The world of digital marketing has undergone a radical change over the past several years. The way we spend our time and money is changing, with more and more brands focusing on the development of their own brand experiences through social media, search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), e-commerce, paid to advertise, retargeting, cross-channel marketing and other areas of digital marketing. As a digital marketing agency, we believe that creating brand experiences for our clients is the key to success. With this in mind, we have created a unique process for developing your brand experiences that include gaining insights from target audiences, designing and implementing campaigns, and monitoring performance. This process integrates social media and web design with data analysis so that you can achieve the outcomes you want.
Since SEO is one of those areas that has seen significant changes in the last few years, it is worth looking into what are some of the latest trends that marketers would need to keep an eye on.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is not just about the performance of your products but the total performance of your business and your marketing team. Performance marketing is not just about measuring page views, clicks, downloads or likes. Performance marketing is not just focusing on ROI. This article provides a broad overview of some of the key trends in performance marketing that are shaping things to come.
What are Some Performance Marketing Trends to Watch?
Performance marketing is a term that has been used to describe the specific trends in marketing that lead to increased sales, increased engagement and improved customer experience.
The best way to define the term is simply: what are the behaviours that result in higher sales, better customer experience, or a more engaged and happy business customer?
As with many other aspects of performance marketing, there’s no single definition — so it is helpful to provide some commonly agreed-upon definitions.
In our experience, there are three common definitions of performance marketing: the customer’s view of why they buy (e.g., “I want my products delivered on time”), the brand’s view of how they are perceived by their customers (“My products are trusted by people who know how to use them”), and how a company measures its own performance (e.g., “Customers who have bought from us have rated us highly on numerous occasions”). Often these three notions of performance marketing can be used interchangeably — but don’t be fooled! Just because one person uses the word “brand” in relation to their perception of their brand doesn’t mean they’re using “performance” as well!
It’s also useful to note that retailers often use different terms for the same concept. It makes sense when you think about it: if your store isn’t selling as many items as you expect, you could attribute this failure entirely to your suppliers (bargaining power) and your employees (lack of efficiency), but if instead, you attribute it solely to your inventory management system — well then your supplier might be feeling a bit smug about his product being shipped on time! In fact, most companies will want both elements covered: supplier margin and employee productivity should be managed carefully so that both positively impact both performance and bottom-line results. Performance Marketing will only work if both parties are happy with the relationship; otherwise, each party may find that they have little reason not to walk away from the relationship altogether.
Listed below are some of the top performance marketing trends in our industry.
Voice Search Optimization
Voice Search Optimization (VSEO) is here to stay. It has taken over SEO for the last few years, and voice search is becoming more and more important. People are using voice search more and more every year. And the question should be, how should brands and businesses, in general, prepare for this trend?
It’s worth noting that this type of optimization does not require any expensive or complicated tools.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is constantly evolving. Time and time again, new tools and channels come out that help marketers achieve better results. One such tool gaining popularity is marketing automation. Attracting new customers is no longer the only goal of marketers, which is why automation is gaining popularity. An email automation tool helps marketers send targeted communications to customers to engage them in a conversation, build relationships, and increase sales. But are brands leveraging email marketing effectively? And is automation the right tool to do it?
Social Media Trends
Social media trends have forever changed how we interact, communicate, and consume content. These trends have been adopted by businesses as invaluable tools to engage, inform, educate, and entertain their customers. These trends also serve as fantastic customer experience marketing tools. In 2022, social media trends will continue to evolve and evolve.
Strategic Marketing Transformation
Strategic marketing transformation (as opposed to tactical marketing transformation) is all about how marketers adopt new marketing technologies and techniques to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. The performance marketing industry is evolving rapidly, with marketers embracing everything from AI to VR, with many predicting that machine learning will completely transform how marketers do their day-to-day work.
Conclusion and Recommendations
If you’re not yet familiar with the concept of performance marketing, it is essentially the art and science of delivering a great experience to customers, no matter how long they take to get there. This post will set out some basic principles of performance marketing and also outline some key trends to watch.
While we can’t possibly cover every aspect of performance marketing in this short post, we do want to outline the following:
• The role of buyer personas vs product personas – A persona is a model — one that will help us create a customer’s “ideal” experience. By using personas, we can also identify areas where our products are weak or could be improved. Once we have an understanding of what our customers want from us, we can create products that meet their needs better than any other.
• The importance of optimizing conversion rates – The more sales you can get from your customers during their purchasing cycle, the better chance you have of performing well in future sales cycles as well. If you want to outperform your competitors, then you need to be able to achieve sales conversions very quickly (not just sales conversions).
• The need for data-driven decision making – If your decisions are based on assumptions or guesses, then they might not be as good as they could be (or at all). Instead, you should think through each decision carefully and put yourself in the shoes of your customer so that you can make a good decision by measuring (and acting on) real-world results.
• The importance of targeting – Customers aren’t only interested in their own purchases; if they are getting something from us, then they may also wish for other purchases. It is therefore important for us to understand who our audience is and what makes them tick; otherwise, it will be hard for us to target them properly and provide them with what they want.
These are just a few examples, but hopefully, these guidelines will help remind marketers that there is more than one way to run an effective marketing campaign: depending on which audience/customer/channel/product or service/app or whatever it may be, we need different tactics and approaches depending on their interests, needs and buying motivations.
Performance marketing has matured to become the fastest-growing channel in online advertising. Some of the hottest performance marketing trends to watch this year include: expanding cross-channel efforts, leveraging data insights, and continued investment in emerging channels.