Campaign strategy
Which channels, which audiences and which budget for each objective, decided from your numbers rather than from what the platforms recommend.
Capture — visits into intent
Performance marketing measured in enquiries, not clicks
Paid media can buy attention quickly. Whether that attention becomes revenue depends on what it lands on, how it is tracked and how quickly budget moves away from what is not working. We run all three together.
Performance marketing is paid advertising on search, social and display, planned, bought and optimised against measurable business results such as enquiries, sales or donations, rather than impressions or clicks.
What is SEM?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is paid advertising on search engines: ads shown to people searching for terms related to your business, paid for when someone clicks. It reaches people at the moment they are looking, which makes it one of the fastest ways to generate enquiries, provided the page they land on converts.
What it includes
Six parts of a performance engagement
Paid search (SEM)
Search campaigns built around buyer intent, with keyword and negative-keyword lists that keep spend on searches that can actually convert.
Paid social
Campaigns on the social platforms your buyers use, for reaching new audiences, retargeting visitors and supporting launches.
Landing pages and conversion
Pages built or fixed before the budget is spent, because traffic sent to a page that does not convert is the most common waste in paid media.
Tracking and attribution
Conversion tracking and analytics events set up and tested, so every enquiry or sale can be traced back to the campaign that produced it.
Optimisation and reporting
Budget moved weekly towards what works, and reports that show cost per enquiry or sale, what changed and why.
Why do paid campaigns fail to generate revenue?
Rarely because of the ads alone. Common causes are landing pages that do not convert, no tracking of what happens after the click, audiences that are too broad, and budgets left running on campaigns that stopped working. Fixing the journey after the click often does more than changing the ads.
Search or social
Paid search or paid social?
Paid search captures demand that already exists: people searching for what you offer. Paid social creates demand, reaching people who match your audience but are not yet looking. Most accounts need both, weighted by whether your buyers already know they need you.
| Paid search | Paid social | |
|---|---|---|
| Who you reach | People searching for what you offer | People who match an audience profile |
| Intent | High: they are already looking | Lower: you are interrupting |
| Best for | Capturing existing demand | Creating demand, launches and retargeting |
| Main risk | Paying for searches that cannot convert | Reach that never turns into action |
Questions
Performance marketing: common questions
Do you work in our existing ad accounts?
Yes. Where accounts already exist we audit them and work inside them, so the history and data stay with your organisation. Where they do not, we set them up in your organisation's name rather than ours.
How quickly can paid campaigns produce enquiries?
Campaigns can go live as soon as tracking and landing pages are ready. The first weeks are for learning which audiences, messages and searches convert; spend then shifts towards those. Expect early enquiries quickly and steady improvement after, not a perfect campaign on day one.
What should we measure in performance marketing?
The result you actually want: cost per enquiry, cost per sale or donation, and the conversion rate of each step. Clicks and impressions are useful for diagnosis, but a campaign with cheap clicks and no enquiries is not performing.
Should we run paid media before SEO?
Often alongside it. Paid media gives fast results and quick evidence about which messages and keywords convert, which then informs SEO. SEO builds the visibility that does not stop when the budget does. The balance depends on how quickly you need results and how competitive your searches are.
Spend on what converts
We start by checking your tracking and landing pages, so no budget is spent before it can be measured.