A Solution to Combating Supply Chain Struggles: Performance Marketing

It comes as no surprise that over the past year and a half, many marketers have been experiencing the impacts of supply chain issues. Looking to the holiday season ahead, over 43% of retailers currently have concerns regarding stock-outs and inventory problems. Companies have been struggling for months to get products to consumers as they face shortages in everything from raw materials and labor to cargo containers and delivery drivers. While many brands are considering pulling back on ad spend this year, why not take advantage of performance marketing and plan marketing efforts around available stock?  

Finding a Solution: Performance Marketing

With inventory low and demand high, many brands are unsure how to stay afloat heading into the holiday shopping season. Countless marketers are even questioning whether it makes sense to promote products they can’t adequately stock. If you too are experiencing stock shortages this year, don’t fret – performance marketing can be the solution. 

Performance marketing was built on the idea of brands only paying for real customers, hence real “performance”. The power of performance marketing is that, in times of supply chain struggles, marketers can budget for the exact number of products they have in stock – no more, no less. Let’s say you’re an e-commerce brand that specializes in makeup products and you’ve been experiencing a shortage of your most popular lipsticks. You’re worried that any additional marketing efforts could push your products to oversell, leaving you unable to fulfill orders. Rather than dialing back your ad spend, you can budget for the exact number of lipsticks you have available to sell over a specific period of time. That way, you can continue to drive sales and avoid overpromising and underdelivering. 

Work with a Trusted Performance-Based Team

Teamwork makes the dream work – working with a network or agency partner that treats you as part of their internal team positions both parties for success. It’s important that when choosing a performance-based network, you take into consideration multiple factors including the tracking technology, fraud prevention efforts, and the pricing models available to align with your specific customer acquisition goals and KPIs. 

Choosing the Right CPA Pricing Model

When it comes to selecting the right pricing strategy, there are a wide variety of Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) pricing models for performance marketers to choose from. Along with CPA, common performance pricing models include Cost-Per-Install (CPI), Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE), Cost-Per-Lead (CPL), and Cost-Per-Sales (CPS), among others. 

Marketers experiencing short stock this holiday season may opt to take advantage of a CPS pricing model. CPS campaigns are a great option for traditional product offerings, as they allow marketers to track each individual sale driven while only paying for actual sales. This pricing model has proven to be very successful within the e-commerce vertical. When preparing to run CPS campaigns, marketers are able to establish a set number of products they’re looking to sell. For example, a popular e-commerce brand has only a select number of sunglasses left and is worried about selling out before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. When running a CPS campaign, this marketer can input the exact number of sunglasses left to sell over a set period of time. The marketer will only pay once a real sale has been made, further ensuring that the exact number of sunglasses allotted are sold. 

Performance Marketing Technology: Hyper-Targeting and Budgeting

In order to track campaign performance and make optimizations where needed, you need a network with a reliable tech stack. At Perform^[cb], our marketers have access to our in-house tracking platform.

Perform[cb]’s platform focuses and functions on AI and human optimizations, granular targeting, and rules-based offer automation to increase day-to-day campaign efficiency. Within the platform, marketers have the ability to build their offers while leveraging advanced segmentation tools and price every traffic source to its genuine value based on geographic area, device type, day-parting, and more. For example, QuoteWizard came to Perform^[cb] Network looking to revise their acquisition strategy and acquire more leads that aligned with their most valuable target demographics. The Perform^[cb] team worked with the marketer to segment traffic by channel, device type, and day-of-week to create improved pricing alignment, thereby enabling them to run their offers consistently. By utilizing platform’s hyper-targeted lead tier system rather than a traditional, flat-payout system, the client was able to competitively position their offer to target more of their most valuable consumers. This resulted in a 92,000% increase in growth, reaching over 220,000 leads in Q4. 

Platform’s dayparting capabilities are extremely helpful in times of high seasonality and low stock, in that marketers can schedule offers around specific start and stop times and dates. Additionally, this functionality allows marketers to set budgets based on time periods or conversions – to fit with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for example. This is just one of the ways that performance marketing can help ease some of the uncertainty around supply chain issues and potential sell-outs happening. 

Perform[cb]’s platform is fully-equipped with the tools and features to make marketer’s campaigns fully customizable, especially in times of limited supply. Our Development team recently introduced a refreshed Marketer Dashboard within platform, giving immediate visibility into how budgets are pacing, along with effortless functionality to allow more time for campaign monitoring and optimizations. Learn how Perform[cb]’s platform revamped Marketer UI and user-friendly navigation can push your holiday campaign to the next level amidst stock uncertainty. 

Supply your Brand with Success

It’s wise to assume that supply chain shortages will continue to be a battle that marketers must learn to overcome. By taking a performance-based approach, marketers can be sure to have a successful holiday season by avoiding customer dissatisfaction and back-ordered inventory. Don’t let supply chain issues stand in your way any longer – if you’re interested in implementing performance marketing into your holiday strategy, reach out to our team of experts to unlock guaranteed success today.