The world is in such a strange state these days. On one hand, everything feels like it’s stalled, with large swaths of the population confined to their homes; yet the rate at which business is changing is accelerating at ever more rapid rates. The plans we make on Monday may seem totally unsuited for Friday’s reality. And on top of all that, our reality of where we can go and who we can even shake hands with creates additional challenges.
The only certainty is uncertainty and the only answer is agility and adaptability. COVID-19 has illuminated a brutal truth that many are just now realizing: many traditional marketing strategies aren’t providing tangible ROI. On the contrary, leveraging performance-based marketing solutions is not only the answer to navigate these choppy waters in the short term, but it can provide long-term results and better positioning when the seas calm.
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What’s Wrong With Traditional Marketing Strategies?
Blindly spending on marketing is a major gamble in uncertain times. We learned that long ago, even more, the rigidity of traditional marketing strategies isn’t built for the fluctuations of the short term. Traditional marketing plans tend to rely on upfront pricing models. In normal times, when customer behavior is generally more predictable, charging fees for services before any results are delivered feels like a less risky endeavor. That’s not so today. Today, every marketing dollar counts, and every budget can feel like spinning a roulette wheel.
How Does Performance-Based Marketing Contrast the Traditional?
Performance-based marketing models have been used for years, and they’ve primarily been applied to digital campaigns where results can be more easily and precisely tracked. Essentially, a performance-based model means that advertisers make payment once a placement has delivered on a specific result.
Deploying a performance-based strategy provides more control in times of uncertainty. Marketers have more control over setting unique KPIs, allowing them to get more creative with their strategy and redefine how they measure success. Additionally, performance-based models are built to adapt and transform quickly as individual tactics prove effective or ineffective. The ability to adapt instantly at different points in a customer journey allows for a maximized ROI. Why? Because every investment is a more educated one, at each point of the conversion funnel.
The key to performance-based marketing is optimization. Whether the goal is awareness, conversion, or any number of other unique KPIs, a performance-based model can be adjusted on the fly when specific placements prove resonant with customers. The insights gleaned can be extrapolated to a larger whole, but they’re not solely holistic like in many traditional models. Instead, teams get insights at every step of the customer journey, and continually build upon them.
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Looking at Performance-Based Marketing in Practice
We’ve seen many marketers struck especially hard by the new reality of the pandemic, and we’ve seen many of them adapt in new ways. One of our clients, Alder Home Security, completed a transformation of their workforce from an in-person, door-to-door sales force to primarily a digital and phone-based sales organization. Being both respectful of quarantine orders and social distancing guidelines, Alder took advantage of the PX customer acquisition platform to power their pivot to mostly online lead generation.
This move enabled them to take advantage of dynamic lead pricing, optimization tools to meet goals, and more. The platform increased their level of insight, a necessity to keep pace with their sales goals, all while decreasing the burden it would take for the team to meet them.
Changes such as this to a digital, performance-based marketing approach, can be widely transformative. In doing so, companies can revamp roles to better suit not only the current business disruption, but to emerge from it with a completely new skill set that will prepare them for the future.
And that’s the key to performance-based marketing strategies. It is an approach that is built to provide speed and agility, to address short-term goals, and to deliver solutions and insights that create long-term success.
