The Pursuit of Marketing Performance: four new imperatives for success

The term “performance marketing” was once reserved for lower-funnel, highly measurable direct response tactics. Today though, with 80% of CEOs looking to marketing to drive business growth, the pressure for teams to become more accountable to performance outcomes has resulted in every channel touting itself this way. 

A new wave of performance marketing is upon us and simply relabelling channels as “performance” is not enough to stay in the game. It requires marketers to fundamentally rethink their approach to the discipline.

In this piece, we recap on Skai's recent webinar with eMarketer, which covered best practice examples for the four new imperatives for performance marketing success:

• Reassess Media – for effective targeting and measurement in a post-cookie world

• Reorganize Silos – how to operationalize a customer-obsessed advertising strategy

• Redefine KPIs – from impression to impact; how performance metrics need to evolve

• Rethink Inputs – the data hierarchy of needs that every marketer needs to fulfil their potential

By all accounts, 2023 will bring a renewed prioritisation of performance marketing. Thus, it makes sense to revisit and rethink what performance marketing means these days and how marketers should approach it next year. 

To explore these issues, eMarketer recently hosted Skai™ for a webinar entitled, The pursuit of marketing performance: Four new imperatives for success. In this online event, marketing experts share their insights about performance marketing with a modern twist to take advantage of the latest tactics and thinking. 

Skai™ speakers included CMO Margo Kahnrose and directors Kelly Fogt and Melissa Barringer.  Watch the full webinar here.
 

Performance marketing imperative #1 – reassess media channels

The webinar speakers urged marketers to begin by rethinking their media channels. Specifically, how to flip performance marketing to not mean how it performs for marketers but rather how it performs for consumers. The main point here is that modern performance advertising needs to be helpful and valuable rather than just loud and disruptive. 

“It’s our job as marketers to empower consumers to make every single touchpoint useful to them,” explains Kahnrose. “To do this, we need to stop thinking about performance marketing as tactics and channels to squeeze the most out of consumers, but rather marketing that performs for the consumer. Advertising needs to help them discover, research, and meet their goals. It should be well-matched to their interests and intentions.”

Under this lens of helpful ads, not disruptive ones, the presentation turned to the subject of walled garden media. Of course, open web companies often claim that a disproportionate amount of budget goes to walled gardens. But, when you consider that walled gardens offer ads that help consumers the most, it becomes apparent how important these publishers are to modern performance marketing. 

Consumers in these walled garden ecosystems are also in a more receptive frame of mind to engage with brands than in other areas of the web. They don’t mind being exposed to a new product while on social media, they actively research purchases in online stores, and click ads on search engines when looking for information.

And these walled garden publishers are growing beyond the single channels they have been known for and into full-funnel performance partners. Google offers more than search, including display, video, and app install ads. Amazon Ads has DSP and CTV ads. And you can send Facebook or Instagram users to online retailers directly from social ads. 

Walled gardens also benefit from being more future-proofed because they rely less on cookies and offer potent first-party audience targeting. 
 

Performance marketing imperative #2 – restructure your silos

The inherent problem with siloing marketing channels is that your internal channel teams compete for budgets. However, to succeed, they need to work harmoniously towards a common goal in favour of a more omnichannel organisational approach. 

But “omnichannel” is hard. It’s easier just to let different teams run different channels. 

The first step is to have a unified system of record, so all teams get insight into performance in every other channel. This requires a technology platform that is holistic and facilitates omnichannel workflows. 

Ironically, there isn’t profound empirical evidence that a more holistic, consumer-centric approach performs much better than a siloed channel approach. However, most marketers agree that there’s enough potential value here to explore an omnichannel performance marketing plan as a way to drive true business growth.
 

Performance marketing imperative #3 – redefine your KPIs

In an omnichannel approach to performance marketing, one of the most significant areas that needs to change is measurement. As a whole, the marketing industry still prioritises vanity metrics like CTRs and impressions. While they are indeed the easiest to collect and gather, the problem is that, in the long run, they force us to keep our marketing efforts siloed. 

But now that digital is a primary touchpoint, performance media can and should be held accountable to more meaningful metrics that other business units are expected to impact.

“Marketers need to evolve to a new measurement paradigm,” urges Kahnrose. “Mainly, legacy metrics treat all conversions as ad-driven but ignore other factors like brand equity, loyalty, word of mouth, etc. We need measurement to be more holistic.LTV, New to brand, growth, margin contribution, share-of-voice, profitability, subscription rates, etc.”

Performance marketing imperative #4 – rethink your inputs

As a whole, marketers seem to explore more holistic marketing approaches. But to get there, the industry must rethink the data inputs needed to drive success. The most basic requirement we have is clicks, conversions, and ROAS. While these metrics are still needed for a foundational view for channel-level optimisation, we must add other things like review and rating data, content analytics, consumer insights, etc.

And these insights must be connected across datasets, channels, and teams for them to be most helpful.