Top tips for killer performance marketing campaigns

Here are our top four tips to ensure your next performance marketing campaign is your best one yet.

• Learn from four winning examples of big-brand performance marketing campaigns.
• Take their best strategies on board to ensure your next PPC or paid social media ads guarantees great results.
• Discover examples from a variety of platforms and find innovative ways to supercharge your ad strategy.

Executing a strong performance marketing campaign is a true skill. It takes accurate data and fresh ideas to hit the right targets, whether that’s for conversions, brand recognition or any other metrics. Since performance marketing focuses so closely on ROI, it’s more important than ever to do all you can to meet those sales targets. Some of the most leading brands provide great examples of well-executed campaigns that have garnered huge success.

Keep Everything Native

When employing social media ads for your brand, you’re engaging with an audience on someone else’s platform. Your instinct might be to encourage them to leave that platform and head to your own, through a link to your website or app. However, keeping everything within the original social platform can actually work to your advantage.

TVideo, a video streaming service, increased their app downloads by almost 50% by making their app download and account creation possible all within Facebook. Users didn’t need to open a new browser or get held up at loading screens, making everything fluid and as easy as possible. Sticking with Facebook’s navigation served TVideo well.

Credit: SMBP

Connect With What People Care About

Whether you’re looking for better engagement, more conversions or improved brand outreach, you need your audience to care about your campaign if you’re going to have any level of success. Airbnb took action in 2017, at the heart of the refugee crisis, to contradict some bad PR from allegations of racism towards their hosts.

Credit: Lindsay Gamble, Medium

They launched a paid ad campaign across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #WeAccept to showcase their efforts to house refugees across Europe. They also donated $4M to refugee charities, while regularly sharing stories of hosts from various backgrounds. Their engagements skyrocketed, with 85% positive responses to the campaign, underlining how people engage with causes close to their hearts.

Quality Can Make The Difference

Social media is often populated with pretty standard quality posts. You can make your ads stand out by upping the quality going into your content, especially if you sell a more premium product. Wayfair is a great example of this.

To make the most of Instagram’s in-app retail features, Wayfair promoted a series of their most popular products with exceptionally high-quality photos in realistic looking homes. They tapped into the aesthetic nature of Instagram, knowing that Instagram users are used to seeing luxurious and filtered versions of reality. People want to recreate this perceived perfection for themselves in their own homes, and these ads promised to do just that with one click.

Instagram users could buy the products showcased beautifully in the ad with just a few clicks within the app. This way, Wayfair made the most of the aesthetic-focused characteristics of Instagram users, coupled with the easy-to-use retail features. It was the perfect storm for a successful social ad campaign.

Tap Into New Trends

Social media platforms create new features all the time. Any modern brand needs to stay up-to-date on these trends and make the most of them to advertise their products. If a brand shows its audience that it stays in line with the modern changes of an app, it helps the brand’s image stay young and fresh.

Credit: The Blueprint

Converse demonstrates this perfectly in their Stories campaign. They used clean, fresh photography in Instagram Stories to pop up alongside organic content, combined with well-chosen influencer posts. Their diverse campaigns fit their target market perfectly, launching a new range of products successfully. They were one of the first brands to use paid ads in Stories, as audiences weren’t used to seeing branded content there. Being the first through the door gave them the edge over the competition and helped the ad campaign to make waves with ease.

Performance marketing campaigns can be tricky to get right at first, but once you have a winning formula, they’re a cost-effective way of achieving your brand’s marketing goals within a budget. Keep testing different ad and paid campaign formats to see what works best for your business. Remember that you can never stop learning and experimentation can often be your path to success.