Maximize ROI with enterprise performance marketing solutions

If you have years of experience in the enterprise marketing business, you’ve almost certainly leveraged a variety of marketing services and techniques, including email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Successful performance marketing delivers more profitable results in the form of clicks and conversions — and that’s what this guide is all about. In it, you’ll discover insights and enterprise performance marketing solutions that can help you maximize your ROI.

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing is strategy where marketers pay for advertising based on a predetermined benchmark or result. And while there are various types of performance marketing (like affiliate marketing or pay-per-click advertising), they all share one thing in common: Marketers pay when potential customers take specific actions. This means that enterprise performance marketing solutions are ultimately all about results.

Rather than paying an upfront cost, you pay fees for clicks on advertisements, leads generated, sales, and other actions produced by a performance marketing campaign.

What are the benefits of enterprise performance marketing solutions?

Among enterprises, performance marketing is—or should be—a crucial part of your overall digital marketing strategy. The below benefits of performance advertising can make your brand more competitive in a challenging marketplace.

Increase your chances for leads

Performance marketing often relies on techniques like search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Being listed on a search engine is necessary for discovery by potential customers, but advertising takes it to the next level—increasing your chances for leads, customers, and sales even more.

Plus, as the cherry on top, you’ll receive a boost in brand visibility and awareness from the extra impressions.

Engage the right audiences

A performance marketing campaign is highly targeted by design—and that translates to increased audience engagement. Enterprise performance marketing solutions go beyond basic demographic targeting to seek out customers based on specified behaviors, interests, location, and other factors. For example, you could target men located in the Midwest who are interested in auto parts for classic car restoration.

This comes with opportunities for almost endless optimization. Fine-tune your performance marketing campaigns so that they reach the people who are most interested in what you have to offer—and reap the benefits of an increased conversion rate.

Lean on trackable and measurable data

Performance marketing is highly trackable and measurable. Rather than basing campaigns on estimates, you can actually view the numbers of clicks, conversions, and other interactions. Leaning on this data can give you a tight grip on your ROI since you’’ have the ability to target highly specific audience segments with the types of ads that are most effective for each segment.

Primary types of enterprise performance marketing

To stay competitive, enterprise performance marketing solutions are a must for today’s businesses. Effective strategies typically include a blend of the following types of performance marketing.

1. Social media advertising

Not all social media marketing is performance marketing—but savvy enterprise marketers know how to leverage paid social media campaigns for performance marketing. This strategy involves paid ad campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Successful performance marketing on social media usually features a funnel structure. In other words, you would design a series of campaigns to move potential buyers through your sales funnel.

Example of social media advertising in action

Let’s look at a hypothetical social media campaign for an athletic apparel retailer. This retailer’s first social media ad campaign will be all about building awareness, so they’ll use a blend of information about demographics and interests — specifically women aged 18-30 who enjoy yoga, pilates, and outdoor sports — to target potential customers on social media with ads. These ads will highlight how comfortable the retailer’s athletic wear is for these particular activities. Customers who see them are now aware of this brand, their products, and the specific benefits of those products.

From there, the next step is a retargeting campaign that reaches people in the consideration phases. These would-be buyers have visited your site but haven’t yet converted. Having collected additional data on their target audience (like geographic locations, popular career choices, or income levels) from the initial awareness-building campaign, the athletic apparel company can now retarget that audience with more specific ads that are highly tailored to needs and interests, which encourages customers toward a purchase decision.

You can follow this step with a third paid advertising campaign that highlights special offers to encourage conversions, or you can use other types of content marketing to round out the final stages of the sales funnel. For example, the athletic apparel company may use dynamic content on store pages to promote special offers to buyers who are ready to convert.

2. Search engine marketing (SEM)

SEM is an essential tool for enterprise marketers, and depending on your industry, clicks and conversions can vary. For example, research shows that the highest average conversion rate for 2023 was 13.41% for the animals and pets sector. But the lowest? That was the apparel and fashion sector, where the average conversion rate was only 1.57%.

To make the most of SEM initiatives, remember that these campaigns work much like social media performance marketing. Rather than paying for ads on social media, you’re purchasing and placing ads on search engines so that your campaigns drive traffic from search engines to your website.

