Are you part of one of these business? Green flag!

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In my experience, there is a clear distinction between the businesses that understand performance marketing and it is one of the critical factors of their success v/s the ones who have no patience, no belief system and are always struggling.

I understand that cash flow is critical, but trust me when I say this, just performance marketing is not the solution to your cash-flow problem.

Performance marketing is an important wheel of your business.

There are other wheels that need to support your ads to give you results.

Today, I am going to talk about 5 differentiations I have seen in mature and smart businesses about how they look at performance marketing v/s the ones who look at it as pure play platform level optimisation.

Let’s get started:

1. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon with sprints

Performance marketing is like nurturing a plant that occasionally needs a shot of growth serum.

If you invest in performance marketing thinking it will make you money from the moment you start running ads you are in for a surprise.

If you think, performance marketing will make you money in the first 3 months of your ads journey. You are still wrong.

Most of the times it takes longer than that and many times it takes much much longer than that. There are various factors that kick into the time investment and scale of performance marketing.

For ex., how competitive is your category on digital medium? If there are many brands in your category, chasing the same set of audiences, then it will be a long journey for you to before your performance marketing truly starts giving you result.

Another scenario is how aggressively you are aspiring to grow? and how much money are you willing to invest behind that growth? If you are a high growth startup, you will invest money in creating brand awareness, and the more you do it, faster your performance marketing will optimise to give you better results.

The point is; just because you are on digital and you can track everything, doesn’t mean things will change drastically for you in 3 months or so.

As long as you are seeing growth, as long as your agency is not leaving your campaigns alone for long and are keeping an eye on it, as long as you are supporting your performance marketing with high-quality organic content, as long as your product’s differentiation is coming out strongly and your audience is well defined, you are in good space. Your efforts in performance marketing will reap you results.

And because it’s a marathon, always get the right people to run your ads. As I have always said this:

Spend time getting the right agency partners on board. How to choose the right agency partners is a topic for another newsletter.

But a good agency partner will set you up for the long run and while doing it, will also help you run small sprints in between successfully.

For ex., the black Friday deal. promoting a deal for 4 days with the help of performance marketing is hugely challenging, but if the agency partner has set your campaigns right to prepare for such occasions, you will get good results.

While performance marketing is a marathon, but it needs to have small sprints in between.

2. Data, not drama

In the world of performance marketing, data is your drama-free best friend who tells it like it is.

While businesses often get swayed by gut feelings or flashy trends, what they sometimes don’t grasp is that numbers and analytics are the real tea-spillers.

These numbers tell you who’s visiting, what they’re doing, and even when they’re just tire-kicking your website without buying.

Understanding and acting on this data is like being a detective in a crime drama, but the crime is low conversion rates.

Simply put, successful businesses tend to look at the data very closely.

Data of who is their ad getting served to. Who is interacting with their ad, who is landing on their website, what are users doing on their website, what are they clicking and not buying, what are they clicking and buying, whether they are leaving reviews or not, whether they are coming back for repeat purchases or not and so on.

There are approximately 200 metrics that Meta can report on the ads manager dashboard. YES 200!

Here is the break up of 200:

These metrics are broken down into Engagement metrics, Performance metrics and Conversions metrics.

And you are just looking at RoAS and deciding the success of your campaign, the success of your content, the success of your agency and the success of your business?

What you are not realising is that RoAS is an extreme output metric.

Many of the above metrics lead to a good RoAS which is the holy grail.

If you are a kind of business that runs 2-4 creatives throughout the month and then blame your media agency for the underperformance of your ads, you have a long journey ahead of you.

Make data your best friend and it will be with you to help you make the right decisions forever.

3. Your Ad copywriter is your secret superhero

Here’s a quirky truth: the copywriter behind your ads might as well be wearing a cape. Businesses often undervalue the power of a well-crafted message.

The right words can act like a magnet, drawing in customers.

It’s not just about flashy images and big discounts; sometimes, a cleverly worded headline is your undercover superhero.

Writing good copies for ads is an art and your best friend ChatGPT is not great at it yet.

If you continue using ChatGPT to write your ad copies, you will continue to see stagnancy in your ads.

I love ChatGPT, to generate ideas, create frameworks, or do research. But to write the final copy that will go on my ad? No way. Yes I may still take some inspiration but my final ad copy will be written by someone who understands my business, why am i doing it, what makes my product unique, who is audience it has to reach out to and appeal etc..

4. The answer you are looking for is in the Micro-moments

For most of the products or services, a user goes through either all 4 below stages or at least 3 stages before buying:

• I want to know moment

• I want to go moment

• I want to do moment

• I want to buy moment

Once your business starts categorising your user journey in these 4 steps, your job of channel identification and communication strategy becomes well-categorised too.

For ex.,

If Lenovo launched a new laptop today, here are the 4 micro-moments a potential Lenovo customer can go through:

I want to know moments are when a user is doing research on more details about the laptop. Like ‘Lenovo laptop features’. These are one category of searches where Lenovo should ideally be present with both a website page and a YouTube video.

I want to go moments are when a user is specifically looking to go to the destination from where they can explore more about the laptop and probably buy it. The destination here could be wth website or a physical establishment from where they can buy the laptop. This is where Lenovo has an opportunity to focus on Local SEO and be present in such searches.

I want to do moment usually happens post-purchase when a user is looking to get some help with respect to the Lenovo laptop after buying it. For ex., ‘How to install XYZ software on Lenovo laptop‘. Lenovo has the opportunity to establish itself as full full-fledged solutioning website leading to higher recall. This also helps in the opportunities for cross-selling.

I want to buy moment is when the same user is looking to buy add-ons or accessories for the laptop. For ex., ‘best accessories for Lenovo laptop‘. Here Lenovo can optimise the category page to land users on all the accessories they sell for the same laptop.

Many brands use the micro moments strategy around their products or services for social content too.

5. Lack of Testing will test your longevity

With performance marketing, it is never about one size fits all. I may have 10 years of experience in running ads, but when I work for you, I will not apply a template that has worked for anyone else.

With every brand, one has to test certain hypotheses before arriving at a sweet spot.

And the more you test here, the better things will become.

And do not only run Advantage campaigns on Facebook. These are advanced AI-led campaign types which need decent money to optimise.

It can be one of the campaigns you are running with a long-term view, however, if you are a lean business or startup, you have to have more control over your campaigns hence running more tests on creative and audience will give more intelligence to your Facebook account to prospect more relevant audiences and drive sales.

Therefore, build a culture for testing in your team, if you are running an awareness campaign- test different communication types and formats.

If you are running a consideration campaign, test different creatives.

If you are running. a conversion campaign, test different pitches, offers or products.

Similarly, on Google, testing different keyword variations, their match types, static and dynamic search ads, conversion value-based campaigns etc, is an interesting way to find what is actually working in your favour.

The best part about Google is, that once you find 2 campaigns that are picking up well for you, they can really help you scale and will continue to perform for a longer duration.

But you will never reach that stage if you do not test enough.

Like today’s newsletter? Then you will love what I cover in the Dream Performacne Marketing Masterclass.

In case you missed it, I am running a Flat 20% off on the next batch of Dream Performacne marketing Masterclass which is starting from 4th Jan.

This offer is valid till tomorrow midnight only!

This is a limited-seat Masterclass where I do not take more than 10 signups.

The Masterclass is filled with LIVE projects and exercises to help you learn theoretically as well as practically.

This masterclass also comes with an opportunity for a single 1:1 discussion with me on anything you want to talk about. Could be for your business or for your interview preparation.

That’s it for today folks!

Have an awesome Sunday ahead :)

Cheers,

Apurv