Performance marketing is a strategy, tool or medium used to achieve marketing goals.
Traffic, impression, clicks, lead, landing page view, sales are some of the results you can achieve through performance marketing.
A performance marketing campaign can have one or maximum two goals.
Having a clear goal makes it easy to optimize the campaign for better performance.
7 Common Types of Performance Marketing
- Paid Search Campaign
- Social Media Campaigns
- Affiliate Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Content marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
Content Marketing – Content marketing can be a very effective performance marketing method. Due to social media, putting up content has become very easy. Knowing your target audience and creating content around their problem, pains or desire can get a lot of traction.
Content can help you attract free traffic and give a big boost to your business.
Email Marketing – Your email subscription list is your biggest asset. You can increase your website traffic, leads and sales if you use email marketing as a core strategy in your business. Marketers Neil Patel use email marketing to attract lots of traffic to their website and webinars. Email marketing is all about giving value. Do not spam your audience with lots of promotion stuff.
Search Engine Optimization – According to demandsage.com Google processes around 8.5 billion searches are made everyday.
That’s huge!
From a local business to an e-commerce giant both can take advantage of this free traffic generation machine.
Paid search campaigns – Search ads appear when a user writes a keyword to find something on the internet.
Google and Bing are the leading search engines in the world and they offer paid search ads service.
You have to pick some keywords for which you want to show your Ads.
Social media campaigns – social media platforms like Facebook have their own ad platform. These platforms offer various types of ad campaigns and detailed targeting options.
With over 3.07 billion monthly active users, Facebook helps you easily reach the right audience for your ads.
Both Google and Facebook use sophisticated machine learning to enhance advertising experience.
CPA Marketing – CPA stands for Cost Per Acquisition.
CPA marketing allows you to only pay when you receive a lead or sale.
You can decide how much you would like to pay per lead or per sale.
Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is also very popular in the performance marketing category.
Many big small brands use affiliate marketing.
Since you don’t have to pay upfront, it’s a safe way to acquire customers.
You have to pay a set commission from every affiliate sale you get.
Influencer Marketing – If nothing else is working, influencer marketing can save your life. If you are new in the market, influencer marketing can help you gain trust quickly. You can find thousands of influencers on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Tiktok.
You can use platforms like Upfluence to find influencers according to your needs. The best part of influencer marketing is that you don’t need a big budget.
As a marketer or entrepreneur, ad policies can give you a hard time to get traffic, impression or views. In such a situation, an influencer can help you promote your product and service quickly.
Which Type of Performance Marketing Should You Choose
Here’s a guide to choosing the right performance marketing channel based on different scenarios:
1. Paid Search Campaign (Google Ads, Bing Ads)
Best for:
- When your audience is actively searching for solutions (high purchase intent).
- Promoting time-sensitive offers or products with specific keywords.
- Competing in highly transactional niches like real estate, legal services, or e-commerce.
Example: A local law firm targeting “divorce lawyers near me.”
2. Social Media Campaigns (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn Ads)
Best for:
- Building awareness for visually engaging products (fashion, food, travel).
- Targeting highly specific audience demographics or interests.
- Generating leads in B2B or professional networks (LinkedIn).
Example: A fitness brand promoting online classes with an Instagram campaign.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Best for:
- Scaling sales through third-party publishers, bloggers, or influencers.
- Businesses with commissionable products like SaaS, e-commerce, or subscription services.
- Low-risk advertising where partners are paid only for results.
Example: A SaaS tool offering affiliate commissions for every customer they refer.
4. Influencer Marketing
Best for:
- Engaging younger audiences on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.
- Building credibility and trust through niche influencers.
- Launching new products or services with buzzworthy campaigns.
Example: A skincare brand partnering with a beauty influencer to demonstrate its products.
5. Content Marketing (Blogs, Whitepapers, Guides)
Best for:
- Establishing thought leadership in your industry.
- Educating potential customers over a longer sales cycle.
- Improving organic search rankings through high-quality content.
Example: A financial consultancy creating blogs about tax-saving tips.
6. Email Marketing
Best for:
- Nurturing warm leads and maintaining relationships with existing customers.
- Re-engaging cart abandoners or promoting exclusive deals.
