Performance Marketing – Why does my business need it?

Paid Acquisition Marketing, AKA performance marketing, often forms a crucial part of the marketing strategy of a business. It’s an area that if done well, can be extremely valuable for a business to bring in leads and sales. 

If you’re a new business and you’re wondering how to get more leads and customers, read on. We’ll explain how the most successful business do Performance Marketing, and how you can too. If you’re ignoring performance marketing, don’t! It’s a huge area for a reason. Read on so I can show you why. 

In this article, we’ll cover:

  • SEM (search engine marketing) including platforms such as AdWords, Bing, and other minor paid search platforms
  • Social media advertising, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many other minor social media platforms
  • Display Advertising
  • Retargeting

The above channels can be crucial at attracting customers for your business and often contribute towards increasing your ROI.

How to get started with Performance Marketing

If you’re a newly formed business, you might be wondering how to get the word out and get customers! So, what do you need to do?

1. Learn about your business

Learn as much as you can about your business and do it fast. As a new business, you’re still in a learning phase, meaning that you will want to find out as much as possible about what works and what doesn’t. The only way to do this is to get visitors onto your site and understand how they behave. For example:

  • Average time spent on-site?
  • The average number of pages visited on the site?
  • Returning vs new users
  • Conversion rate from session to sale (or form submission, or whatever goal you have on-site)?
  • Which channels work best for conversion?
  • The average cost per acquisition?
  • What audience performs best?
  • The average cost per click on a specific channel/campaign?

And much, much more…

2. Achieve sales

Organic traffic is great and usually very high quality. This means it’s easier to draw accurate conclusions from it for future marketing strategy planning.

Organic traffic is a science and you need it for your business! So make sure you invest in SEO

Although organic traffic is great, most businesses need to invest in paid acquisition too. Google Search will always show paid ads before organic results. The higher you are the more traffic and, eventually, the more sales you will get.

So, although SEO is crucial to your success long term, don’t forget that paid search and paid acquisition, in general, will be key to increase awareness, traffic, and sales.

3) Market share

If people are searching on Google for a specific combination of keywords that describes your business and your 2 – 3 main competitors are showing up, they’re getting valuable impressions and driving traffic to their site, traffic that could be yours!

If you are not bidding on those key terms – unless you are doing an amazing job on SEO already – then you might want to consider showing up too. But just because your competitors are bidding on certain keywords, doesn’t mean that you should be too. It could be that those keywords don’t work for your competitors, they’re just not paying close enough attention.

Be warned, some keywords and phrases are very competitive. You might want to start with keywords that have a lower competition unless you want to enter a bidding war with your competitors straight away. A paid acquisition specialist will know what to do here. Remember, low hanging fruits first.

 

4) Planning ahead

Paid Advertisement will enable you to clearly define:

  • How much you want to spend on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
  • It will give you clear estimates of what you can expect in terms of traffic from what you are spending
  • It will also enable you to report on traffic, clicks and conversions with great accuracy (we’ll cover that another time – a whole blog could be written on attribution)

We could be going on and on about how great performance marketing could be for your business, but I feel we have listed enough points for you to have a think on whether it’s a good idea to hire a paid acquisition specialist.

 

What do you need to do before starting paid acquisition work?

There are a few questions that you want to make sure you can answer before starting:

Who is my target market?

My assumption is that you should have a pretty good idea of who your target market is. Otherwise you wouldn’t have founded the business in the first place.

My suggestion, however, is that you ask yourself this question once again. Sit around a table with your team, or in front of the mirror if you don’t have a team, and start asking yourself questions about your target market.

 

Questions such as:

Who are they?

How old are they?

Where do they live?

What’s their age?

What’s their job?

What social platforms do they use etc?

 

Identifying personas

Try to identify at least 2-3 main personas that you think need your product or service.

This will enable you to create a persona document that can then be used when creating targeted campaigns on various channels.

 

What is my value proposition?

This is also key – you need to figure out what is your unique selling point. What can you offer that your competitors don’t or can’t? What makes you stand out?

Sit down and start writing down whatever comes to your mind.

