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?
- Demonstrate a clear correlation between investment and critical metrics such as conversion rates, basket size, and customer lifetime value (CLV). As these metrics increasingly become the basis for expenditure, consumer firms are saving time and resources spent retrospectively tracking campaign success and evaluating whether they delivered high ROI.
- Facilitate sophisticated audience targeting and the ability to seamlessly engage individuals as they transition between segments. Performance marketing is by nature inherently more targeted than traditional approaches. Data-driven insights can unlock more precise placements of ads, more tailored messaging and greater personalization.
- Enable automated content processes for the rapid production of high volumes of personalized content. By analyzing campaign performance metrics, marketers can identify high-performing content formats, messaging, and targeting strategies, which can then be used to fuel automated content creation and distribution systems.
- Unify marketing strategies by integrating all digital channels to deliver seamless, data-informed experiences across physical and digital touchpoints, making it easier to see which tactics are driving the strongest engagement.
- Scalability at affordable prices. By automating content creation and distribution, performance marketing allows businesses to scale their content efforts without sacrificing on efficiency. The automated systems it relies on can process high volumes of content at pace, helping brands flex according to business growth, market demands, geographic focus and audience preferences.
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:
- Modernizing your tech stack. Learn about the importance of unified data, interoperable technologies, and scalable content supply chains enabled by AI to deliver real-time, hyper-personalized, and omnichannel customer experiences.
- The rise of Retail Media Networks (RMNs): Discover how RMNs are projected to expand from $46 billion in 2023 to a staggering $109 billion by 2027, offering unparalleled visibility, precise targeting, and hyper-personalized product recommendations—a ‘win-win-win’ for brands, retailers, and consumers.
- Measuring Success: Gain a profound understanding of common pricing mechanisms such as Cost Per Click, Cost Per Sale, Cost Per Lead, and Cost Per Impression, and how to accurately measure true business impact through metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Retention, Engagement Rate, ROI, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
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:
- MarTech value realization: Optimizing your technology investments to ensure superior efficiency and seriously enhanced customer lifetime value.
- AI-driven content production (Digital Factory): Automating, optimizing, and scaling marketing operations using Generative AI to keep content relevant and high performing.
- Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) channel acceleration: Empowering brands to develop, launch, and effectively operate their own direct to consumer channels, fostering direct consumer feedback loops and building stronger, data-informed relationships with target audiences.
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.