- Driving repeat purchases with personalized campaigns.
Example: An e-commerce store sending a personalized discount to previous customers.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Best for:
- Long-term strategies to increase organic website traffic.
- Brands in competitive industries looking for sustainable growth.
- Building credibility and ranking for high-intent keywords.
Example: A travel agency optimizing for “best honeymoon destinations.”
8. Video Marketing (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels)
Best for:
- Showcasing how-to guides, product demonstrations, or customer testimonials.
- Reaching visually-oriented audiences or telling a compelling story.
- Building awareness for complex products requiring visual explanations.
Example: A SaaS company demonstrating its features through a tutorial on YouTube.
Why Performance Marketing
Performance marketing is popular because it allows you to deliberately allocate your ad budget and get optimized, measurable and predictable results.
Measurement is the key to success in marketing.
Performance marketing allows you to do that with great accuracy.
And that is the reason brands spend big money on their performance marketing campaigns.
Here are the top reasons why you should give performance marketing a try:
1. It’s fast – you can get started with performance marketing very fast. It takes 10 to 15 minutes to set up a paid ad campaign on Google.
2. You pay for the result – performance marketing is not shooting in the dark. It’s laser-focused to help you achieve your marketing goals, including impressions, clicks, leads, sales, conversions, CPA, or ROAS.
3. Easy to access – Traditional modes of marketing like TV, Radio and Newspapers are hard to reach unless you have a good amount of money to spend.
Now we have marketing channels accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Now, with platforms like Google, Bing, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok, you have a level playing field with business giants.
4. You can start with a small budget: Performance marketing channels allow you to start with a small budget.
When you achieve your target CPA, you can scale your campaigns.
(Add screen shoot of the for newspaper ads in India)
5. Advanced measurement and optimization – Tools like GA4 and Microsoft Clarity help you track campaign performance and identify areas for improvement.
Facebook and Google have advanced machine learning to get predictions about your results.
Google also offers a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) advance bidding strategy that allows you to set up your desired cost for conversion.
If your Google ads account is old with enough conversion data, you can get great results with this.
6. Scale big – With performance marketing you have unlimited potential for growth.
As long as you can maintain a good profit ratio you can scale as big as you want.
Before Getting Your Hands Dirty
Now you know what performance marketing is and how it’s different, better and cheaper than other methods.
Let’s understand how you can go about creating your first performance marketing campaign.
But before you take your first step, you have to do the groundwork.
Many skip this critical step and their campaigns suffer because of that.
Guessing never works in performance marketing.
You have to work hard researching, planning & positioning to get results.
Here I have outlined the steps you can take to make a solid groundwork for your winning campaigns. Let’s dive in.
Step 1 – Know your objective
Many marketers and business owners have a vague understanding of their marketing goals.
If you don’t have a goal in mind, you are sailing a ship without a destination – you may get lost in the sea or drown yourself and people with you.
Do you want to take that risk?
Absolutely not.
That’s why having a clear goal and sticking to it is very important. It will give structure and direction to your processes.
If you want to be successful in performance marketing, do not change your goals frequently or midway.
Making a clear goal will allow you to focus in one direction and allocate all your energy and resources to achieve your goals.
Here are some of the common goals you may want to achieve:
- Generate leads
- Improve the quality of your leads
- Drive ecommerce sales
- Improve repeat sales
- Increase landing page conversion rate
- Increase the response rate from your email campaign
- Promote a lead magnet to acquire lots of top of the funnel leads
- Lower customer acquisition cost
- Increase your social media followings
- Increase your organic traffic
- Have a brand position in the marketplace
- Increase your profit margin
- Scale your business
- Test a new offer against your existing one
- Launch a new product or service
- Test a difference customer avatar
- Scale your business across platforms
These are some of the goals that you can consider if they apply to your specific situation. Don’t go wild while picking up your goals, instead just work on 1 or 2 goals initially.
Step 2 – Know your target customer
If I ask you who your target customer is, you may react ‘what a silly question!’
This instant reaction makes many marketer and business owners blind. And they never dig deeper to understand their target customer.
They hopelessly try so many fancy things to lure the audience to buy, but they don’t.
Instead, if they had gone two or three stages deeper to understand your audience, your life as a marketer would have been much easier.
