6 Creative Ways to Boost Performance Marketing

  • By C R Venkatesh
  • 20-02-2023
  • Digital Marketing
6 Creative Ways to Boost Performance Marketing
Performance marketing is a great way for businesses to derive value for their advertising spend. However, getting leads to perform the desired actions isn’t always smooth sailing, which can compromise the relationship between an internet marketing company and its client base. Whether you’re an affiliate marketer looking to increase your profits or a business aiming for maximum ROI from paid advertising campaigns, these six recommendations will make performance marketing work better for you:

1) Make your offer and landing page count 

The common downfall of many performance marketing campaigns is typically a poor landing page. That entails too much text, so many CTAs that the user gets confused, and a lack of aesthetic appeal. 
 
To counteract all this and make your landing page a better ally to your campaign, you need to: 
 
- Make up your mind on just one CTA and emphasize that throughout
- Authentic proof of value (such as testimonials) also go a long way
- Increase visual appeal and decrease textual crowding
- Take out unnecessary links from your landing page
 
Let’s delve into more detail. Starting with your CTA or call-to-action, you want to use just one and preferably implement a contrasting color to your primary hues. So what are the best performing CTA colors consequently? Research finds that orange and green are particularly a hit with today’s audience, although red and yellow are not bad options either. Moreover, your want to make your CTAs button large enough so they don’t get lost on the page. 
 
Additionally, less is more when it comes to landing pages. Keep it succinct and to the point. Moreover, don’t say it in words when you can do it in imagery. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words after all. 
 
Now on to testimonials. Social proof should be a key part of your landing page if you want to squeeze a lot more from your performance marketing efforts. We also suggest including more visual content (e.g. customer videos or photos) to give your social proof that human touch. 
 
Having too many links on the landing page can also hurt your performance marketing. Each link is a doorway and essentially a temptation for your lead to wander off. 
Therefore, you want your landing page to have just the one link, i.e. your call-to-action button. 

2) Implore negative keywords to cut down on waste

With paid advertising platforms such as Amazon, for example, keyword mismatching can be a big headache. The platform is quite frankly a little loose with this aspect, hence you should always set your negative keywords. 
 
Part of the reason why you may be struggling with your campaign could be because you’re appearing against queries that are not relevant to your business. Therefore, you want to implement these across all paid advertising platforms you’re reliant upon to bump up lead quality. Moreover, you want to be thorough with your negative keywords in terms of specificity so you’re spending more resources on leads that are most likely to perform the desired action.
 
For our purposes today, we shall zero in on Google Ads as an example of how you could implore negative keywords to your benefit: 
 
- Gradually incorporate your negative keywords: You want to avoid listing i.e. putting in all your negative keywords at a go as this may lead to more lost impression shares. Consequently, steadily add in negative keywords overtime This way, you’ll have much better insight into what negative keywords have bigger control over your ads
 
- Reexamine your current negatives. Performance marketers mistakenly add valuable keywords to their negative lists, which may be part of the reason your campaign hasn’t taken off yet. Go back to the drawing board to ensure there are no such cases. 
 
- Adjust your budget allocation: Sure, irrelevant keywords in a foreign niche should be added to your negative keyword list. But don’t give up on your low-converting keywords just yet. Try increasing your budget allocation for these and see what happens
 
- Match type intelligence: You have two options when setting negative keywords. First, you could expand reach with broad match types or zero in with exact match types. The latter becomes ideal for instance if you sell a specific product geared toward a certain demographic such as an age or gender group.  

3) Create urgency with your offers

To be human is to procrastinate. And people who procrastinate, likely end up forgetting altogether. Beat this intrinsic flaw of humanity by making your offers urgent, so your leads get the sense that it’s now or never. Otherwise, your leads will have no real drive to act immediately. And the more they put this off, the lower the chances of the conversion going through. 
 
So how do you show urgency in sales and performance marketing, in particular? Here are a few ideas to experiment with to incorporate urgency into your performance marketing campaigns: 
 
- Include deadlines in your sales: When there’s no time limit, leads will waste a lot of time examing your product to the granular level, all the while, postponing a decision. Moreover, without urgency, they even have time to check out a competitor and you’ll lose your lead. Therefore, include a time-limited offer e.g. a 5% discount for buying within an hour, or something along these lines.
 
- Elevate urgency with countdown messages such as e-mail reminders. You can also beat procrastination and forgetfulness with regular countdown emails, which check in on your lead and progressively ramp up urgency 
 
- Use titles and copy that convey urgency e.g. “final offer”, “last chance on this deal at 5% off”, etc. You need to be a lot more creative with your title. There’s limited space to work with so you want your most important message coming first in the title, more so for emails. 
 
- Create scarcity: This entails limiting the number of products or subscriptions available for a given time. For instance, you could push out a campaign based on a limited number of slots available such as 100 for a software subscription at this time. 
 
Urgency cultivates the fear of missing out (FOMO)- also known as a marketer’s best friend- and thus encourages prompt lead action, and better performance marketing success in the long run. 

4) Update your product feed regularly 

If the objective of your performance marketing campaign is sales, not updating your product feeds often could be your downfall. For example, YouTube Shopping often recommends products that are out of stock for eCommerce stores, hence why you may be getting a lot of traffic but little of it ends up in conversions.
 
