March 4, 2020

minutes

By

Performance marketing is key to brand success

The first ever online advertisement hit the world in 1994, before then an advertising campaign would see a business try to boost their brand awareness via print, tv and radio channels. 

But over the past three decades or so, as the online advertising industry continues to grow, performance marketing has come to the fore. 

At Metronome, we have continued to evolve to match this trend, and advertise our clients through various channels, like email, Google Ads or social media and then provide value in the form of tracking and client support.

Performance Marketing - Performance marketing is key to brand success

As our very own Digital and Performance Marketing Lead, Brendan Lucas, explains, it’s an integral arm of our business.

“Performance marketing is the perfect harmony between business objectives and marketing. 

“It allows you to create digital marketing campaigns that not only create brand awareness, but more importantly generate a return on ad spend (ROAS) or return on investment (ROI) – something leadership teams and executives feed off.

“The level of sophistication and granularity you can achieve from click to conversion is unparalleled. It is the reason why skilled marketers in this space are so sought after by businesses.”

Steps to a successful performance marketing strategy 

Successful marketing campaigns aren’t born out of luck. There’s always a plan, or a process, that has been followed behind the scenes. 

At Metronome, we follow a simple but effective four-step process:

1: Determine the overall objective, from brand awareness to conversion. This narrows and focusses the field of marketing channels we use.

2: Ensure we have a set budget and understand what our KPIs are, the demographics we are targeting and the creative we are using. This way we can provide a transparent and comprehensive media plan or strategy for our campaign.

3: Once launched, ensure the budget is pacing correctly, brand guidelines are adhered to, and overall performance is tracked against that plan.

4: Once we have completed the previous steps, we can now optimise by tweaking targeting or shifting budget to higher converting campaigns and reducing spend on lower converting ones.

“By looking at ourselves as an extension of our clients’ businesses, we always take a step-by-step holistic approach,” adds Brendan.

“Using commercial business data with our own strategy allows us to align our objectives so we are all working towards the same goal.

“Our client Wilson Storage is a perfect example of this. We have end-to-end visibility of their sales process and CRM which allows us to track and optimise our advertising spend around driving quote submissions and phone calls, which in turn helps them generate move-ins.”

Our channels

2018 was the birth of the Google Marketing Platform, and in two short years, it has transformed the performance marketing world. 

The rebrand from Adwords to Google Ads has seemingly changed very little, so the incredible ability for marketers to reach consumers with the click of a button has remained intact.

Google Analytics - Performance marketing is key to brand success

“The Google Marketing Platform is great because it allows us to maintain everything in the one place from tagging our websites to tracking our KPIs in Tag Manager, to analysing top conversion paths in Google Analytics and setting up our Google Ads.

“With so many tools out there these days, it is easy to fall into the trap of having too many eyes in the sky as a performance marketer, so we try not to use too many. We do, however, get a lot of value from tools such as SEM Rush and Hotjar.

“SEO is a long-term game, so this allows us to complement the advertising arm of our offerings in-house with website optimisations, backlink management and keyword analysis.

“But, it all goes back to following that checklist. Marketers that establish KPIs, understand regional differences in consumers, and leverage data in their strategies, will reap the rewards of informed, impactful performance marketing.”