When you think about marketing, what do you picture? A talking gecko, golden arches, or maybe a polar bear enjoying a refreshing beverage. The truth is, unless you're one of the largest companies in the world, brand marketing can be a bit of a crap shoot. Instead of hoping their immeasurable brand marketing is having an impact, many businesses are turning to performance marketing to help achieve their marketing and sales goals.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing (also known as direct response marketing) is a marketing method in which the advertiser pays the marketer based on the individual successes of the campaign. For example, an insurance agent may pay a performance marketer $15 for every qualified insurance lead the marketer provides. This performance-based structure can also apply to everything from page views, to clicks to direct sales.
Doing Smarter Business
As performance marketing grows, small to mid-sized businesses are finding it more practical and more cost-effective to work with performance marketers to directly achieve a goal rather than practicing in-house brand marketing or hiring an advertising agency for traditional marketing purposes.
Good for the advertiser
Paying on a per-click or per-lead basis gives the advertiser tangible return on their investment. A traditional marketing campaign with a $50,000 budget may achieve brand awareness and a certain amount of measurable leads and sales. However, if an advertiser agrees to pay an affiliate or publisher $15 for each qualified lead, that $50,000 guarantees thousands of qualified leads. What if your affiliate can't produce that volume? Simply recruit more marketers to run your offer. Because you only pay out on your specified end goal (click, page view, lead), it is extremely low-risk to bring on new affiliates yet the upside is huge.
Good for the marketer
Good marketers can thrive in a performance marketing structure. Because the payout is on a one-off basis rather than a percentage of media spend or flat rate, the marketer is motivated to produce results and is rewarded for hard work. Because this structure can work for virtually any industry, performance marketers can also find plenty of opportunities and even carve out a niche in which they excel. While some performance-based marketing is done by large, established companies, even a single affiliate can compete because of the low barrier of entry.
An Imperfect Science
While performance marketing has many advantages over traditional brand marketing, there are some inherent flaws such as variable lead or click volume and quality from your affiliates/publishers. However, as performance marketing continues to grow, more and more business are finding out that the return on investment simply can't be beat. So while performance marketing might not spell the death of brand advertising for the biggest players in the game, it has certainly shifted the practices and helped shape the successes of many more.
boberdoo is a lead generation industry leader. With over 14 years of experience operating in the lead industry, we have seen just about everything. Our sophisticated lead distribution software continues to help companies all over the world manage and grow their lead businesses. Our clients sell leads in real-time to everyone from insurance agents to home improvement contractors. If you're looking to launch a performance marketing business, our software may be the right fit for you. Give us a call at 800-776-5646. We would love to discuss your goals and determine exactly how boberdoo can help get you there.
