Performance Marketing: The Importance of Adaptability, Targeted Audiences and Automation

Hattie Sprittles | 20 Jul 2020

Recently on our podcast we spoke to performance marketing experts Emily Shaw from Itineris and Abiola Babarinde from InDigital. We chatted about how to create a successful performance marketing campaign, the challenges performance marketers face and trends to watch in the upcoming months and years. Here’s the juice:

Be Adaptable

“We have just gone through and probably still are going through what has been one of the weirdest times in all of our lives. It’s showing that more than ever with performance marketing we need to be adaptable and malleable.” said Emily.

Now more than ever brands are having to ensure their performance marketing strategy is adaptable. Covid-19 saw some businesses thrive and others suffer as customer interest shifted with the changing climate. What worked yesterday may not yield the same results today and thus it is imperative to take both changes “in the business itself and in the wider world” into account when working on a performance marketing campaign to ensure maximum profitability. A successful performance marketer will therefore treat their campaign like a “living, breathing being” and be prepared to mould and adapt the campaign at “the drop of a hat”. Keep an eye on any data that comes through, question why certain KPIs have increased or decreased and work on tailoring your strategy to ensure continued and long-lasting success.

Know Your Audience

“It's not just putting something out into the ether and hoping we are finding the right person. There is a way to target the specific people that we are after.” said Emily.

It is no secret that performance marketing campaigns are tailored to specific audiences, however, the depth of the tailorisation cannot be overlooked. However detailed you think your targetisation may be, go a level deeper. And then go another. It’s one thing to know your target audience’s age, gender and interests, but another to truly understand their character.

Abiola puts this idea of tailorisation perfectly: “Understanding your audience is really, really critical for campaigns and I think it is something that can sometimes be underestimated slightly. If you know who you’re targeting, if you know your customer profiles, if you know their needs, wants, desires, fears etc, you can do a better job of first of all targeting them and serving them something that actually resonates with them which is of the utmost importance.”

Automation

“Everything in performance marketing is shifting towards a more automated world.” said Emily.

When asked about trends to watch for the rest of 2020 and 2021, both Emily and Abiola responded with automation. As Abiola says, “anyone who has been in the game for that long kind of knows that there’s about to be another swathe, another set of changes”.

From responsive or dynamic ad formats to automated bids within campaigns, automation has been taking over multiple aspects of performance marketing over the last few years and will continue to do so as time passes. This is an exciting opportunity for performance marketers. Not only does the increased automation free up time for developing your creative strategy that would otherwise be used doing manual optimisations on campaigns, but the AI used is often much more efficient in its work. However, the tech driving performance marketing is evolving very quickly and thus it can be a challenge to keep abreast of the ever-increasing automation. 

To find out more about the performance marketing process and the challenges Emily and Abiola face in their day-to-day work, listen to the podcast here:

UpMarketing Podcast episode 1 part 1 with Emily Shaw

UpMarketing Podcast episode 1 part 2 with Abiola Babarinde

Hattie Sprittles

Content Marketing Strategist at FavourUp. Hattie is passionate for the topic in the SDGs of fashion’s future. As part of the publications at TEDxWarwick, the largest student-run TEDx event in Europe, Hattie interviewed many inspiring speakers. You can see Hattie's published works in The Boar, Warwick Uncanny and TedxWarwick magazine.