There are other questions, such as who are my competitors, what are their weaknesses, and what are the weaknesses and strengths of my product? Know your rivals as well as you know yourself, and you’ll find success on every front.

These answers will all feed into the creation of detailed personas and value propositions.

Personas & value propositions will form the basis of your testing plan. We will talk about the testing plan in another blog as it’s something crucial for a successful paid acquisition plan and it can be a very long topic.

 

Now it’s time to choose the channels you want to explore. 

Our suggestion is always to carefully identify the target market first for the reasons we’ve just explained. If you don’t know your target audience, then you’ll be at a loss as to how and where to proceed. From that, the whole strategy collapses.

The target market will help you determine what channels to use, but you also need to do your research.  I hear a lot of people talking about doing Instagram ads because it’s the right channel for their business. However, they don’t have anything to back up their statement. It’s not rooted in data or demonstration, it’s just an assumption. As an assumption, it’s not nearly enough to base an entire marketing campaign around. As well know, to ASSUME makes an ASS of U and ME (sorry, I had to!)

One of the most important things — just like I mentioned in the CRO article from a couple of weeks ago — is to have a strong case and hypothesis. Any proposal should be backed up by data if possible.

To be sure, sometimes “gut feelings”, hunches and gambles do have their place in marketing. Sometimes you just know something will work, not from any hard, quantifiable data but just from intuition and instinct. That can be invaluable if you really do have that talent, especially when it’s honed by experience. Such leaps of faith can potentially become game-changers.

Even so, constantly relying on rolls of the dice, however lucky you feel, will inevitably result in you rolling 1s at least once. Just as lucky guesses can make your company, wrong ones can break it. Trust your gut, but always trust your data more.

Always look before you leap into the unknown.

 

May growth find you soon…

If you would like to have a chat – click on the link below:

https://thegrowthhustlers.com/contact/

 

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Giovanni Perri

About Giovanni Perri

Giovanni is the co-founder of The Growth Hustlers. His years of experience in marketing – and growth marketing in particular – have helped many businesses find and accelerate growth using his data-driven approach.

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Testimonials

The Growth Hustlers team are a team of highly skilled cross-disciplined technical marketing experts. I’ve worked with them on multiple projects at different businesses and they always bring a level of expertise and energy that ensure the impact is rapid and significant. Specifically the value they add with Data Strategy and Marketing Automation workflows has really empowered my team to be truly data driven.

Duncan McKenna,
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The Growth Hustlers are highly skilled analytics consultants with a wide knowledge of applicable technologies and a determined attitude. They have been invaluable in helping our growth team access the data they need. After an accurate audit of our current analytics and the implementation of new views and goals the growth team can finally make decisions based on clean data enabling us to optimise paid acquisition campaigns and focus on the channels that are performing best.

Rob Imonikhe,
Co-Founder

Giovanni & his team have been absolutely great. They started by setting up our web analytics stack. We now have full visibility of activation and acquisition events on Google Analytics. This has enabled us to make data driven decisions based on the performance of our digital marketing activities. They’ve also drafted a Marketing Automation Strategy which will play a key part in reducing drop offs in our acquisition flow. Finally, they have been working on Paid Acquisition Testing on LinkedIn and Adwords. Ambie is looking forward to carry on working with them in the following months.

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The team at Growth Hustlers were instrumental in developing the inploi data infrastructure and marketing automation engine. Marketplace liquidity and user engagement are critical to the success of any product seeking to efficiently match supply and demand. With the help of The Growth Hustlers we were able to develop a complex growth stack that has enabled us to rapidly scale our marketplace without having to increase the size of our team or compromise our user experience. Technical know-how and deliverables aside, they are a great bunch to work with!

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The Growth Hustlers are a great team of talented growth marketers. They helped us deploy a solid analytics framework which enabled us to easily distinguish marketing efforts between our App and our Website. Their team added great value across CRO and paid acquisition testing, thanks to very well structured experimentation roadmaps. We were also very impressed with their workshop skills. In short, the learnings acquired through their data focused experimentation helped us improve our App and Website flows.

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