Besides products going out of stock there are other vital reasons to follow up with your product lists, namely: 
 
- Updates work as reminders: Your leads can forget about your existing services or products in a matter of hours. When you regularly update elements around your offerings, it ensures continued relevance. 
 
- They demonstrate improvement: If you’ve improved the product/service or have sorted out a bug that was previously a nuisance, you want to not keep this quiet. Product feed updates detailing product improvements- or including new incentives such as a trial offer extension- can trigger a surge in interest 
 
- Updates can increase repurchases: You need to keep your existing customers more reasons to stay on a product/subscription and buy more products or upgrade their subscription to a higher plan. Constantly enticing your existing client base will further improve your performance marketing returns from your present customer base. 
 
Consequently, you want to consistently track your product inventory for changes so you can update these promptly across your performance marketing channels. Doing so will save you from miserable ad performance and spare your client base from frustration. 

5) Make it heartfelt and personal 

Everyone’s vying for your leads' attention. How do you stand out in this endless depth of options? The answer is personalizing your performance marketing experiences. Tapping into the unique needs and mindset of your leads drives more engagement and exponentially increases the probability of the desired outcome. 
 
Here are a few tips on personalizing your performance marketing campaigns to achieve more success: 
 
- Get data to craft exact-fit buyer personas. And how do you collect data for buyer persona? It’s simple. Trawl for real-life data through customer surveys, in-person interviews, web/exit surveys, and phone interviews among others. 
 
- Map out content to match these various personas. Once you have your buyer personas worked out, create content across the divide. For instance, if you’re selling products to help both individuals and businesses, you want to create content around the distinct pain points of the corporate entity and the individual customer as well. 
 
- Create personalized email marketing campaigns. The first mistake you want to avoid with such campaigns is buying email lists. If you’ve bought a bunch already and are wondering why results aren’t forthcoming, this could be to blame. Instead, build email lists organically. Offer incentives for leads to willingly give you their addresses, such as a free e-book 
 
- Provide prompt customer service: Live chat is the way our internet marketing company achieves real-time communication with prospects. Ensuring leads are tended to while they’re still hot sees to it that you strike when intent is at its highest
 
- Personalize follow-up as well: Just 2% of sales go through at the first attempt, which speaks to the importance of follow-up. Yet, just most marketers conventionally give up after 3 tries while half of all sales happen after the 5th time of asking, so to speak. Thanks to CRM data, you can personalize follow-up emails according to the initiated action that the lead is yet to complete
 
Additionally, consider looking into smart content strategies for your website. That way, each lead receives different and customized sales messages or content depending on a specific buyer persona. 

6) Be picky with your traffic sources 

High traffic. Low conversions. It’s a scenario we’ve seen one too many times as an internet marketing company. Largely, this problem boils down to not getting your traffic from reputable sources. 
 
Besides below-par traffic quality, not choosing the right sources could also hurt your performance marketing campaign in other ways. For example, lead trust could plummet if your advertising sources are of questionable repute.
 
So how do you get quality traffic? Here’s what we have to say about this: 
 
Start with social media: The average person spends about two-and-a-half hours a day on social media. Capitalize on this by using the right hashtags so people can find you. Of course, you’ll have to churn out compelling content and include quick links to your site somewhere atop your social profile bio.
 
Use social share buttons: These can improve the discovery of blog posts on your website and get more eyes in front of your campaign. For this strategy to really take off though, you want to include surprising stats or lists in your content and add share buttons alongside them. 
 
Don’t overlook LSI keywords. With the introduction of Google’s “Hummingbird” algorithm, the search engine now pays great attention to your LSI keywords. You can use free tools such as LSI graph to identify LSI keywords around your topics
 
Take video marketing to LinkedIn: LinkedIn is often overlooked by many performance marketers. Yet, there’s lots of quality traffic that’s ripe for the picking here. Be sure to venture beyond video marketing on the platform as well. 
 
Another trick many marketers also use today is giveaway competitions. Let’s face it: everyone loves free stuff, and you can use these freebies to get your traffic stream going. Leverage the chance to win to get email lists and incentivize shares, likes, or some other desirable actions. E.g. participants may get more entries the more they share your contest, etc. 

Bonus tip: Test and then test some more

Any good internet marketing company knows to regularly test and adjust performance marketing campaigns because initial success requires continuous work to maintain. What worked today may not be as effective tomorrow, and what didn’t catch on previously may explode soon after. It’s therefore important to not rule anything out, reserve an open mind and keep on tweaking. So keep exploring your AOVs, CRO, and other optimization tactics and techniques. The point is to keep on A/B testing so you can replicate success continuously and weed out the weak points promptly.

Last Updated in March 2024

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Author

C R Venkatesh

C R Venkatesh, often known as CRV, is a multi-talented entrepreneur, author, and technology specialist with a base in India. He is one of India's early IT industry pioneers and has led Dot Com Infoway to great success for more than 20 years as its CEO. Today, the business is a pioneer in digital marketing and sets the standard for global online and mobile development. The resume of Mr. Venkatesh includes various IT and business honours. In addition to his credentials, he exudes enthusiasm, is unflinchingly confident, and believes that everything is possible.

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