Today, the internet has transformed how people locate and buy products. Consumers buy more from online stores because they can browse from their smartphones. They can also find recommendations online, pay for their products using mobile apps and receive them at their doorstep. This change has completely altered how brands promote and sell their products and services. The global pandemic contributed to the explosion of online shopping. This article will inform you more about how to use performance marketing to increase sales.
Companies are using omnichannel marketing to engage with loyal customers and reach more. To build their customer base and grow sales, brands have switched to affiliate marketing, merchandise marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, and much more. The increased data transparency is helping brands, and their marketers manage their campaigns and achieve better results.
Performance Marketing Explained
Today, companies want to pay for the results that advertising platforms and marketing companies achieve after running their online campaigns. Brands want to pay for the actions such as clicks, leads, conversions, or sales. Use performance marketing to increase sales as this will help you grow your business. Previously, companies paid an upfront fee to cater for ad space irrespective of the outcome. For instance, a fashion brand would advertise its products through print and television because of their potential to reach a wider audience. That meant companies spent thousands of dollars in fashion marketing in traditional media outlets without a single result in sight.
However, the strategy with performance marketing is different because businesses pay advertisers after achieving an agreed business objective, i.e., conversation, sales, or transaction. Therefore, performance marketing is a form of digital marketing where advertisers place ads on behalf of companies on performance marketing channels such as search engines, social media, embedded web content, videos, and more. Using performance marketing to increase sales will give your business a boost & will help you build a strong online presence. Brands pay these marketing service providers when their business objective is achieved. Thus, the advertiser must prepare a good marketing strategy to boost ad performance measured by impressions, clicks, shares, or sales. Performance marketing is measured using the following metrics:
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
- Pay Per Lead (PPL)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Cost Per Action (CPA)
- Lifetime Value (LTV)
Why Performance Marketing Will Grow Your Sales?
1. Easily Trackable Performance
In performance marketing, marketers create and launch campaigns to track and measure results. They rely on different data analytics tools to track performance campaigns and optimize them in order to get better results. Use performance marketing to increase sales and track your performance as this will enable you to analyse your mistakes and take necessary actions. For instance, a fashion brand can see the click-to-consume path of all buyers and other metrics. This helps it identify where to focus more in its fashion marketing campaigns, and in terms of putting more money and the channels with better results. Read about how to track your website performance effectively in our blog LEARN THE BASICS OF WEB ANALYTICS: USE FREE ONLINE TOOLS to have an in-depth understanding of how you can improve your business by tracking your performance.
2. Better Brand Awareness
Marketing agencies and affiliates have an already established audience. Thus, performance marketing allows your brand to reach a new wider audience, which increases your website traffic, leads, and sales.
3. Result Focused
Return on investment (ROI) is an important element in performance marketing. The end of launching a marketing campaign is to improve performance. Achieve your organisational goal by using performance marketing to increase sales. That explains why such campaigns continually move towards better results, such as more leads and sales.
4. Low Risk
Launching a performance-oriented fashion marketing campaign puts your brand in a better position than when you use traditional media outlets. Marketers track results at every stage, optimize performance, and reduce potential risks whenever necessary.
Further, brands pay affiliates after the desired action happens. Therefore, the Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is much lower while its ROI is higher. This allows you to focus on the best-performing channels, and test new ones because you pay based on the agreed results. Using performance marketing will not only help you grow your business but will also reduce your risk.
The Difference Between Performance Marketing and Other Types of Marketing
1. Affiliate Marketing
In affiliate marketing, affiliates promote a company’s products and earn a commission when a purchase is made through an affiliate link on their website. On the other hand, in performance-based fashion marketing, a marketing agency earns when the desired result is achieved. Using performance marketing to increase sales is similar to affiliate marketing only. Therefore, affiliate marketing is one type of performance marketing, and the new technologies have improved how this partnership is done, or results are tracked. Read our blog on AFFILIATE MARKETING COMPANIES: HOW DO THEY WORK? to understand the functioning of affiliate marketing companies.
2. Merchandise Marketing
Merchandise marketing presents products directly to where customers are likely to buy. Digital merchandising involves the use of photos, strong product descriptions, and product recommendations to show off your product’s appeal. In merchandise marketing, marketing agencies position your products where customers can easily see them, click and buy them without considering other online options.
Similarly, in performance marketing, marketers place your products in channels where your target audience is to increase exposure and entice them to click and buy. Performance-linked fashion marketing and merchandise marketing leverage social media to create brand awareness and generate sales. The use of performance marketing to increase sales is one of the most effective ways to grow your business.
3. Influencer Marketing
The rise of social media, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, has made influencer marketing a popular topic. Brands and marketers use online personalities in their industry to influence their target audience’s purchasing decisions. Read our blog on BEST ONLINE INFLUENCER MARKETING PLATFORMS AVAILABLE to learn more about the best platforms for influencer marketing.
