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How does one become an exceptional Performance Marketer, not just a Button Pusher?
I understand that A performance marketer is a combination of copywriter, media buyer, designer, creative strategist, and data analyst.
How far will setting up campaigns on Google and Meta and facing clients get you in the industry? How do you take your skills to the next level or start your own business one day?
How do you not end up like just another performance marketer and stay above the rest?
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1 Reply
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Being the best is more a journey than a destination as the platforms are always changing. Best place to start is mastering how the platform work, and being able to execute the boring stuff everyday,… day in and day out flawlessly.
No one learns all the different roles you mention in your post at once. Master media buying, then you can expand your skillset. Some people will just be ok at one of the roles in your post. I don’t think you have to be amazing at copywriting, media buying, designing, strategy, and data analysis as those are so different to become a master at all would be almost impossible. Pick the one’s you want to master and then a few you will be just ok at.
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I think you’ll find that if you can understand how marketing fits into the business and learn to explain marketing in the language of business you’ll have an advantage over those who can’t.
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>I understand that A performance marketer is a combination of copywriter, media buyer, designer, creative strategist, and data analyst.
That statement very far from the truth.
A performance marketer is someone that deals with ads and data.
>How far will setting up campaigns on Google and Meta and facing clients get you in the industry?
Pretty far as far as I am concerned.
>How do you take your skills to the next level
MMM and/or MTA are the ultimate skills IMHO
>or start your own business one day?
You can start a business with META ads, just fine
>How do you not end up like just another performance marketer and stay above the rest?
Performance marketers are on top the pyramid alongside with traders (programmatic)
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First, you need to become a Guru with *this* secret hack that Google doesn’t want you to know about.
Then you need to become a Ninja with this other special copy that Facebook doesn’t want you to know about.
And then you need to become a Rockstar with this AI tool that will help ELEVATE your business next to Jeffrey Bezos.So when you get the 3 achievements -> GURI, NINJA and ROCKSTAR, you become the ultimate ENTREPRENEUR EXTRAORDINAIRE and then Ogilvy comes to shake your hand.
And if you add in Bing Ads, Don Draper sends you a pack of Camels (toasted).
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I like to consider myself an exceptional performance marketer. I’ve worked my way to Sr. Director in Under 8 years since switching careers after 10 years in sales.
Being a good performance marketer all really boils down to one thing. Maximize the margin dollars. If you’re the person who consistently turns $1 into more, you’ll be popular. I like to say my job is to make sure we bring in more money than we spend.
The #1 thing to start with is being a good media buyer. I strongly suggest you pick your platform and become an expert. I’m really great with Google ads personally. Not nearly as effective with Facebook, but I got what I needed with Google ads, and now I manage others to run Facebook ads better than I could, so it doesn’t matter.
Optimizing your ads performance is table stakes. As you learn your platform, you’ll start to pick up other things that you need to do to optimize your ad performance. Data analysis will definitely be important. Depending on your platform of choice there may be others. For Google ads, I never really needed to be good at copywriting or creating design, but I had to understand keywords and optimizing product feeds data. For a meta ads expert it would be the opposite.
Don’t sleep on landing pages either. You may or may not control these directly, but they can have a huge impact on your performance so you need to understand them so you can fix them or at least put in good clear requests for someone else to execute.
The final part is understanding the business to put things together so you can maximize margin. Get a handle on other costs so that you can understand margin. Let’s say you’re working in e-commerce and you have two products that are both sell for $100. Product A is really popular and costs $75 to make and ship. Product B is not that popular but only costs $50 to make and ship. You need to understand that a ROAS of $4 on product A is as good as a ROAS of $2 on Product B.
This is where the fun starts. Assuming everything is optimized, then you now have two levers to pull. Scale and efficiency. Use those two levers to make the most money possible when you consider everything else.
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Remember that marketing is about objectives. Many people just do marketing for the sake of it (e.g. “we should be doing SEO/Meta Ads/Instagram!” etc) . Good marketers understand that marketing is a function of the wider business and know how to use it to achieve that business’s broader goals.