You’ll leverage behavioral data to target potential customers with different ads that lead to varying destinations—such as landing pages to build awareness, product pages for customers who are considering specific items, or content marketing assets for customers seeking information. Each destination encourages a different desired action.

Example of search engine marketing in action

Let’s look at two hypothetical examples of how brands might use search engine marketing:

• Example one: An outdoors footwear retailer is looking to drive traffic of potential buyers to their e-commerce store. They decide to create an ad that will appear when someone searches for “hiking boots for women.” Based on this search query, it’s likely that the user is in the market for a pair of boots and their purchase intent is high. So when clicking on the brand’s ad, it will redirect the potential customer to an e-commerce page that shows all their women’s hiking boot options.
• Example two: A regional outdoors and hiking club offers paid memberships that allow the organization to develop educational programs, maintain trails, and support conversation efforts. They are looking to attract potential members that are in the early stages of the sales funnel, so they decide to run an ad that will appear when people within their regional area search for “what equipment do I need for hiking?” Based on this search query, they know the user is interested in hiking and is looking for an informational resource. When clicking on the organization’s ad, the user is redirected to a content marketing blog post that lists out the gear that’s needed in different seasons. The user isn’t being prompted or encouraged to make any purchases; this is simply a way to increase brand awareness and nurture a potential future member.

3. Influencer marketing

According to the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2024, influencer marketing is still expanding rapidly. More than 85% of survey respondents intend to have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing in 2024—and nearly 60% expect to increase their influencer marketing spend in 2024.

As with social media advertising, not all influencer marketing is a type of performance marketing—56% of those surveyed use this type of marketing to create user-generated content, which helps expand brand awareness and engagement. However, there is an element of performance marketing within influencer marketing—and 23% of survey respondents reported using this marketing technique to generate sales.

So how does performance marketing intersect with influencer marketing? These days, many brands rely on influencer partnership platforms. These are platforms where you can network with influencers—then contract those who are the best fit for your brand. From there, you can provide influencers with affiliate links, promotional offers, and other sales tools that they can use to send clicks and conversions your way.

Influencer marketing platforms are crucial not only because they connect you with influencers who have target audiences relevant to your business’s needs but also because they offer a lot in the way of automation and data analytics.

Most will allow you to automatically create affiliate links so that you can track how those links are performing. For analytics, most platforms will give you robust datasets that let you track each influencer’s performance so that you can see which individuals—and which types of content that they publish—are performing best.

As with most other types of performance marketing, the ROI can be high. While some influencers charge per post or for content packages, other influencer contracts stipulate that you only pay when the influencers get members of their audience to perform specific actions, like clicks or conversions.

Example of influencer marketing in action

Let’s say that you’re marketing for an international hotel brand, and you want to generate more clicks and conversions through influencer marketing. The first step is to find and register on an influencer marketing platform that features a broad selection of great influencers in the travel vertical. You read up on what they have to offer and check out their analytics to learn more about their reach and their target audience.

With this information, you can choose and contract with a few influencers whose audiences overlap with yours. If you’re paying influencers to produce content about your brand, then the influencers will create content about your hotels—maybe even stay at them as part of their travels so that they can showcase your offerings in their videos. You can also offer affiliate links that the influencer can include in their posts.

Potential customers who follow these influencers will not only get to see firsthand what it looks like to stay at your hotels, but they’ll also have easy access to the affiliate link included with the post so that they can click and book their own stay.

4. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is very similar to influencer marketing—but instead of paying influencers to promote your brand, you’re paying affiliates. Common types of affiliates include product reviewers, bloggers, and product comparison sites. Enterprises leverage affiliate marketing platforms to find and contract affiliates who have the right target audiences, and then use the platform to create links that the affiliates can place within their content to generate clicks or conversions.

Affiliates only get paid when users click the link or make a purchase. Just as with influencer marketing, most affiliate platforms provide data and analytics so that you can track both links and affiliates so that you can optimize for top performance.

Example of affiliate marketing in action

To see a prime example of how affiliate marketing works, check out NerdWallet. This is a well-known affiliate site that people visit when they need recommendations for credit cards, banks, insurance, and other financial products. Articles, reviews, and product comparisons all feature affiliate links to help move customers from the awareness phase to the next stages of the sales funnel.

Yelp Audiences: next-level enterprise performance marketing solutions

The objective of every performance-based marketing strategy is to get results in the form of increased clicks, better lead generation rates, or improved conversion rates. Yelp for Brands offers tools to help you create high-performing campaigns—and one of those tools is Yelp Audiences.

