Marketing is intrinsically a purpose-driven exercise. Whether it is securing profit for a company or advocates for a cause, marketing begins and ends with a goal. Once a strategy is set in motion, marketers shift their focus on tracking market response and making sure that challenges are flattened out to achieve targeted results.

This “results fixation” that all marketers have is at the core of performance marketing. Once popular only within the online business community, performance marketing has evolved as a validated system of delivering desired outcomes for marketers across industries and different channels. As a campaign optimization approach, the goal of performance marketing is, in a nutshell, to assure sustainable, repeatable profitability for the business enterprise.

Performance marketing makes guesswork a thing of the past. A key proposition is tracking and measuring audience interaction, i.e. ad/page views, clicks, feedback, making the marketers of today fully loaded with statistics and records telling them in real time whether their campaigns are being seen and heard or not. These nuggets of intelligence enable them to gauge their approach, change strategies midstream, and cut their losses significantly if their campaigns are not quite hitting the mark.

Performance marketing analytics also allow marketers to pin down where a particular strategy made an impact in the overall consumer outreach, and how much of an impact it made on the bottomline. Said insights can be leveraged later on to frame better messages, sharpen tactics, and develop more moving engagement experiences for consumers. Ultimately, the objective is not just to get a reasonable return on every marketing dollar spent, but to secure long-term business growth.

In the mobile world, performance marketing as an advertising model is increasingly gaining traction as well. The growth and extensive reach of mobile, the proliferation of smartphones, and consumers’ high use of mobile web to connect, learn, be entertained, and do business are encouraging companies to increase their mobile marketing efforts, and to do so in a performance-oriented way.

Rohit DadwalA testament to this phenomenon is the explosion of agencies providing customized performance marketing-approaches for advertisers going mobile. Offering attractive value propositions to both advertisers and publishers, these agencies create a wide range of networking platforms to introduce reliable, convenient, and scalable technologies that drive the bottom line.

As the space turns rife with publishers adopting performance marketing technologies, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) remains steadfast as an industry educator and partner. We encourage advertisers to try out different engagement models, including performance marketing, however, in order to capitalize on the strengths of these approaches, they must always be up to speed on industry trends and opportunities. Part of the MMA’s commitment is to ensure that techniques do not supersede in-depth understanding of consumer behaviour and the companies’ innate drive to innovate.

It is likewise important to flag the importance of accurate, scientifically-validated measurement tools, whether the analytics is conducted by the advertiser, the publisher or a third-party. Transparency and accountability are crucial elements of a lasting partnership. Standard methodologies to evaluate outcomes are essential to building trust and provide learnings for improvement and innovation.

By Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, Mobile Marketing Association Asia Pacific Limited