Performance Marketing: How it Can Improve Your Brand

In February, Owen Hewitson helped to ease the concerns of businesses who believed that

performance marketing would affect their ability to improve brand image and reputation. His blog post on maintaining a positive brand image while engaging in performance marketing strategies reveals that it is possible, and even advisable, to trust affiliates with your products and services. In exchange for this act of trust, businesses can use performance marketing to generate widespread brand recognition and positive brand reputation.

Paying After Performance Results are Shown

Performance marketing involves paying affiliates based on their actual performance and the performance of paying customers. This is also known as CPA or cost per action. With performance marketing, affiliates do not get a kickback simply for posting your products and ads on the website. Affiliates are only paid when customer activity reveals high quality performance on the part of the affiliate.

Click and Impression Performance

The most common type of performance marketing involves kickbacks for affiliates based on the number of clicks or impressions for customers. With this type of marketing, an affiliate posts your advertisement on his or her website. Each time a customer clicks on the ad, you pay the affiliate a small sum. Because only a small percentage of clicks actually turn into sales, the amount paid per click is usually only a couple cents. However, businesses that employ this type of performance marketing strategy are not necessarily interested in immediate sales. Instead, the value of the clicked ads is in the development of brand image. Each time a consumer clicks an ad, he or she is exposed to your brand, your company, your products, and your services. This most basic type of performance marketing can help your business get the word out of its own existence.

Registration Performance

Registration performance marketing is a form of marketing where affiliates receive payment when customers fill out registration information. You will be paying for the generation of leads for your brand and products or services. Your affiliates will host registration forms on their website and encourage consumers to provide you with personal information. You can then use this information to contact leads and transform them into customers.

Revenue Performance

Some businesses set up performance rewards that only involve customer revenue. These are the most exclusive performance marketing strategies on the web. Affiliates who partner with you in revenue performance marketing will only receive payment when a customer follows a link and makes a purchase. It can be difficult, however, to find affiliates who are willing to engage in this type of performance marketing on your behalf. Affiliates know that their kickback will be much lower when it is dependent on customer purchases. It may be effective for you to offer this as an additional incentive alongside other types of performance kickbacks. This will encourage affiliates to partner with you while simultaneously encouraging them to place your ads in prominent places on their sites.

Will You Lose Brand Control?

Many businesses are concerned about performance marketing. It can be difficult to give control of your products and brand image over to strangers and their various websites. Companies wonder whether or not they will lose the ability to effectively manage their brand’s image if they allow affiliates to host products and links on their own websites. In one sense, this is the case. It can be difficult to manage where your affiliate marketers or performance marketers place the information that links to your webpage. You may see your products and services pop up on websites that have poor reputations. This can be disconcerting, especially if you have worked hard to maintain a positive brand image and create a trusting relationship with your customers.

As with any marketing strategy, it is crucial to weigh the bad with the good when discussing performance marketing. Every strategy has pros and cons. In the case of performance marketing, however, the pros far outweigh the cons, and there are things that a company can do to eliminate the risks of performance marketing.

First, consider the positives: performance marketing is an expensive way to market your brand image, products and services. Because you do not pay for marketing unless it proves effective, you aren’t wasting your marketing dollars on campaigns that do nothing for your brand. Also, performance marketing has the potential to spread your brand’s image much further and much faster than you could accomplish alone. If consumers are interested in your products or services, but you don’t have a wide enough audience to show the consumer population that your brand exists, performance marketing can help draw customers to your site.

Obviously, there are risks associated with performance marketing. However, you can reduce these risks by choosing your affiliate marketers carefully. Examine websites and social media accounts where your links will be hosted. If you don’t like the content that is posted on those sites, don’t allow those individuals to partner with you in performance marketing. Another thing you can do to make performance marketing an effective brand booster is to ensure that your website is beautifully and logically designed. Even if a consumer stumbles upon your products from a poor-quality website, by linking to your well-designed site the customer will be satisfied and impressed.

Bottom Line: Will it Help You?

Like all business owners, you probably want to hear the bottom line. So, does performance marketing really work? Will it help you? Will it be good for promoting your brand? The answer is “yes.” When you use effective performance marketing strategies, you pay for the performance of your ads and not the publication of your ads. This will help you save money on marketing. It will also help you evaluate what types of marketing strategies are and aren’t working. If your affiliates are posting advertisements but they aren’t generating any performance venue, you might have an indication that your ads are not effective.

Performance marketing is a great way to share your brand’s image with a larger population. There is risk involved, but this risk can be managed, reduced, and even eliminated.