“You don’t need to measure the ROI of everything in marketing.” Is this true?
Well, the fact is that marketing has changed over the years as digital solutions have improved. Data-driven marketing tactics and platforms that deliver real-time feedback on your reach, engagement, and acquisition have given people answers to the age-old marketing questions:

1. Is this marketing strategy working?
2. Where are our customers coming from?

With 81% of consumer research beginning online and digital marketing benefiting from advanced tracking capabilities, we can begin to make the argument that, YES, we do need to measure everything in marketing.

What is a Growth Marketing Agency?

In today’s world, anyone with an Instagram account can call themselves a “digital marketer”, but we need marketing solutions and strategies that are actually measurable, move the needle, and allow for effective decision making on marketing investments (Note – See video on the basic growth equation, and when to hit the gas pedal).

“In performance marketing, there is no hiding from results – performance agencies live under the microscope with complete transparency. You are either failing or succeeding.”

A need for effective decision-making, measurability, and results are driving the demand for performance marketing agencies. A performance marketing agency is a digital marketing agency that specifically focuses its strategies and tactics on ROI-driving activities, such as online marketing and advertising that drives key actions; such as a lead or a sales conversion. Yes, we love pretty designs and animated websites, but as one of our clients likes to say, “Nothing is more beautiful than a conversion!” In performance marketing there is no hiding from results – performance agencies live under the microscope with complete transparency. You are either failing or succeeding. The results stem from an intense focus on specialization, effective execution, and result-generating activities that get better and better as the agency (and clients) matures.

As one of the early performance marketing agencies, we’re seeing a strong trend towards the demand for performance-focused digital marketing and education around its strategies and tactics. To me, this is a monumental shift as digital continues to mature and penetrate in today’s fast-paced and growth-minded world.

Performance Marketing Agency vs. Traditional Digital Marketing Agency

Have you analyzed top-performing organizations recently? Notice any patterns? In the past, you would see beautiful assets, parallax websites, and large display media spends. Today the definition of “sexiness” has changed and top-performing organizations have:

1. Clear, direct, and user-focused websites that are built to educate and funnel the user to desired actions.
2. Abundant use of dynamic and high-converting landing pages.
3. 10+ analytics pixels and conversion tracking.
4. Advanced analytics and attribution models to understand ROI and media spend.
5. Advanced paid acquisition models:

• • • Search: Brand campaigns for BOFU acquisition.
    • Search: Large budgets for deep penetration of segment terms sending individuals to purposeful landing pages.
    • Social: Leveraging paid social and education funnels to build demand.
    • Social: Heavy use of remarketing.

As digital marketing first started to evolve, the efforts and solutions were novel, unknown, and few had the tools and skillset to make an impact. Over the past several years it has been considered “enough” to make pretty WordPress websites, set up paid campaigns, and report on traffic, CTR, and organic rankings. Those days are gone as organizations demand results and expect visibility into the performance that modern marketing provides.

Demands are changing, the metrics are growth-based, and the growth equations are taken very seriously:

• What’s our CPL (per channel)?
• What’s our lead quality or lead to SQL rate?
• What’s our lead growth velocity?
• What’s our cost per customer acquisition?

The core difference of a performance marketing agency is that these are the metrics we report and the metrics we’re held accountable for. It’s a new world and vanity metrics aren’t cutting it anymore. Traffic is easy to acquire, conversions are difficult.

Creating Growth Frameworks

The days of cookie-cutter execution are over. A linear roadmap may have worked in the past, but we now have access to so much data and tools that strategy is essential. Modern marketers are continually testing, learning, iterating, and developing growth frameworks that are specific to the business. A great performance marketing agency has the ability to look at the bigger picture, set a goal and a target, but still have a strategic process to achieve those goals. This combined with a reporting structure is a scalable growth framework.

It’s Time for a Change

Is it time to look at your current digital partner and the overall strategy? Are you thriving through digital with a growth strategy or are you in need of a digital overhaul?

In 2020 performance marketing is more important than ever. As customer preferences, technology, and marketing techniques are getting more sophisticated, performance marketing is where your business can get a real-time measurement of ROI.

At OM we’re a performance marketing agency that operates as your outsourced demand generation team by working hand-in-hand to create and execute a growth strategy that is measurable and scalable. Looking to scale your company? Contact us to experience the fastest way to generate demand and scale with a dynamic marketing team.