Redefining Performance Marketing for Customer Success

Is performance marketing just a buzzword coined by some agency and now we’re just following it? There is so much conversation and discussion on LinkedIn and other forums about performance marketing, how to improve it, what to do, what not to do, how to set up and optimize campaigns, etc.

To put it simply, performance marketing is a marketing strategy that is driven by results.

Introduction

In a data-hungry world, performance marketing offers the ability to reach your target audience at scale, while also measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns. The ultimate goal is to drive revenue and strengthen your top line.

So if revenue is what performance marketing is evaluated on, why is it restricted to the prospector funnel (‘Get Customers’) and not extended to the customer funnel (‘Grow Customers’)?

For a SaaS business to have sustainable growth, it is imperative that it focuses on growing customers equally as on getting customers. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, ‘Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%’.

If you look closely at your business numbers, I’m sure you will find a similar pattern.

No, I’m not proposing that you must ignore performance marketing to get new customers, but it would be gainful to also spend an equal amount of time, effort, and resources on performance marketing for your existing customers.

Here are the first few steps to do performance marketing

1. Create hunters and farmers within your current marketing set-up

2. Hunters would be the ones who will focus on the traditional performance marketing

3. Farmers would be the ones who will focus on customer growth

4. For result-driven marketing, customer data will help you to establish key metrics to analyze performance (for ex, product usage, product, and feature adoption rate)

5. Plan and execute campaigns and activities that help to improve these metrics

In addition, a healthy relationship with customer-facing teams and other departments will help to have in-depth knowledge of customer pain points which can ultimately help the marketer to create impactful and more targeted communication.

While these are just thought starters for an extended approach to performance marketing, I’m sure there is more to it and that marketing can contribute more than what it traditionally does at the moment.

The idea is to collectively work towards the common goal of customer value and satisfaction and with customer-focused performance marketing, we’re not only focused on boosting the top line but also the bottom line.