It is not uncommon in day-to-day business that campaigns can only start after many months because rigid processes rob them of any flexibility. As a rule, these are processes that were created for classic marketing. They represent insurmountable barriers for online marketers and “kill” their performance.

But this does not have to be!

Here are my 6 TIPS for a successful cooperation with performance specialists:

1. Keep decision paths short

Even before you start with performance marketing, ensure fast and flexible approval processes. In the best case, you involve the management from the beginning and secure the necessary support for autonomous decisions. Performance marketing means fast and ongoing optimization and constant improvement. Slow decisions result in media budgets not being able to work efficiently.

A practical example:

Lately we have often had the situation that campaigns can only start after many months because the messages, landing pages or creatives have to go through long internal approval processes, especially in larger companies. Sales, compliance, marketing or management often intervene. In this case, the following applies: too many cooks spoil the broth.

2. Time for a strategy

Take the necessary time in advance to work out the strategy together with your performance experts. The strategy is the be-all and end-all for successful campaigns. Voting methods are also clarified during this preparation. The entire campaign is strategically structured in such a way that it is then only implemented and optimized “operatively”. The better this preparation is done, the better performance you will achieve. Especially for longer terms, this effort is amortized for you by far.

3. Flexibility within given framework conditions

Define a so-called runtime budget. So how much can be spent in total in the period X.

Performance marketing always requires a flexible way of working. Therefore, give your specialist the power to make adjustments at any time within the agreed framework, provided they serve the purpose of optimization.

Be sure to enable:

• Flexible budget shifts within the agreed runtime budget
• Independent activation and deactivation of advertisements
• Independent revision of texts within the corporate identity
• Ongoing optimization of the campaign (bids, placements, creatives,..)

A quote from the collaboration with one of our customers shows how far this way of working can go:

“I give my partner Corvis the freedom to manage advertising expenditure flexibly. As long as a campaign is profitable, the budget can be adjusted or increased at any time. However, if a campaign is in deficit, I receive a message immediately and decide in consultation with the performance marketers further course of action.”  – Investment Punk Gerald Hörhan

4. Avoid the “over-reporting” trap

Every adjustment to a campaign takes time until the campaign is stable again and the results are meaningful. Out of fear that these adjustments might not bring the desired results, we marketers often tend to interpret too many intermediate results. Similar to the stock market, this can result in fatal losses in performance. Driven by assumptions, this behavior can trigger knee-jerk reactions and ruin the strategy.

So don’t fall into this trap!

Corresponding reporting should always be coordinated at the end of the month in order to be meaningful and contain enough data. You should trust your experts for ongoing adjustments beforehand. Intermediate results will always fluctuate, driven by dozens of influences. A good performance marketer knows this and will make adjustments accordingly.

5. Creatives must appeal to your target audience

Try not to overstate your personal opinion about the creatives, as they will always be subjective. Above all, an advertisement must appeal to its target group and perform well. You can test creatives and evaluate the results at any time. You should definitely take advantage of this great advantage of online marketing to constantly improve your campaigns.

Your performance specialist has probably already run a number of campaigns and therefore has valuable insights that you can use for production. Therefore, work together on good creatives from the visual aspect to copywriting.

Tip: 5 short animation videos (up to 30 seconds) often work better than an expensive image film. 

6. Target groups as an aid, not as a guide 

Give your performance marketer all the information they need about the target audience. These are valuable insights for planning the campaign and researching the keywords.

However, do not make the mistake of specifying fixed target groups, because it is not certain that these are actually the best buyers.

The clear advantage of online marketing is that you can work data-driven. This means that it makes a lot of sense to test different target groups against each other and to improve them successively.

A good performance marketer understands how the algorithms work. If we initially work with so-called “cold targeting”, the goal is almost always to let the algorithm carry out the optimization later on.

Therefore, give your performance specialist the freedom to work out and test the target groups yourself in order to achieve the best result.

When we work with customers, we always discuss these things in advance so that we can ensure good performance. I would be happy to advise you on how to build a good infrastructure and what is necessary for this.

I wish you good performance!

Best wishes,

Markus Siuda