Performance marketing

In practice it is search advertising, paid social and remarketing, managed by numbers: cost per click, cost per enquiry, share of revenue spent. Campaigns are reviewed weekly and the ones that do not pay are switched off. At the start you need two or three months of data before you can claim anything. Before that the results are noise, and deciding on the basis of a single week is the most common mistake.

Why it appeals: it is the only part of marketing where you see numbers at the end of the month. When an online shop puts a thousand euros into a campaign and gets four thousand back in sales, nobody questions it. The trouble starts when the same logic is applied to brand work. A film about the company cannot be judged on clicks, and when someone tries, it looks bad and gets cancelled.

How to start sensibly: fix the website and the measurement first, then spend. Advertising sends people to a page, and if that page is slow or has no clear action, you are paying for visits that go nowhere. Begin with one channel and one goal, with a budget you are willing to lose while learning. For a small company that is usually a few hundred euros a month for three months.

Where it hits a wall: performance marketing harvests demand that exists, it does not create it. If nobody knows you and nobody searches for your kind of service, campaigns will be expensive and weak. The money is better spent on content and brand, so there is something to harvest later. And budget for the work: a campaign with nobody adjusting it weekly stops making sense within a month.

We tell clients that brand and performance are not rivals but different time horizons. Brand works on next year, performance on next month, and a budget should hold both. Try it today: check how many of your last twenty jobs came from advertising and how many came from a referral.