Performance marketing is here to stay. In fact, we believe strongly that all marketing should be measured on performance. As the industry moves toward online and mobile, there’s a new opportunity for companies to grow their audience, tighten processes and engage customers through channels such as performance marketing (formerly known as affiliate marketing). If you’re new to performance marketing, it’s an extension of digital marketing that leans on valuable partnerships with publishers to boost traffic, brand recognition and overall revenue. The key is forming relationships with high-performing publishers in an active network that work hard to drive traffic to your offering.
Our Digital Marketing Services team has written a lot about performance marketing over the years. We polled our top marketers to identify posts that have gotten a positive response from readers. Read on for our most popular ones. Who knows – you may learn a few tips that you can apply to your digital strategy.
Recruit
5 Ways to Build Publisher Relationships for Success
In order for your program to become successful, you need to communicate, diversify and differentiate yourself with publishers. Deliver a service, not just a tracking platform. Ensure that you’re following basic best practices, and allow room for your publishers’ changing needs. Here are five tactics from our Senior Performance Marketing Manager that will move you in the right direction toward a successful performance marketing program.
Think Like a Performance Marketer: Three Keys to Making More Money
Marketing with publishers poses unique challenges to your digital strategy. Unlike your other channels, your success is only as strong as your relationships with individual publishers. But once you treat your publishers as partners and as real people, you can harness their efforts to do what they do best. Read on to learn how to foster mutually beneficial relations and maximize profitability.
Manage:
Performance Marketing 101 Series
In this four-part series, we explore an effective path for building a successful performance marketing website, which involves identifying your domain and host, deploying SEO tactics, driving traffic and facilitating conversions, and turning one-time visitors into lifetime customers. This multi-step playbook can help you set reasonable goals and effectively achieve them.
- Part 1 – Performance Marketing for Beginners
- Part 2 – SEO Tactics
- Part 3 – Driving Traffic
- Part 4 – Converting Customers
Three Ways to Leverage Social Media
Building a solid presence on social media is a gradual process. You must select the appropriate channels and build a genuine following there. And you should stick to a disciplined posting strategy that deepens your influence as you promote your products or services. Through a steady and disciplined approach and being responsive to metrics, you will establish a foothold that will burnish your brand online, leading to a more loyal following and more commissions.
Analyze:
3 Geeky Habits of Successful Performance Marketing Managers
Performance marketing management is a long game. There’s always one more publisher to email, one more link to send, and of course one more report to create. If it seems like you’re making spreadsheets for spreadsheet’s sake, then it’s time to start looking at meaningful data that inspires you to take action. Here, we illustrate how to tell a story with your performance marketing data in a way that will grow your program and convey the efficacy of your work to clients, bosses, executives, and anyone else who needs convincing.
Keystone
Companies must weave in new technologies and adapt to changing advertising patterns and customer engagement habits in order to maximize sales and customer retention. Performance marketing is an effective digital channel with high ROI. But the bottom line is that performance optimization is the way you can ultimately get the most out of interactions with prospects as performance marketing is very much about metrics and data.
One final thought: Our Digital Marketing Services team is working on a new offering that will help our clients form stronger relationships with valuable publishers that will deliver top-line revenue. Stay tuned – we’ll reveal details on July 25.
Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer and Andrea Bailiff-Gush is the product marketing manager for cleverbridge.
