Every business should have a performance marketing plan in place to make sure that its marketing efforts are as effective as possible. A performance marketing plan is an outline of the goals and strategies that will help the businesses achieve those goals.
When it comes to achieving marketing objectives, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. One business’s right strategies and tactics may not work for another. That’s why it’s essential to customize the performance marketing plan to what a business needs. A performance marketing plan helps businesses track progress and make necessary adjustments along the way.
This article will provide an overview of what a performance marketing plan is and give some tips on creating one.
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What Is A Performance Marketing Plan?
Photo credits: Carlos Muza on Unsplash
Performance marketing is a digital marketing strategy where companies pay for marketing services to promote their brand. A performance marketing plan is a set of goals, strategies, and tactics that marketers would use to optimize their online campaigns.
A performance marketing plan essentially contains SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) goals. A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis usually helps a great deal in structured planning.
8 Steps to develop a successful performance marketing plan
- Review and understand current marketing strategies
- Analyze our competitors
- Understand one’s situation in the market
- Set a budget
- Set objectives and KPIs
- Develop a time-bound action plan
- Run and start the campaign
- Monitor results and make adjustments
1. Review and understand the current marketing strategies
We can begin by reviewing and analyzing our company’s current marketing strategies. For instance, if we have executed performance marketing campaigns in the past, we can go back and analyze the data from those campaigns. This will give us insights into what worked well and what could be improved.
We can also take a look at our company’s overall performance in the market in terms of sales, leads, and engagement. To discover all of the online footprints of our business, we can ask the following questions:
- Which social media profile does the business have?
- Does the business have a YouTube channel or other videos posted online?
- How did the previous performance marketing campaign perform?
- Is the content accessible on a variety of devices?
The answers to these questions will give us a solid basis for launching an entirely new performance marketing campaign.
2. Analyzing our competitors
Knowing who our competitors are, their goals, their operating models, and what they offer will help our business gain a competitive edge in the market. Conducting a SWOT analysis is a great way to understand and analyze competitors. Once this is done, it is important to reflect on one’s position in the market.
3. Understand one’s situation in the market
After analyzing the current performance marketing plan and conducting a competitor analysis, we can conduct a detailed review of our company’s overall position in the market. We can understand where our brand currently stands by asking:
- Why do we exist, and what is our vision?
- What is our position in the market?
- What makes the company unique?
- How do our customers see us?
- How do we relate to our customers?
At this point, marketers can apply the NPS methodology, or Net Promoter Score, to their company, which measures the degree of satisfaction and loyalty of consumers of any type of company.
4. Set a budget
Each company has an investment capacity, and marketing actions will hardly get off the ground without knowing how much can be invested in the performance marketing plan. At this stage, the marketing, sales, and finance departments need to come together and align the needs and possibilities of the business. The organization’s marketing budget should allocate adequate funds for its performance marketing plan. How much money a business has is going to impact the investment capacity and, consequently, the returns.
Even if businesses have a reduced budget, it is possible to search for digital marketing service providers that suit your budget and help the business grow. One can use inbound marketing strategies that are not as expensive as outbound alternatives and have a more extended ROI.
5. Set objectives and KPIs
Now that we know where our business stands, who our competitors are, and how much money can be spent, it is time to set SMART goals and objectives and identify KPIs that will measure the growth of the business. The objectives must align with the company’s strategy. KPIs are responsible for measuring the success of the actions and will only make sense if they are related to the objectives.
Some examples of KPIs in a performance marketing plan are:
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost per Click (CPC)
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Lead generation
6. Develop a time-bound action plan
The objectives and KPIs can be achieved by designing a detailed plan. We begin by finalizing our digital marketing channels that will execute the plan. SEO, content marketing, email and social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, etc., are some channels that will help us to engage with the audience effectively.
It is also important to use different marketing automation platforms to execute your performance marketing plan with agility and accuracy. Also, schedule each marketing activity for the foreseeable future. This would mean planning marketing activities for the entire year with devoted deadlines. A marketing calendar will ensure that the team is aware of upcoming deadlines and can collaborate with other departments and stakeholders to finish each task on time.
7. Run and start the campaign
Here we execute each and every step outlined in the marketing calendar. We can use digital marketing tools and software to do this. Digital marketing tools and software automate tasks such as sending emailers and SMSes. This helps us devote more time to business strategies and ways to convert leads to sales. Some of the most popular digital marketing tools and software used by marketers today include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, AdWords, BuzzSumo, and Mailchimp.
8. Monitor results and make adjustments
The marketing team must constantly measure its success through data analysis. For instance, we can use Google Analytics to analyze how our marketing plan is doing. Google Analytics can track conversions, leads, sales web traffic, social media engagement, and email marketing metrics. We should also track consumer behavior through website visits.
Even the best performance marketing plan has to go through several modifications to help a business achieve growth.
Conclusion
Businesses with more visibility always have a high chance of selling more. Marketing helps us create and maintain our brand’s reputation, relevance, and demand. A performance marketing plan is at the heart of a company’s digital marketing strategy. The best approach is to come up with a SMART performance marketing plan that is aligned with the latest market trends and which promises good forecasts to a business.