknight.com.

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