Performance marketing is a strategy that includes a range of marketing activities to meet your advertising needs. In this article, we explore the role of performance marketing in the online marketing ecosystem and the five essential skills required by a performance marketing manager.
Performance Marketing or performance-based marketing is a digital strategy in which online marketing is paid for based solely on the performance of the ad or when the desired conversion takes place, such as a sale, lead or click.
The Performance Marketing Manager is primarily responsible for the management of digital accounts and diversifying the channel mix using paid social channels. She focuses on campaign-specific results and drives the marketing department’s commercial performance.
Let’s looks at the key tasks a performance manager is responsible for:
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- Drive campaigns from planning to execution and beyond to meet key performance metrics
- Constantly optimize marketing activities to improve return on investment
- Allocate budgets and analyze and recommend modifications to ad spends
- Collaborate with marketing teams to guide A/B creative tests, incrementality tests, and spend scaling tests on campaigns online and offline to identify what works best
- Test new channels and trends (such as voice search, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Digital Out of Home, etc.)
- Optimize marketing budgets to maximize Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and efficiently scale new customers
Now that we understand the role and the requirements to be fulfilled, let’s look at the critical skills required to ace the position of a Performance Marketing Manager:
1. Analytical Skills
The role of a Performance Marketing Manager involves quite a few analytical functions, such as estimation and allocation of budgets, targeting and segmentation, evaluation of the performance of each channel, and forecasting the performance of campaigns.
Strong analytical skills and a data-driven approach to problem-solving is a must for this role. The performance marketing manager needs to adopt a methodical approach while analyzing statistics and should be able to glean insights to make campaign recommendations.
An analytical mindset will also help collect and examine consumer insights to help develop creative marketing acquisition tactics. The ability to understand and monitor web analytics dashboards and reporting tools is expected as these tools will help him maintain and monitor reports, budgets, campaign performance, ROI, and channel metrics.
2. Strategic Skills
The Performance Marketing Manager position involves responsibility for the strategic direction of various marketing channels. This includes:
Setting up, managing, and optimizing campaigns to display ads and retarget them across verticals, such as SEM, display advertising, social media, affiliate marketing, content discovery platforms, etc. Here’s a list of tasks to apply these skills to:
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- Source and implement the most effective keywords, measure keyword performance and optimize campaigns based on them.
- Tweak your strategies by evaluating the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of all existing marketing channels to determine and make necessary adjustments to optimize marketing effectiveness.
- Understand your products inside out. Research competitors and their strategies to find the gaps in the industry and accordingly set up marketing and advertising goals for the brand.
- Manage ad placements, target the relevant interests and topics and use Google’s in-market audiences for search ads.
- Use multi-touch attribution to track touchpoints across the funnel, which will help maximize Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign effectiveness.
- Develop hypotheses and perform A/B (or multivariate) testing to recommend optimizations
- Leverage customer insights to better segment, target and reach potential customers
- Explore new marketing opportunities such as social media channels, apps, ad formats, etc.
Learn More: 5 Performance Marketing Basics in an Omni-Channel WorldOpens a new window
3. Decision-Making Skills
A successful Performance Marketing Manager is an independent decision maker. She should be resourceful and demonstrate a thorough understanding of key performance metrics on various channels. Being highly driven with quick decision-making skills will help orchestrate and execute large campaigns.
Here are some pointers to remember:
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- Set acquisition and growth targets for marketing teams spread across offline and online channels such as social, search, paid search, mobile, display, etc.
- Allocate and modify budgets for efficient spending
- Tweak strategies and budgets based on current performance to maximize ROI
- Direct and manage agency performance on various channels to achieve goals and ROI targets
- Scope out and identify new platforms, tools and systems to improve performance
- Identify pain points to creatively improve non-performing areas
4. Technical Skills
Performance marketing can be mastered only through practical experience and exposure to various levels of campaigns with multiple ad platforms. A performance marketing manager should master the following:
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- Analytics and database tools such as Excel, Google Analytics, Tableau, Marketo, etc. and performance marketing platforms, such as Social Animal, HubSpot, GetSocial, BuzzSumo
- Knowledge and prior usage of tools like Facebook Ad Manager, AdWords, Taboola, Outbrain
- Exposure to data visualization and reporting tools, such as Tableau, is a plus
- Keeping abreast of emerging technologies and developments in the digital industry
- Experience with Google Adwords is a bonus
Learn More: Is Performance Marketing the Key to Better Mobile Measurability?Opens a new window
5. Collaborative Skills
The Performance Marketing Manager has to communicate and collaborate effectively across teams and various levels of the organization. She must especially work closely with the concerned teams to set goals, report to senior management for campaign status, collaborate with the design team to produce channel-appropriate campaign briefs and creative assets. She also needs to coordinate with vendors for online paid channels.
Final Takeaways
Having good communication skills (both verbal and written) is a mandate. This being a team-player role, a performance marketing manager is expected to chart out goals and contribute towards goal achievement.
Apart from the above skills, a Performance Marketing Manager should be able to juggle between multiple projects, have the ability to prioritize, meet deadlines and be adaptable and focused.
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