What is B2B Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing includes any paid online marketing campaigns that businesses pay for based on the action taken by ad viewers. It’s a highly targeted marketing strategy that ensures a performance-based return on investment. 

Both performance marketing and traditional marketing work for the same desired outcome, but the key difference is that you only pay if your campaign achieves a specified result. As a B2B company, it is important to use a results-driven marketing approach such as performance marketing. 

What are the benefits of B2B Performance Marketing?

• Performance-based spend: With measurable user action, you know exactly what you are paying for and you only pay when the desired result is achieved.
• Measurable performance: You can measure the effectiveness and success of your campaign during its entire duration of it. It allows you to adapt and amend it at any time depending on the performance.
• Lower Risks: Compared to other approaches, performance marketing involves less financial risk. Your decisions are data-driven, allowing you to increase your chances of running successful campaigns.

What are the B2B Performance Marketing goals?

Establishing clear goals is the key to any successful marketing campaign. Before allocating a budget to b2b performance marketing, it is important to identify the goals and understand the results you can expect from them. The basic goals of performance marketing campaigns are:

• Generate brand awareness;
• Drive more traffic to your website;
• Generate quality leads and convert them.

What are the different types of Performance marketing channels for B2B?

• Social Media Advertising: Businesses often use social media to create brand awareness, increase website traffic, and generate leads. B2B businesses commonly use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram to target the most diverse user base for specific objectives. 

These platforms ensure that the impressions and engagement come from the audience that is most likely to be interested in your business and convert. Along with metrics like engagement metric likes, comments, and shares you should also track CPM - Cost Per Mille or Cost Per Thousand impressions.

• Native Advertising: Native advertising is sponsored content that blends into the platform in which it appears and doesn’t appear as paid advertising. It seamlessly imitates the content and function of the site it is placed in. Native ads are ads that appear in the same format as the content on the site or platform where they are shown.

It can be used to inform the top of the sales funnel customers since native ads are shown to users based on their interests and viewing history. Due to its nature of imitating the rest of the content on the site, native ads get more clicks than traditional advertising. 

• Affiliate Marketing: With affiliate marketing, a business rewards or pays an affiliate for certain specific actions such as - traffic, leads, free trial users, or sales. Here’s how it works:
  • An affiliate shares your product or service on their blog or a social media platform. 
  • Once any purchase or any other desired action happens via the platform, the affiliate earns a commission.

Here are a few KPIs to help you track the performance of your affiliate marketing campaigns - Click-Through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate, Cost Per Action (CPA), Average Order Value (AOV)

• Search Engine Marketing: Search engine marketing involves paid advertising on search engine result pages (SERPs) to improve your business’s online visibility. It helps you to reach users on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. An SEM manager can help you plan and implement your company's overall SEO strategy.

Target specific keywords your target users might use and pay to appear as search results for those keywords. Search advertising platforms charge you only if a user clicks on your ad.

• Search Engine Optimisation: Along with performance-based ads, marketers with the help of their SEO consultant rely on the search engine’s algorithm to gain organic clicks. While SEO isn’t considered a part of the performance marketing model, proper attribution allows you to differentiate organic traffic from other paid channels.

How to track and measure the success of B2B Performance Marketing?

Here are a few KPIs for you can track to measure the success of your performance marketing campaign:

• Cost per click (CPC): Tracking CPC helps marketers understand how efficiently their ads are performing and which channels are performing better. 
• Cost per thousand (CPM): One of the most common payment models is CPM where you calculate the cost per 1,000 impressions. Instead of paying for someone clicking on an ad, you pay every time the ad is shown to the target audience. It’s an important metric to track if the campaign goal is to increase brand awareness. While paying for views, it’s important to use advanced targeting so that the impressions are from relevant audiences.
• Lifetime Value (LTV): You can analyze a customer’s lifetime value using predictive analytics and estimate how much revenue you will get from them based on their ongoing activity. Use that data to plan strategies and boost your ROI.
• Conversions or Pay Per Lead (PPL): PPL is a pricing model where a business pays for a specified action such as submitting a form submit and converting a visit into a qualified lead.
• Revenue: The ultimate aim of any marketing campaign is to earn revenue. Measure the performance of your campaigns based on the revenue you earn from them. Be sure to use an advanced attribution model to track revenue from various performance marketing channels. Otherwise, you cannot accurately measure the results of your marketing strategy.

How to set up a B2B Performance Marketing campaign?

Create your B2B performance marketing campaign in 5 simple steps:

• Define clear and measurable goals: Set business goals, a plan, and a timeline for your campaign. Knowing the results you can expect helps you create a well-rounded marketing plan. 
• Pick the right channels: Consider an omnichannel approach to increase the chances of reaching your target audience. Identify where your audience is spending their time, and the websites they frequent, and pick those channels to place your ads. Be sure to align your choice of channels with the kind of conversions you’re seeking. conversions.
• Create relevant content: Create tailored content that resonates with your audience’s needs and expectations. Find out their pain points and conduct keyword research. Draft personalized ads that will appeal to your audience.
• Monitor performance: Track your lead gen metrics and monitor results, to identify your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses. Compare ads that are not performing to those that are succeeding, and decide what can be changed to improve performance. 

Summary

With any digital advertising campaign, businesses are looking to get the most bang for their buck. Performance marketing ensures that you only pay when you receive some value - such as an impression or a click. It’s a better and optimal use of your marketing budget because you don’t pay for ad campaigns unless it generates engagement.

Featured image by Mediamodifier on Unsplash