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Everyone’s given great advice, so I’ll try to add something I haven’t seen here yet:
Learn to run ads with your own money.
Things change when you’re on the line for your own mistakes or lack of skills.
It forces you to learn and improve your skills much quicker than otherwise, and you become a lot more focused on what matters and what doesn’t.
You can check out CPA networks to find good offers to advertise with conversion tracking integrations for meta, Google etc.
Learning about PNL management, contribution margin and MER are also insanely useful as you get into more important roles.
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I’m seeing many tactical approaches which are valid for the most part. Being an exceptional Performance Marketer goes beyond being great at managing campaigns. I’ve been in the Google Ads space for 20+ years and have found the following to be keys to success.
1. Take care of the money. Respect the responsibility of managing the program budget.
2. Always be learning. Structure your campaigns to learn. Find and follow the YouTube (and even Twitter) channels to learn from the experience of others. Don’t get snowed by the “I got my clients 50x ROAS every time…” blowhards.
3. Communication. Performance marketing can be complex. Your job is to explain it to stakeholders/leadership in a way that they can understand…and explain to their stakeholders & leadership. -
A exceptional performance marketer understands business strategy, communication and can lead an organization to alignment of marketing execution and business objectives. In-platform media execution is table stakes, and in many cases, will not be executed directly by a exceptional performance marketer. But platform execution alone can take you very far – nothing wrong with a career focused on that. But with that in-platform skills set you don’t need to have a great understanding of business strategy, EBITDA, executive pressure, translating business strategy to measurable objective for different teams, etc.
A common mistake I see high level media buyers who want to be great performance marketers is an over investment in tactical solutions. They push multi-touch attribution / media mix modeling / offline import as the holy grail. They see the client as “missing something” whether it be reporting, budget, tools, etc. Nothing wrong with these solutions, I am just idenifying a common ceiling I have observed with performance marketers. No fancy marketing toolset is going optimize alignment with business strategy and win over a board room. If you find yourself surrounded by this mentality you probably work in an agency or a software company and need to get out to continue to grow your skillset on the business strategy side.
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Like others mentioned, it’s about understanding how everything works together and the client’s goal. You can have the best headlines, images, videos, etc., but if they don’t generate leads or sales, they’re worthless. It’s more about understanding the data, having proper conversion tracking, and letting that data guide your decisions.
Every business is unique and cookie cutter strategies don’t work even in the same industry, treating each as their own will also help with performance overall.
This doesn’t happen overnight, as even with us, we needed exposure to a lot of accounts. Most importantly, we managed the accounts ourselves and followed the entire customer journey to understand what was actually working and what wasn’t fully.
My wife and I manage over $3.5 million in annual Google ad spend across all our clients. Does that make me exceptional? I don’t know, I just know focusing on the clients true goals and understanding the data has allowed us to retain a high % of our clients for years.
Also Google and Meta ads are like night and day so strategies, structures, ad copy, images are all very different in approach. It’s hard to compare them 1:1.
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You need to really understand your audience. People focus too much on the tools, and not enough on the target.
Setting up google campaigns alone, ones that work, can get you making $120k a year.
It’s much more about soft skills than hard skills. Anyone can learn what levers to pull. But people who make more are good at advocating for themselves, building trust, and understanding the value of what they’re marketing.
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1. Focus everything you do on real business outcomes. When working with a client, treat it like your own business and focus on ROI. That mindset will help you make savvy decisions and get scrappy/creative.
2. TEST often. This industry changes literally every day and if you aren’t trying new tactics/channels/strategies, you will fall behind. Not every test needs to be a success. Collect the data and learn along the way.
3. Invest time and effort into keeping up with a few great marketing newsletters. They will introduce you to the latest and greatest tools, cutting edge strategies, and will make you a more well-rounded marketer.
4. Take on projects/clients outside of your comfort zone that will push you to learn.
5. Learn how to utilize automation and machine learning to your advantage. Take some prompting courses and streamline the mundane repetitive tasks so you can focus more on omnichannel strategies and setting up systems that help you scale.
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