Measuring marketing: how performance marketing is transforming consumer brands

Modern CMOs face an uphill climb: navigating a complex and evolving marketing landscape, targeting customers at the right place and time, and constant demand to deliver tangible results.

This comes amidst a sea of MarTech solutions claiming to be the silver bullet to solve it all. Meanwhile, traditional marketing approaches are too constrained by limited segmentation and siloed channels and often fall short.

But what if there was a way to prioritise customer needs, guarantee measurable return on investment, and cut through the Martech noise?

Enter performance marketing, which is seeing significant growth, in particular amongst consumer brands with an eye on ROI.

Developed in collaboration with Adobe, this whitepaper explores the power of data-driven performance marketing, and how it’s fundamentally rewiring how consumer brands are connecting to their audiences.

What is Performance Marketing?

In regular marketing, you pay upfront based on potential audience reach and outcomes. In performance marketing, you pay based on the success of the activity. It’s a simple idea that’s known to consumers worldwide - we’ve all heard of a ‘no win no fee’ claim - but it is transforming the way marketers reach their audiences.

Traditionally, especially if outsourcing advertising to an agency or third party provider, marketing costs would be fixed, and paid up front. Brands are locked into a certain marketing spend each month, even if there are some months where campaigns don’t deliver the desired ROI.

Performance marketing means you only pay once a tangible pre-defined result has been achieved. Think of a campaign in which expenditure is directly and exclusively linked to a user visiting your website, completing a purchase, engaging with your brand on social media, or downloading content.

This defining principle means performance marketing is completely results-driven, by nature low-risk and extremely budget efficient for cash-strapped CMOs looking to economize.

Why is this a game-changer for consumer goods companies?

A global media budgets survey showed 42% of marketers planned to increase their performance marketing this year. As marketers push to do more with less and strategically leverage data and AI to modernize their marketing, performance marketing is becoming a differentiator.

What benefits does it deliver for CMOs on that uphill journey to measurable marketing outcomes?

92% of marketers think content is a valuable business asset for driving long-term ROI but statistics show just 53% of decisions are based on data analytics. Performance marketing effectively bridges this gap by underscoring the indispensable role of trusted and unified consumer data in powering next-generation, AI-driven campaigns.

Beyond the basics: key areas explored in the whitepaper

This forward-looking whitepaper helps consumer brands close that data gap and unpick what performance marketing could offer them. We delve into emerging trends and innovative solutions, such as:

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Ready to transform your approach with performance marketing?

Our whitepaper, developed in strategic partnership with Adobe, sets out practical solutions to overcome key CMO challenges like budget constraints, activating and leveraging first-party data, justifying marketing spend against objectives and measuring ROI effectively.

It introduces Cognizant's comprehensive suite of performance marketing services, which include:

The whitepaper looks at performance marketing in principle - but in practice too. Case studies show performance marketing in action on the ground, setting out for instance how a global toy brand achieved a 180% increase in digital revenue, or how a leading US retailer re-engaged 20% of inactive customers using performance marketing.

Take the next step in your performance marketing journey

Download the expert whitepaper today to get access to exclusive actionable insights, helping you map a performance marketing pathway that works for your brand, and accelerate adoption where it matters. These tools are essential to anticipate consumer shifts before they happen, deliver the relevant assets at the relevant moment, avoid sunk costs and inflexibility and ensure every expenditure maps onto positive outcomes. The result is deeper relationships and sustained growth for consumer brands seeking to maintain a competitive edge in a saturated marketplace.

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