If you know your customer well, you can grab their attention effortlessly and when you have a good offer, you will get great results..
It’s not about how good your ad copy is or how fast your website is – It’s all about empathizing with them. You can’t do that if you just have surface level understanding about your target audience.
You should keep learning about your customers and dig deeper to understand their pain, frustration, fear and desire. This knowledge is invaluable and can give you unfair advantages over your competition.
So never skip this important step no matter what.
Step 3 – Figure out your offers
Alex Harmozi wrote a wonderful book “$100M Offers,” outlining the importance of offers. He also gives a formula to come up with your irresistible offer. Here is the formula that you can use to come up with your first a few offers:
Irresistible offer = Dream outcome*Perceived likelihood of achieving the outcome/Time delay*efforts and sacrifices.
Here are the highlights:
You product/service must help your customer achieve their dream outcome
The outcome must be believable
It must be fast or shorter than it usually takes
It must take less efforts or sacrifices from customer side
If you work through this formula, you are going to find the winning offer. It’s likely that your first few offers won’t work, but you should keep testing offers until you find the winner.
Step 4 – Review your sales process or funnel
As a new lead enters your sales funnel, it starts a journey. Make your buying process as smooth, fast & enjoyable as possible to get higher conversion and retention.
Before you start any performance marketing campaign, make sure you have a clearly defined sales process in place.
If your sales process or funnel is broken, it’s like trying to draw water from a well with a leaky bucket. But, how to identify the broken sales funnel? I’m glad you asked.
Here are the symptoms of a broken or leaky sales funnel and potential fixes along with them:
Addressing Symptoms of a Broken Sales Funnel
Here’s how to fix each issue and create a powerful, effective sales funnel:
Your landing pages are not in sync with your ad copy
Fix: Ensure your landing page reflects the same message, tone, and offer as your ad. For example, if your ad promises a free consultation, the landing page must prominently highlight that offer. Consistency builds trust and reduces drop-offs.
You don’t clearly mention what to do next
Fix: Include a single, prominent Call-to-Action (CTA) on your landing page, such as “Book Your Free Call” or “Sign Up Now.” Avoid ambiguity by making the next step easy and obvious.
You confuse your prospects with multiple CTAs
Fix: Stick to one primary goal per page. If the objective is lead generation, avoid adding distractions like multiple links, videos, or unrelated offers. Keep it clean and focused.
You have missed steps in your sales process
Fix: Map out every stage of your sales process, from awareness to conversion. Make sure no steps are skipped, such as follow-ups, lead nurturing, or onboarding. Use a checklist to ensure consistency.
Your follow-up process is delayed and inconsistent
Fix: Implement an automated follow-up system using email or SMS tools. Respond to leads within minutes of their inquiry, as quicker responses greatly increase conversion rates.
You don’t have a system to weigh your leads
Fix: Use a lead scoring system to rank prospects based on factors like engagement level, budget, and readiness to buy. Focus your efforts on high-priority leads.
You don’t prioritize your leads and sales activities
Fix: Categorize your leads into hot, warm, and cold categories. Allocate most of your time to hot leads while nurturing warm and cold leads through email campaigns and occasional touchpoints.
You don’t use a CRM
Fix: Invest in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool like HubSpot or Salesforce to manage customer information, track interactions, and streamline your sales process. A CRM is vital for handling large volumes of leads and customers effectively.
You don’t map out your customer buyer’s journey
Fix: Understand each stage of your customer’s journey—awareness, consideration, decision—and create content and campaigns tailored to each phase. Stop guessing and start strategizing.
You don’t take time to build a USP or offers
Fix: Identify what sets your product or service apart. Create irresistible offers based on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), such as discounts, free trials, or exclusive benefits. Highlight these in your campaigns.
You don’t have campaigns for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU strategies
Fix:
Top of the Funnel (TOFU): Focus on brand awareness with blogs, social media, and free resources.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): Nurture leads with email campaigns, case studies, and webinars.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Seal the deal with testimonials, free trials, or direct consultations.
By addressing these symptoms, you can transform a leaky sales funnel into a well-oiled system that attracts, nurtures, and converts leads efficiently. A strong sales funnel is the backbone of performance marketing.