Nearly a hundred years ago, merchant and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker gained fame for saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  

Wanamaker expressed well the frustration and challenge at the time of measuring cause and effect for marketing programs.  

In recent decades, marketing efforts have often been separated into brand (or awareness) marketing vs. performance-based marketing.

Marketing is treated as an expense with budgets set quarterly. When budgets are reached, marketing programs stop. Sound familiar?

Redefining performance-based marketing

In recent years, the pace of innovation in marketing technology has been staggering, and the growth of online marketing and e-commerce, including the emerging social and mobile marketing channels, has created amazing new opportunities.

Marketing channels, strategies, and metrics have evolved to the point that virtually all marketing can be considered performance-based.

Effective working media dollars are revenue-generating and literally pay for themselves.

Here at Wize Commerce, our shopping network sites like Nextag do not have marketing budget caps: our investment decisions are performance-based, and as long as we are hitting our strategic targets, we continue investing.

We dynamically track, test, and adjust. Since performance-based marketing is bringing in profitable incremental revenue, we don’t focus on the expense, we focus on the cost of sale.

Getting your marketing department and finance department in synch

If your competitors are out-spending and out-performing you, the solution lies with….your finance department.

Whether your goal is revenue per visit, margin dollars, or customer lifetime value, work with your finance team to model investment and develop a growth, not an expense, strategy.

Peak marketing

To execute a marketing growth strategy optimally, it sure helps to have the right people, process and technology.

If your company does not yet have the skill, infrastructure, metrics, cross-platform expertise, or deep category-specific domain knowledge, you may make the wrong investments or even worse, miss growth opportunities.

Now you know why the average CMO only lasts 18 months on the job.

That’s where Wize Commerce comes in.

For over ten years, we’ve been able to succeed with performance-based marketing at a scale, and with results, that others can’t match.

Our Silhouette service lets you learn and generate results launching new marketing channels or running bake-offs for current ones, all with no risk of impacting your current marketing programs today.

Want to learn more?  We’re ready to talk when you are.