by Matt Genna

No matter who you are, or where you’re located in the world, you can’t escape from marketing. Think about it – the majority of people each day wake up in the morning and either read the newspaper with their breakfast or listen to their radios on the way to work, not to mention the ones who login to the internet through their computers or smartphones. Regardless, each of these activities allows these people to be subjected to a wide array of advertisements, whether it’s a shameless plug from a radio DJ, a bold ad in the newspaper, or a simple banner on one of your favored websites.

But this does not necessarily have to be a problem – embrace the positives. When being subjected to a lot of advertisements, you’re also increasing your chances of hearing about new sales going on with your favorite stores and companies, as well as learning about new products or services that may be what you’re looking for. This is why marketing companies will explore different avenues to reach consumers.

The two major routes a company will have to decide on when advertising their services or products are if they would like to use performance marketing or traditional marketing. Performance marketing is a type of internet marketing that rewards affiliates or publishers when a specific service is completed; examples would be a sale or lead. Traditional marketing is a more cut and dry form of marketing; examples would be TV commercials or radio spots.

With traditional marketing, companies hope to blast all types of consumers with endless ads and sales. Saying this, I’m talking about ads in newspapers, magazines, posters, billboards, T.V commercials and radio spots. By doing this, you’re reaching out to the masses, which is great if you’re looking to boost your branding through a great number of impressions, but this doesn’t always convert to sales as well as expected. By investing your money into traditional marketing, you’re basically leaving your results up to chance. Let’s say you want to advertise your landscaping service and have decided on going the route of TV advertisement and your commercial is going to air at 5pm. Everyone that is now tuned into the specific station that you have purchased air-time for at 5pm is now watching your commercial; this is great because you know there is an endless amount of consumers hearing about your service. On the other hand, now you have to take into consideration how many of those consumers own a house or land that requires your service – you can’t know how many consumers actually require your service.

Now, with performance marketing, companies seek results from affiliates or publishers through their marketing efforts. Some tactics they use are through online surveys, banner ads, and email marketing, to just name a few. Their purpose is to generate traffic to a company’s website for profit. Meaning, if you visit a website that has a banner ad about a local landscaping service, and you have a house with a large lawn that has gotten out of control recently, you’re going to click it and contact them if the price is affordable. Doing this, you have proven why this form of performance marketing is a beneficial type of advertising. Unlike traditional marketing where you’re in the dark about your results, performance marketing shows you the results you’re looking for, and if not, you don’t have to worry about dishing out the money for something that didn’t benefit you, seeing as publishers and affiliates mainly work off commissions. The only downfall to performance marketing is that it only reaches out to those who are accessible through the internet, but then again, the majority of consumers own a computer and login to the internet daily.

So, all in all I would say performance marketing is the best bet for advertising small to medium sized businesses, seeing as you see the most results for your money.