Leverage purchase-ready audiences

There’s a problem inherent in most types of performance marketing solutions. Whether you work with influencers and affiliates, or pay for SEM and social media campaigns, the audiences aren’t necessarily purchase-ready.

Consider influencer marketing as an example. If you’re a beauty brand who has contracted with several different beauty influencers to help you increase conversions on a new line of lipsticks, those influencers will create different kinds of content that showcase your brand’s new offering. These will include reviews, shade comparisons, makeup tutorials, and other types of messaging. As part of their contract with your brand, the influencers will include links, promotional offers, and other sales materials that encourage their audience to purchase your product.

And that’s where the problem becomes apparent. Some members of these audiences are watching influencer content with the intent of making a purchase, but many more will be there because they’re interested in keeping up with the latest color trends or because they’re watching tutorials for their own benefit.

Yelp offers a solution to this problem. Each month, more than 80 million people visit Yelp searching for businesses of all kinds—and these are high-intent customers who are ready to buy. According to a recent survey, 57% of users reach out to businesses they’ve found on Yelp within a day, and 90% are on Yelp specifically because they’re comparing options before making a purchase.

Access customers off-platform through Yelp Audiences

Historically, accessing Yelp’s high-intent customer base meant placing your brand in front of consumers through Yelp Pages along with other advertising products offered via Yelp’s apps and websites. While these tools are highly effective for performance marketing, Yelp Audiences takes it further by allowing you to access this high-intent audience outside of Yelp.

Even better, Yelp Audiences is a programmatic option that automatically identifies the users who will be most relevant to your business—making your online marketing efforts easier and more effective.

So how does it work? When you get started with Yelp Audiences, you gain access to an enormous network of purchase-ready users. Yelp has information on what these purchase-ready users are in the market for and what their preferences are when considering businesses. Using that information, you’ll create an ideal target audience and Yelp Audiences then places your ads in front of that audience elsewhere online—like the pages of popular publications or on social media sites.

Here’s an example from a potential customer’s perspective. Let’s say this customer recently used Yelp to search for car dealerships in their area. This is a clear sign this user is ready to buy. Afterall, 83% of users make a purchase from a business they found on Yelp. This customer plans to visit the dealership he discovered on Yelp to start car shopping this weekend.

Later that day, the user is online, browsing car publications to learn which makes and models are the most reliable. They get distracted and start checking scores of their favorite games on sports sites. As they browse across the web, Yelp Audiences displays ads for a car brand that is advertising with Yelp Audiences. This catches the user’s attention and sparks them to click through the ad, which takes them to a landing page that prompts them to sign up for a test drive for that brand.

Because this customer has been actively searching for a new car and because the Yelp Audiences ad was in the right place at the right time to capture their attention, the customer clicks and registers for the test drive. As the hypothetical car brand, all you had to do was create and place your digital advertising via Yelp Audiences.

Refine campaigns with powerful metrics

With Yelp Audiences, placing targeted ads in front of high-intent consumers is just the beginning. The platform delivers powerful metrics designed to help you continuously increase your ROI.

Standard metrics include KPIs like conversions and click-through rates. And beyond that, Yelp Audiences will also show you vital information like where conversions are coming from.

• Through Yelp Pixel, you can measure the numbers of conversions generated from Yelp Audiences
• Telmetrics measures the number of phone calls that Yelp Audiences generates for your business
• LiveRamp measures offline transactions generated from Yelp Audiences
• Through Foursquare or Cuebiq, you can measure the number of store visits generated from Yelp Audiences

Using these metrics and more, you can analyze your current campaign and apply what you’ve learned to future campaigns so you can optimize your ad spend even further.

Make performance marketing easy with the right solutions

Performance marketing is the best way to drive sales while making the most of your marketing budget. Social media advertising, search engine marketing, influencer marketing, and affiliate marketing are all great enterprise performance marketing solutions that can help you maximize your ROI.

While there are many different types of enterprise performance marketing solutions, Yelp for Brands is where you can target high-intent customers with both on-platform marketing and off-platform advertising that brings in clicks and conversions from around the internet.

To discover how you can meet your goals with Yelp, book a demo to learn more about Yelp Audiences.