Performance Marketing & Search Engine Marketing - the Difference

Digital marketing encompasses different strategies that vary in their approach and result. How do you know you are using the right type of marketing that is most effective for your business? Utilising an ineffective marketing strategy can lead to months wasted and thousands of dollars lost.

Performance Marketing and Search Engine Marketing are the two tactics that we will explore today. 

Search Engine Marketing revolves around using Paid and Organic search to boost traffic for your website. The goal of Search is to help rank your website higher in relevant keywords, making you stand out from the competition.

Performance Marketing is a result-driven strategy that focuses on paid search and social. It is an experimental strategy that attempts to find what works best for your business. 

What is Performance Marketing

Performance Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that is result-focused. Success is measured through metrics that matter. Some of these metrics include revenue, gross margin, and lifetime value. 

A key advantage of Performance Marketing is its efficiency. Performance marketing revolves around testing multiple messages towards customers on a regular basis. The constant experimentation means that Performance Marketers are able to find what works, and what doesn’t. This means that an optimal strategy can be created faster, saving money and time for your business.

Check out how we’ve done this for our clients in our Case Studies.

The largest Performance Marketing channel is paid social. This is due to channels like Facebook & Instagram and their ability to generate demand. 

Paid Social introduces these products to the right group of people, generating demand where there wasn’t before. 

A weakness of Performance Marketing is its incompatibility with low cost, low margin products. Paid Social and Search revolves around competing and auctioning for the ad space given by the platform. These auctions can lead to Customer Acquisition Costs that may outweigh the profits, or even the product itself. With this in mind, it may not be appropriate for some businesses.

What is Search Engine Marketing

In the long-term, Organic Search (also referred to as Search Engine Optimisation - SEO) is one of the most sustainable approaches to generate traffic. This is often true, but this also comes with a caveat. It needs a timeframe of at least 6 months to bring results. This is the inherent nature of Organic Search. Organic results takes many months to make any meaningful change.

Another caveat for Organic Search are the costs, which may not always be clear. Optimising a website often requires copywriters, web developers, and a long timeframe. Upon first glance, this type of marketing may seem cheaper than Performance Marketing. Yet, when adding all these factors together, it is often not the case. This is due to the diversified spending, as well as the time required for the service.

Search Engine Marketing also includes Paid Search. It is a method that both Search Engine Marketing and Performance Marketing utilises. It helps promote paid traffic towards your business and website through Google Ads. 

Paid search is a great way to make your brand stand out against the competition with the correct keywords. But, this is also one of its pivotal downfalls. It requires potential customers to actually search for a related keyword. Its exposure is limited to the search volume of the potential customers. It cannot generate demand from thin air.

Conclusion

Search Engine Marketing and Performance Marketing are two very different approaches to digital marketing. Despite this, they still hold their similarities in the use of Paid Search - a vital strategy to help beat out the competition. They both have their pros and cons, so it is important to learn which one would be more appropriate for your business. 

To learn more about Performance Marketing, check out our article here. Think Performance Marketing may be appropriate for your business? To talk to a proven Performance Marketing Agency, contact Launcher Lab today.