Robust Performance marketing strategy for ecommerce business

Introduction:

Global marketing investment is set to grow around 30% by 2025. This means that the investment value will increase by almost £3.5 trillion by that time. In 2021, performance marketing saw the highest growth, indicating that businesses around the world know of its importance. But what is performance marketing? If you are an entrepreneur looking to invest more in your ecommerce company’s digital marketing needs, this is an avenue you must pursue. This write-up will provide all the necessary details about this form of marketing, which has gained immense popularity in the last few years.

Understanding the basics of performance marketing

Your ecommerce business has some specific goals in mind when investing in an online marketing campaign. Under standard digital marketing contracts, your firm has to bear the cost of advertising regardless of whether these goals are met. However, when you opt for performance marketing, that’s not the case.

In performance marketing, your company will only pay the marketers when you meet a particular goal. The target or goal can be anything from a click to a sale. Generally, these goals are predefined. Digital marketing companies have to create a campaign around these targets for the best results.

The particular channel you use for performance marketing plays a significant role in deciding whether your ad will reach its desired customers. For example, Google can help you reach people through search results.

On the other hand, a platform like Facebook, allows your business to impact thousands of social media users active every day. Regardless of the channel you pick though, the platforms themselves choose which ads to display and to whom.

The following are some factors that determine how frequently and effectively your business’s ads will appear on these platforms –

• Picking a target audience – As an advertiser, you must pick the section of the audience to whom you are pitching an ad. Platforms like Facebook and Google ensure to show these ads to the relevant people if the target audience is clearly outlined.
• Actual sales – As stated previously, performance marketers often get paid based on the sales arising from their ads. Therefore, channels will display your ad more frequently if the conversion rate is high, and vice versa.
• Quality – Every channel, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, places immense importance on the quality of your ad. If for some reason, your ad receives poor ratings from most people, the channels will limit its exposure.

If you think about it, performance marketing is almost like monitoring stock market performance. The value of your marketing campaign can rise or fall every day, based on the activities surrounding it.

But, simply knowing how this form of marketing works is not enough. As the owner of an ecommerce business, you should know the various strategies to employ to achieve the desired outcome.

Owing to the overall scale of implementing healthcare marketing strategies, doing everything yourself might not be the best option. Reputed agencies specializing in the affair can build brilliant promotional, advertisement and marketing campaigns aligned with your business’s goal.

Listed below are a few of the areas where your marketers should focus

1. Set your goals and choose the best type of performance marketing

The process starts off with your company picking the goal it wants to achieve with a particular ad. Do you want impressions or do you desire clicks? Or perhaps, you want the ad to generate leads? Here are the options available to you –  

• Cost per impression – In the digital marketing world, impressions are nothing but the number of times your advertisement is viewed by the public. Now, suppose you decide to pay the marketer for every 1000 impressions. One particular ad achieves 5000 impressions. So you would need to pay the agency five times the agreed-upon base rate.
• Cost per sale – As the name suggests, this is a form of performance marketing where the target is a sale. However, this sale must be a direct result of the ad in question.
• Cost per click – Again, the name makes it clear what the underlying goal is. You pay advertisers based on the number of times people click on your ad, thereby driving more traffic to your ecommerce platform.
• Cost per lead – In the online business space, a lead is when people sign up for something related to the advertiser. This can be anything from a webinar to an email newsletter.
• Cost per acquisition – In this form, advertisers pay every time a customer completes a certain activity. One example of CPA can be the marketer receiving payment every time a customer provides their contact details through the ad.

However, it can be tricky to understand which of these your business needs at a given time. That’s where professional digital marketing services, such as Upthrust, come into the picture. Expert marketers at Upthrust design performance marketing solutions, which are perfectly tailored to your brand. Book a consultation call today to get extensive details!

2. Outline your value propositions

There is no dearth of competitors out there selling the same products or services you do. Over 24,000 new ecommerce businesses started in the UK in 2021 alone. With so many options, why should customers come to your online storefront? You cannot just say that your ecommerce platform offers the best products.

Instead, let your customers know how products on your catalogue will address particular problems and improve their lives. Value props give your products the appeal that inspires customers to buy them. Fortunately, this is something that can be showcased using ads in performance marketing.

3. Diversify which channels you choose

It is very easy to become overly reliant on just one channel for your performance marketing needs. For instance, you may think that Facebook provides the best option to reach the maximum number of people. However, you should not avoid other such avenues, including Instagram ads, Tik Tok, etc.

Remember that acquiring customers for your business is a volatile process. Relying on just one channel for the same can be detrimental in the long run.    

4. Utilizing dynamic remarketing

Dynamic remarketing is easy to understand with the following example – A customer to your ecommerce site adds a product to his cart but does not complete the purchase. Now, through performance marketing, you can target that person with ads for the same or similar products. This is a smart strategy to follow because the customer has already shown interest in that specific product. So, it is more than likely that he will return to actually purchase it.

To make the most of it, you should follow these practices –

• Set a cap for the number of times a customer sees the same ads. Seeing the same ad too frequently can get irritating and actually harm your chances of conversion.

Make sure that the ad includes a reason why the customer should revisit and reconsider buying a product. This could be a discount or some other offer on the said product, which was not available before.

5. Use Amazon’s platform for performance marketing insights

Even if you run an ecommerce website, you should consider listing some of your products on Amazon. There is no denying that no ecommerce brand is as powerful as Amazon is today. As a seller, you can pay Amazon to be listed at the top of relevant searches. With the Sponsored Brands program, you can also ensure that your company’s products always stay at the top of the results.

In terms of performance marketing metrics, Amazon offers the immensely useful Advertising cost of sale (ACoS). This is nothing but an insight into your brand’s profitability after spending for ads on the platform. The ACoS figure is reached by dividing the ad expenses on Amazon divided by the total sales value.

6. Unlock the full potential of visual search

If you do not know what visual search is, you should find out about it immediately. It is the ability for people to take out their smartphone cameras, click a picture of an item and search for it on the internet. Suppose a customer likes a bag someone is carrying and simply looks for an exact match through a visual search. If you utilise this strategy perfectly, your ecommerce website will come up in the search results.

However, to ensure performance marketing through visual searches, businesses must address the labelling and organisational aspects. In this case, if the bag the customer is looking for is available on your site but is not labelled properly, it will not show up. Proper keyword usage and organisation into categories are crucial here.

Conclusion

Performance marketing allows brands like yours to engage in smart advertising campaigns without going over your budget. It is a creative way to diversify your target customers and enhance your brand’s overall reach. Remember that the future of digital marketing is looking brighter with every passing day. Therefore, you have to update your marketing efforts too.

Mastering the various performance-related marketing strategies is far from simple. Thankfully, with Upthrust’s expert digital marketing services, you don’t need to. From influencer marketing to YouTube shopping, experts at Upthrust are perfectly equipped to take advantage of the most trending marketing avenues. To know more, book a consultation call today!

‍

“Performance marketing is a form of digital marketing in which the advertiser only pays the marketers when a specific goal is achieved. The goal can be anything from a click to a sale, and the channels for performance marketing can include search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook..”

‍