Performance Marketing in B2B Industries is an essential tool to ensure that your marketing budget is being used effectively. Performance marketing takes the most eligible buyers and gives you a way to track their performance. This allows you to focus your marketing spend on an audience that has the best return on investment.

What is B2B Performance Marketing

The Performance Marketing Association defines it as “a comprehensive term that refers to online marketing and advertising programs in which advertisers and marketing companies are paid when a specific action is completed; such as a sale, lead or click.”

In short, you’re paying for conversions and not impressions.

It focuses on achieving results that can be measured and tracked. This marketing strategy is important to gauge the performance of a business and to understand how successfully it worked.

Being that the main advantage of performance marketing is that it’s almost 100% measurable, you can gain a clear understanding of your overall expenditure, the nature of your site’s visitors, and their buying habits.

In fact, measuring how well your marketing strategy performed gives you an insight into the following:

Number of pages viewed per visit on your website
Time spent on your website
Number of leads generated
Number of leads converted
Details about the leads
The kinds of keywords that were used
How the particular strategy performed
If the strategy worked or not
If the strategy increased the sales of the business

This is such vital information in order to adapt, improve, and make relevant changes to really satisfy the demands of your target audience.

Keeping an eye on your performance is mandatory to help your business grow in the right direction.

Benefits of Performance Marketing in B2B Industries

The goal of a B2B performance marketing agency is to produce outcomes that will generate real business results – such as leads, conversions, engagements, and sales.

There are many benefits to running performance-based marketing campaigns, including:

Easy-to-track Performance

Performance marketing is based on actual data. It’s convenient and accessible because all the metrics are tracked and reported.

This is done via tracking technologies like cookies and URL parameters.

Low Risk and Increased ROI

Unlike other types of marketing strategies where payments are made in advance and do not rely on the campaign’s success, you only pay for successful transactions. This gives a better value for money and allows for real-time ROI measurement.

It turns the relationship into more of a partnership where the marketing channel and yourself share outcomes. This is opposed to you, the business owner, paying no matter what the outcome of the campaign.

Improves Planning

Since performance marketing is a pay-per-action strategy, it’s easier and uncomplicated to budget for. Goals are more emphasized and you only pay for results, making it easier to stick to a target budget.

How To Measure B2B Performance Marketing

Everything that you do in business must be tested and measured against key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure its success. Whether it be the number of clicks, page views, or sales, these key metrics are crucial to measuring and enhancing the performance of your marketing strategy.

But how exactly do you begin? Below is a list of how to structure a performance marketing campaign.

Identify Specific Goals

Since performance marketing is 100% measurable, you want your goals to be aligned with that to get the most out of this strategy.

Having a defined framework will help you accurately measure the successes and failures of your marketing strategies.

Do you want to grow your newsletter subscriber list 10x? Or do you want to attract 100,000 visitors to your website?

Evaluate what your goals are and ensure you’re working backwards through your marketing funnel.

Here are five major ways to determine the optimization of performance marketing strategy.

Cost Per Click: Simply paying only when a potential lead clicks on your advertisement. It is usually the first step when engaging with a brand.
Cost Per Lead: Creates a balance of responsibility between the advertiser and the publisher, wherein the advertiser only pays when a user submits their information via a CTA. This could be an email, a phone call, or booking a demo.
Cost Per Order: Determines how much money was spent to gain one customer.
Cost Per Action: Paying when a potential lead performs a certain action.

Select Channels That Align With Your Goals

Once you understand the behavior of your target audience and your specific goals, you can decide which channel you may choose to market on.

Below are some of the channels where B2B performance marketing can be executed:

Display Advertising

It is a method of attracting the target audience by using images, videos, or text-based advertisements. This encourages the user to click through to a landing page and take action.

It’s one of the most popular ways for blogs, websites, and publications to monetize their site and commonly uses CPM as a pricing model.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is a type of sponsored media that is tailored to the look of the website where it is displayed. It is made to blend seamlessly in its environment, mirroring the non-paid content around it.