Most importantly, you need to have impactful influencer marketing strategies to produce excellent results. Bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and online personalities are paid to increase brand and product awareness, and exposure in their niche audience. Use performance marketing to increase sales if you want to create brand awareness. A content creator is paid for performance marketing when a specific action is achieved, thus an excellent way to drive customer acquisition at a reduced cost.
Build Your Performance Marketing Strategy to Drive Sales
1. Establish Campaign Goals
What do you want your campaign to achieve? Is it to drive website traffic, engagement, sales, lead generation, or brand awareness? Use performance marketing to increase sales and achieve your goals. There is no universal way to do performance marketing because it has several channels and campaigns. Even so, you can build a great performance marketing strategy for any audience and use it to run your campaigns toward success. For instance, a fashion brand may launch a fashion marketing campaign to improve its online-based sales through creative media. Digital marketing agencies will ask you to list down your goals before they set up campaigns or create ads that meet those specific goals. You can meet specific goals by using performance marketing to increase sales.
2. Select a Digital Channel(s)
Select the channel where you want your ads to run. Diversifying the channels you use is better than focusing on a single channel. This is mainly because it increases the chances of success. You can use native advertising, affiliate marketing, merchandise marketing, or social media platforms. In fashion marketing, social media platforms offer better outcomes than affiliate marketing. You can diversify on social media networks to expose your products to a wider audience.
3. Create the Campaign
Marketing agencies do a lot of work when creating performance marketing. They have to identify the target audience, their desires, and their pain points, and craft ads that address those needs, and attract their attention. Advertisers want to create the best ad headlines and images and schedule them. They consider the size of the ad, and images acceptable depending on the channel they want to run it on. Marketers consider specific demographics and geographic areas when launching a fashion marketing campaign. To use performance marketing to increase sales you must create an engaging campaign and boost your business.
4. Measure the Campaign
The campaign will start to generate data when it’s up and running. Marketers can optimize each campaign across multiple channels, track the analytics and metrics, and allocate ad funds based on performance. Performance marketing campaigns help companies to identify best-performing channels, target audiences, grow sales, and increase return on investment. Read our blog on WHICH STRATEGY FOR DIGITAL MARKETING HAS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)? to learn more about how you can increase your ROI.
5. Handle Potential Pitfalls
Merchandise marketing, fashion marketing, influencer marketing, and content marketing have potential pitfalls and challenges. Similarly, performance marketing has challenges such as click fraud, bot traffic, placement transparency, publisher fraud, brand safety, privacy regulations, and compliance-related issues. To use performance marketing to increase sales you must know how to overcome the challenges associated with it. Marketers want to commit their resources to highly-performing platforms and those without data privacy and brand safety issues when running fashion marketing campaigns.
Top Performance Marketing Channels
1. Banner (Display) Ads
Advertising companies put their clients’ ads on top performance channels and get paid based on how the ad performs. Brands are lately using a lot of display ads. But people use ad blockers that render banner ads ineffective. You can find these ads on the top or bottom of a news web page or the side of a Facebook newsfeed. Display ads with engaging graphic design, interactive content, and videos are highly successful. You must know about all the channels for using performance marketing to increase sales.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is designed to educate users. This marketing type is less costly than outbound marketing but generates three times more leads. Companies generate high-quality content in the form of blog posts, e-books, case studies, and more, then place a link back to their products.
3. Social Media
Brands use social media marketing to reach a large audience and drive traffic to their website. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer an extensive list of services to help marketers reach new customers. Social media platforms are excellent channels for online merchandise marketing or fashion marketing. To build your brand name in the market use performance marketing to increase sales.
4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Users search for brands and their products or services via search engines. Therefore optimizing your website for SEM can drive traffic, conversions, and sales. Performance marketers focus on cost-per-click (CPC) when using paid advertising or SEO-optimized pages and content marketing for organic SEM.
5. Native Advertising
This type of ad focuses on the natural appearance of a site or web page to promote sponsored content. Such types of ads are common on eCommerce sites such as Facebook Marketplace. These ads are effective because they allow sponsored content to live seamlessly with different types of organic content.
Today, companies can use multiple types of marketing to promote their brand and products. They include influencer marketing, merchandise marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, etc. Performance marketing has a higher impact than the others because it allows brands to measure performance against their goals, and pay only for what was achieved. It’s a transparent form of advertising where the return on investment (ROI) takes center stage. Using performance marketing to increase sales is the most effective & economical way to grow your business.
Performance marketing has become more sophisticated over time. It enables advertisers to track, measure, and optimize their campaigns for their client’s ROI. Brands in the fashion industry can now create performance-based fashion marketing campaigns to create brand awareness and improve sales. This type of marketing is also applicable in other industries. So jump into performance marketing and grow your sales.
