Are you having trouble with optimising your marketing campaigns and maximising your return on marketing investment? In today’s blog article, we sat down with our Founder & Managing Director, Vivien Koh, to find out more about her on-the-ground experience in the field of Performance Marketing as an accomplished business practitioner.
From debunking misconceptions of the role of Performance Marketers, to dishing out proven tips & tricks on how to run successful Performance Marketing campaigns, Vivien reveals the well-kept secret of the relevance of Performance Marketing to a business’ success.
What is the role of Performance Marketing today and how is it more relevant than ever given the Covid-19 Pandemic?
Being on the ground, I spent a lot of time speaking to startup and SME founders pre and post Covid-19 pandemic. What I commonly hear from these passionate leaders are how do we drive more traffic to their websites, generate more qualified leads and increase conversions to accelerate revenue growth. As such, they are turning to their marketers to get their marketing right i.e. get the highest return on investment against their marketing objectives and KPIs.
You see, in my earlier days, many companies were willing to just spend on marketing and hope for the best. But now, digital has altered the way businesses advertise and sell their products or services. Today, the impact of marketing can be measured and tracked. Marketers can gather data related to the number of clicks, Click Through Rates (CTR), Cost Per Click (CPC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and also attributions which will allow the marketers to optimise their campaigns for better performance. This is why Performance Marketing is so important in today’s context. With Performance Marketing, advertisers will pay only when conversion actions occur which include a click, generated leads, a sale, etc. Essentially, as long as the conversion actions set by you get triggered.
Over the past 1.5 years, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to many businesses lowering their marketing budget (according to Statista, the advertising spend has been reduced by 7.8% y-o-y), making sure every penny counts. Performance Marketing will help you to find the return for every ad dollar spent. Having visibility on the data and key metrics, Performance Marketing also helps marketers to optimise better and decide on a desired action to drive campaign performance.
As a Digital Marketing Agency, you will have the opportunity to work with clients across various industries. How are the approaches to Performance Marketing different for the different types of clients?
In addition to being a Digital Marketing Agency, with our strong consulting background, we conduct research and dig deep into the search & social media data to uncover consumer insights for each of our clients - including website, social media and brand audit. With minimal data made available to us for one of our clients, we managed to help them uncover 4 new customer segments using our consulting frameworks. This has paved the way for our Performance Marketing specialists to identify the right digital channels and advertising formats e.g. Google Search Marketing, Google Shopping Ads & Display Ads and Online Marketplaces such as Shopee and Lazada. They were also able to customise their communications to attract, educate and address the needs of these segments. This customer acquisition Performance Marketing approach has helped many of our clients to expand their customer reach while maximising the return on ad spend.
One of the challenges faced by Performance Marketers is the perception that they’re outdated and don’t add value to businesses. What are your thoughts on this? Is Performance Marketing really effective?
Ever since I have been involved with Performance Marketing since 2013, the marketing and advertising landscape has evolved significantly. For Performance Marketers to continue value adding to the businesses, they will have to embrace change, adapt and grow.
Today, with automation and machine learning, there are at least 8,000 tools available in the martech space. As Performance Marketers, we have to lean into automation to help us thrive so that we can focus on consumer insights & experience, data strategy and gather deeper insights not only for Performance Marketing campaigns like social media, online marketplace and search but also overall business and marketing strategy. We collaborate with Alavi.ai which utilises their AI engine to identify products to market and audiences to target. With Alavi.ai, our customers were able to boost revenues without sacrificing its bottom line. For instance, in just 3 weeks, Far East Flora Singapore managed to accelerate their growth profitability, with RoAS increasing by 21.75%, while AOV shot up by 20.33%. Today, the team at Far East Flora continues to enjoy an extended partnership with VK Transformation and Alavi.
While Performance Marketers have to adapt with the changing landscape, we are still getting a lot of focus from our existing and new clients on Performance Marketing. Hence, I believe that Performance Marketing plays an important role in today’s business landscape.
How can a business leverage on Performance Marketing to successfully drive conversions with a limited marketing budget?
We have experience working with many SMEs with limited marketing budgets. It is inevitable to realise that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the change in customer behaviour and created a more complex or non-linear customer journey not only for B2C but also B2B businesses (B2B business includes wholesalers and distributors). We have helped a higher learning institution to save $200K per annum by improving and prioritising their targeting - identify which customer segments will generate the most ROI, hence, improving ad spend.
Embracing a strong performance mindset, Performance Marketing can also help businesses drive results throughout the marketing funnel from building & driving brand awareness at ToFU, to driving conversion at MoFU and BoFu. At ToFu, the target audience will be exposed to relevant content which can address their pain points and spark interest. Given the right technical knowledge of Performance Marketers, the Performance Marketing campaigns can be attributed and advertisers can pay according to specific budget and conversion goals at each stage of the funnel.
Do you have any advice on how a brand can roll out a successful performance marketing campaign?
Firstly, if you’re planning to outsource your Performance Marketing efforts, it is important to work with Performance Marketing agencies who have the right technical expertise from intent or interest analysis to conversion tracking to structuring & setting up of the campaigns apart from the ability to add value to the business and marketing strategy. One of the things to look out for which signal expertise would be the presence of existing certifications, such as the Google Partner Certification. I am happy to announce that VK Transformation has recently attained the Google Partner Certification.
It is important to understand where you’re at with your digital marketing efforts using our Digital Sales & Marketing Lifecycle Roadmap. This will help you form your Performance Marketing strategy.
After having to define your profitable target segments, it is important to set goals at every stage of the marketing funnel. The key metrics will differ from one stage to the next.
In order to create more compelling marketing content for e-commerce, Google and social media platforms, it is important to analyse both first and third party data to determine your customers’ interests. This can also help to discover lookalikes from a brand’s loyal customers.
Retargeting with personalised advertisements will give brands an opportunity to reconnect with the visitors who have visited your website but did not convert. This effort will help to increase brand recall.
With our Performance Marketing efforts, we have helped one of our clients drive at least 50% year on year growth during off peak within 3 months and 10x during peak seasons for B2C across Google, social media and online marketplace channels. For B2B, we have managed to capture leads within 2 hours of campaign launch and 23 quality leads within the first 2 months for one of the clients who has just embarked into Performance Marketing.
VK Transformation has successfully transformed both B2B and B2C brands by embracing High Performance Marketing strategies. If you’re interested to find out more about our experiences, we would be delighted to connect with you over a virtual coffee chat. Click here to connect: https://www.vktransformation.com/contact-us
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