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Bounce Back From Lockdown With Performance Marketing

Author Jack

August 14, 2020

Tags

Featured, Lead Generation

With lockdown easing, many brands are looking to reopen and resume business operations once again. But make no mistake, this isn’t business as usual. The ‘new normal’ will be here to stay for the foreseeable and, with further uncertainty on the horizon, many brands are reassessing their budgets. This means your marketing budget will have to step-up with significant performance and returns – doing more with less, so to speak. An effective way to achieve this is through performance marketing.

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing (also known as performance-based marketing) is a comprehensive term that refers to many types of online marketing and advertising campaigns. It focuses on improving a specific action, like a customer clicking on a piece of content, filling in a lead-gen form, or purchasing (or committing to a sale in B2B). But the crux of it lies in paying for performance. When someone completes a specific action, then a brand pays – meaning results are guaranteed.

Different performance marketing channels

Generally speaking, if a digital marketing channel has an attributable conversion event then it falls under the performance marketing category. This means that native advertising, search engine marketing (like Google Ads), social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), affiliate marketing and display advertising all count as performance marketing.

The perks of performance marketing

With performance marketing, you only pay based on how often your advert is viewed, clicked, generates a lead, or results in a sale – there’s no payout from you until the result is achieved. It’s pay-per-results, and that’s really attractive in today’s economic climate. After all, it’s a lot easier to get budget sign-off when returns for each pound are guaranteed. This, in turn, makes it easier to launch campaigns more quickly, with less hoops to jump through and fewer stakeholders to get on-board.

Of course, there’s also less risk. That’s why more brands are turning to specialised performance marketing agencies to drive online growth in the short and long-term. At Soap Leads, for example, you will only pay for a valid and quality lead, not just a page view or a click.

You also get a real-time measurement of your return on investment (ROI). This makes your marketing completely accountable and trackable, which makes it easier to justify spend with stakeholders (particularly your finance team). It will also make your marketing super slick and effective, because you can tell what campaigns are most successful and then scale these out for even higher ROI.

This is incredibly powerful. In the past, attribution was nigh on impossible, but with performance marketing, you can finally make informed decisions based on what campaigns and channels are likely to offer the best returns. You can measure everything from brand reach to conversion rate down to a single ad.

Impressive results

That’s why performance marketing continuously delivers. Organisations that use performance marketing techniques enjoy returns of, on average, $12 for every $1 spent.

No longer is marketing, advertising, and branding solely dependent on the size of your budget. With performance marketing, you can continuously iterate and tweak your campaigns, optimising your spend to deliver the best bang for your buck. The power of marketing is brought back into your hands and you can scale as high as your in-house capacity will allow.

An agency gives you the edge

So, with these benefits in mind, why would you turn to a specialist performance marketing agency? Some perks will come from the very nature of performance marketing itself (having guaranteed results, for example). However, a specialist agency will also provide you with extensive experience in digital marketing and the online world, cutting-edge technology, data-driven reporting, and expert advice.

When you work with a performance marketing agency, you gain the benefits of a broadly well-accomplished team who will clearly track your spend and results, and advise on the best course of action based on this. They’ll help you communicate the value of different campaigns, using data, to your stakeholders. Plus, they’ll continuously work to refine your campaigns and drive incredible results.

Performance marketing agencies also have a wealth of technologies at their fingertips, that will help you better analyse the effectiveness of your campaigns. Such technology will inform your future campaigns, helping you to knit your data together to fully understand your customers and their buying journey.

How to pick a performance marketing agency

Not all agencies are made equal, so to pick the right agency, you need to look out for a few things:

  • Multi-channel experience: Choose a team that has a holistic background in marketing strategy and performance – who understand that different marketing channels don’t operate in silos. An agency that can create campaigns that complement existing marketing campaigns, generate valid, high-quality leads and who can assess how every performance marketing channel is functioning (and influenced by each other).
  • Strategic: Look for an agency that will go beyond running your campaigns day-to-day. One that will think beyond daily execution to identify the opportunities to take your brand (and results) further – and generate more leads for your pipeline.
  • Brand protective: Your agency shouldn’t cut corners with your brand to get quick results. Our lead generation experts work to fully understand your brand and target audience, then align their lead generation efforts to only provide you with relevant leads.
  • Adaptable and committed: Consider the agency’s responsiveness and communication style – and how much they adapt to you and working with your team. Ideally, you want an agency that will work hand-in-glove with your in-house teams, who will inform and collaborate around your performance marketing strategy.

Again, make sure the agency truly understands your brand, your customers and your product(s) or service(s), to effectively drive the best performance marketing results.

Time to refresh your marketing

Now is an opportune time to refresh your marketing efforts and create campaigns that drive prospects into your pipeline and create tangible results for your bottom-line. With performance marketing, and the right lead generation agency as your partner, you can achieve lasting results that far surpass your previous efforts.

Performance marketing is the ideal solution for today’s turbulent times, ensuring your brand remains front-and-centre and moving forward.

To learn more about lead generation and how our team can support you, contact us now.

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Your Questions. Answered.

It involves a process of targeting, attracting and capturing potential leads that can be converted into customers. For example, inbound marketing techniques are used to attract a potential lead to content about your business services, where they’re encouraged to visit a landing page, designed to capture their information. By providing this information, a lead is created that can be followed up.

Leads can be generated via devices that potential customers often use and on platforms they frequent. We aim to generate leads from digital devices such as smartphone and PC, and on many platforms such as email, national news sites and social media channels.

There are many ways to generate leads. At Soap Leads, we use a variety of tried-and-tested methods. This includes creating inbound marketing strategies, PPC adverts and automated email workflows, and using LiveChat to respond to customers’ queries.

It’s crucial to follow-up a lead before it goes cold. At Soap Leads, we work hard to pass on generated leads as quickly as possible. Our lead scoring systems also ensure strongest leads are prioritised above others.

An MQL is a lead that has engaged with your marketing team’s efforts, such as by reading a content asset or filling out a form for an offer on a landing page. They are interested but aren’t yet ready to be followed-up, such as by a sales call.

You can use these to measure your lead generation efforts to know how well they are working. This involves measuring a customer’s journey through the sales funnel to see, for instance, where they might lose interest.

There are many metrics that can be used to measure different stages of the lead generation process. Examples include, measuring the conversion of the enquiry through to the MQL, the MQL to the sales accepted lead (SAL), and the SAL to the sales qualified lead (SQL).

This is where you build a campaign around an element of your business as a way to generate leads. For example, a service or a business value, a product or its features. But when doing this, it’s important to focus on engagement and meeting your customers’ needs.

This is about generating leads who are your most potential customers. To achieve this at Soap Leads, we use methods that target, engage and nurture those people, while filtering out the weaker, uninterested leads who are less likely to convert.

It’s difficult to go straight from creating a lead to customer conversion. This is where lead nurturing comes in. It’s focussed on developing relationships with your leads, building trust, and nurturing them so they successfully move through the sales funnel and convert.

AI technology is important because it helps a business generate more leads. It can do this in many ways, such as by streamlining processes, filtering out poor leads, and using marketing messages to target specific, potential customers.

These tools help you manage your leads as efficiently and effectively as possible. For instance, they allow a sales team to know which leads to follow up, prioritise, or ignore. They also help speed up and improve the process of reporting and monitoring your leads.

Yes, we do. There are often leads that show signs they are about to convert, so they need to be followed up immediately. At Soap Leads, we use real-time delivery methods, so warm leads can be passed on to your sales team and pursued right away.