Unlike display ads, they do not appear as regular advertisements. It may come in the form of suggested reading, dynamically served to users based on their viewing habits online.

Depending on the niche, CPM is also typically used as a pricing model for native ads.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Just like private individuals, buyers of individual companies also search online for products and services to compare offers.

Despite the target audience’s more complex decision-making cycle, SEM is still a good opportunity to advertise to the target audience and accompany them in their decision-making process.

The most commonly used pricing model for SEM is CPC.

B2B Marketers may have to think of a more strategic approach when it comes to Social Media Marketing in order to reach business owners and decision-makers. The key is using the right social media platform, such as LinkedIn where 4 out of 5 LinkedIn Members drive business decisions.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy wherein compensation is offered when a partner generates traffic, leads, or sales on behalf of your business.

Finding the right kind of affiliate partner is crucial to the success of affiliate marketing, especially in the B2B industry. They are usually trusted and well-known content creators and thought leaders in your target industry.

The ideal affiliate partner is different for each business, depending on your target audience. They may range from influencers, to large blogs, to discount websites.

When these affiliate partners promote your service or product, the decision-makers are more willing to see what you have to offer.

Affiliate marketing is typically priced based on CPL, CPC, or a revenue sharing model.

Monitor, Evaluate and Optimize Your Campaign Routinely

Analyze your data, and ascribe to the activities wherein the highest success is seen. Adjust your strategies accordingly to campaigns that did not perform well.

Know the reasons and dig deep as to why a certain strategy performed well, while the others did not. This will be especially helpful in future campaigns.

Ongoing efforts to improve and refine your campaign will cultivate exceptional results.

B2B Performance Marketing Challenges

B2B Industries face a distinct kind of challenge when it comes to performance marketing in that they have extremely specific needs. The sales cycle is much longer as compared to B2C, so a revenue share marketing agency must be adaptable.

Let’s take a look at some of the challenges faced by B2B industries when utilizing performance-based marketing.

Keeping an eye on the sources of frauds and bots. The probability of your advertisements showing up on fake websites is high. Spotting these websites is important so you can differentiate the ones that are actually producing results.

This way, you can remove websites that do not bring value to your marketing campaigns.

Last-click attribution will keep you focused on what matters. This refers to analytics that features all the value of a conversion to the last source a customer was on before arriving at your website.

It’s important to identify where the last click came from, to better understand the journey of the target audience.

Losing Sight of Longer-Term Objectives. Nurturing your target audience and generating awareness is still an essential part of your performance marketing strategy because this leads them to arrive at your affiliate marketing websites.

Best Practices in B2B Performance Marketing

Performance marketing does not work like other advertising options. Having a solid strategy is the key that will help drive results.

First, build marketing strategies that align with your business goals. Then analyze the efforts currently being implemented so that you can determine how well it is accomplishing your goals.

Do not forget to brainstorm for new ideas to promote the growth of your business. Creating a plan and implementing strategies, while doing routine evaluations will put you in a better position towards attaining success.

Things to Consider in B2B Performance Marketing

Almost all kinds of businesses may benefit from performance marketing. However, there are a few more things to consider when utilizing performance marketing in the B2B industry.

Your Business Reach

The distribution of your business should be considered to determine the most suitable performance marketing platform.

If you are a smaller, local business, you should be more selective to ensure that your chosen marketing platform can target your specific area.

Your Online Presence

Make sure that your business’ online presence and your website are in top shape before doing your first performance marketing campaign. After all, the goal of performance marketing will revolve around your website.

If you want to do cost-per-lead advertising, ensure that you have a well-designed, credible, and attractive website funnel.

Your Current Earnings

A lot of factors will affect how much you will spend on performance marketing. Some of these are commission rates, platform costs, additional personnel, and the margin rate of your product/services.

Your Technical Needs

You need to be familiar with tracking, data feeds, and affiliate programs, in order for your performance marketing to succeed.

Conclusion

When doing B2B performance marketing, it’s best to keep in mind that paying for performance is a wise decision because it generates measurable outcomes.

For performance marketing to work, you have to be analytical, strategic, technical, and always ready to adapt.