What Is Performance Marketing: A Definition
Performance marketing is a paid online campaign that triggers ads on platforms to receive measurable user transactions or engagement. It is meant to expand reach, acquire new customers, and retain existing ones.
How it works: performance marketing managers place ads on a platform or channel and pay according to how the ad performs. The affiliates or platforms are only paid when there is a desired action. Depending on the goal, it can generate leads, drive sales, or increase engagement.
Here are the different ways you can measure performance marketing:
Cost-per-Impression (CPM)
Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA)
Performance Marketing Channels
A good performance marketing manager must be able to create and place ads across all channels. They must discern which channels to prioritize according to your brand and goals.
Below are the different performance marketing channels they should be extremely familiar with:
Social media
Social media is often used to build brand awareness, drive more site traffic, and boost conversions. However, the organic reach can only go so much, so it’s often part of a digital marketing strategy to have sponsored content targeted to the right demographic.
Content marketing
Performance marketing managers must know how to advertise content relevant to both the brand and the audience without being hardsell. Content marketing aims to educate and bring value to your potential consumers through content, which may then lead to conversions.
Native advertising
Performance marketing managers must be highly familiar with high-traffic platforms and websites relevant to your site. They must know how to make sponsored content appear natural on a web place.
Search engine marketing
SEM is also sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing; it places sponsored ads on top of the search engine results pages.
Mobile ads
With consumers accessing the Internet more and more on mobile, it’s imperative for performance marketing managers to know how to create high-quality mobile advertisements. Some of this may differ from web pages, as you can create ads specifically for mobile apps or messaging platforms.
Display / banner ads
One of the oldest online advertising tactics, display ads are the advertisements you see on the side or top of a web page or social media Home page. However, performance marketing managers should be able to discern whether this is still worth pursuing for your brand, especially with the emergence of ad blockers.
Performance Marketing Platforms
Running marketing campaigns across multiple media channels may be tricky to track. Performance marketing platforms provide you with quick, accurate data for each driven action or engagement so your organization can determine the ROI of your campaigns.
Performance marketing managers must be able to pick the right platform for your business goals and strategies as these platforms may help them analyze performance via leads, conversions, clicks, and any measurable action, and more importantly, correctly attribute these measures to their specific performance marketing campaigns.
Here are a few performance marketing platforms to keep in mind:
Performance Marketing Manager Salary
At the time of writing, Glassdoor indicates that the likely annual salary of performance marketing managers in the US ranges from $76,000 to US$123,000.