Performance Marketing This change is not merely technological; new technologies have always opened up new ways of communicating.
This time, however, the change turns fundamental assumptions upside down – or better: from head to toe! For a long time now, there have been calls to place the individual consumer at the center of communication, but it is only recently that we have begun to see how radically people themselves are taking the reins of action. I would like to describe below why this fundamental change is creating great opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises in particular.
Sieht man von den Impulskäufen am Point of Sale ab, haben wir es mit einer völlig veränderten Beziehung zwischen Sender und Empfänger, zwischen Produzent und Konsument, zwischen Dienstleister und Kunde zu tun.
Classic media such as TV, large-scale posters or the good old daily newspaper are radically losing importance. Advertising expenditure on the internet has long since knocked television off its revenue throne. Social media already collects more money in Germany than all daily newspapers combined (Facebook alone over 1 billion euros!).
How can this be explained?
Two phenomena complement each other: customer empowerment and scalable performance marketing.
Customer empowerment is how we describe the increasing possibilities of customers: they can search specifically (!) for product information, they can rate products and services for other customers, and at the same time they are able to largely tune out classic interruptive advertising.
The task of advertising companies is less and less to formulate a message and deliver it as precisely as possible to the target group via the media. The new challenge is to know the specific questions customers have and provide pertinent answers. A stimulus-response scheme becomes a question-answer game: the stimulus now comes from the customers.
But how do we know what moves our customers?
This is where the technological possibilities of performance marketing increasingly come into play: better than ever before, we can track the customer’s path across different media and channels, can measure in real time whether the customer shows engagement and how long they interact with our content. But the best part is: we can make direct correlations between our previously defined target events (e.g. online purchase or downloading a price list).
Anhand dieses Feedbacks können wir Kanäle, die funktionieren, identifizieren und skalieren – und ineffiziente Kanäle schließen. This direct feedback has always been claimed by classic marketing, but it has never really been established. Vast amounts of advertising money sunk in failed campaigns speak volumes.
Especially for small and medium-sized companies, which often operate in niche markets and have rather small advertising budgets, this disruption in marketing offers great opportunities!