How to prepare for your performance campaign?

New Year, new resolutions and challenges. Every beginning of the year is a time of preparation and planning. And perhaps during this year you plan to launch a new online product or service and you want it to succeed. If yes, let me share with you some thoughts on how to prepare for this challenge. Even if you have already done this before, take your time to prepare, because in performance marketing things usually happen fast and on a big scale. Small things can have a huge impact. Don’t let them take you by surprise.

First things first. Not every business is good for online performance marketing and there’s nothing bad in it. Some businesses operate in deep niches, target a very narrow group of customers, or they have a product which is just too specific. You will probably not believe me when I tell you, that once I saw banners with coast guard ships, advertised by one of international shipyards. Well, yes, I did. And no, you should never sell coast guard ships via banners!

So let’s assume you already have:

• a product / service which can be bought online;
• a target group for your products which can be found online;
• a business that is ready for bigger scale (servers / support team / packaging / etc.);
• a specific goal: increase sales, generate new leads, have more app installations, etc.

When you have all that, performance marketing probably can be one of your channels. Launching such a campaign is always a big project but following those 4 points should help you prioritise when preparing for start.

1. Prepare great materials and think always from a user perspective

Would you be attracted to the banner you just created? Is the landing page you designed easy to navigate and „self-explaining”? Your product doesn’t need to be perfect. But it has to be finished to a stage which will be enough for the user to gain his trust. When you’re working on your service or new product, consult it with people from outside your product development team. Your product might be amazing for you — but is it really amazing for someone who will see it for the first time? Remember that you make the first impression only once. Before launching a big scale campaign, install heat maps which will help you understand how the user navigates around your website or landing page. This will help you find potential bottlenecks and UX flaws.

2. Tell your story

You need to convince the user why your product solves their problems. Users are tired of reading about features. Users don’t need another product that does something. Users need a product which helps them achieve something. You need to tell a story, attract and persuade. Limit your words to the necessary minimum, address user’s emotions and needs.

3. Decide what to measure and how to measure your results.

You will probably use a bunch of traffic sources. You need to know how to assign conversions to them and how to measure ROI on the channel level. Without this you might not understand which channels are working best for you and you will miss some opportunities.

4. Never settle down

Product development is an ongoing process. You should never feel a “yes, now it’s perfect!” way. No, it’s not. Your audience will evolve over time and so should your product. Test your website look and feel. Test creatives. Test your copywriting. But remember to test what you can measure. Therefore, do not test too many new things at once, because you will not be able to give credit to a particular change.

Bear in mind that you, as the product owner, are responsible for how the product works. Try to help your users to get the best experience possible when interacting with your products or services. Be open to suggestions and recommendations. Remember that small changes can have a huge impact so don’t be afraid of testing out new things and features. With this approach, your campaign has a great chance to become a success story.