Performance marketing is a very competitive area, and it can be hard to know where to start since this job is fairly new in the digital marketing world. Whether working with Google AdWords campaigns, social media ad campaigns (such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube), or other digital advertising channels, you will definitely need these six must-have performance marketing skills discussed below.
If you’re interested in becoming a performance marketing specialist but aren’t sure what skills are necessary to succeed, then this blog post is definitely for you. We’ll discuss the 6 essential skills that will give you an advantage over other candidates so that you can find success as a performance marketing specialist.
1. Adaptability Skill
The first skill to develop is the ability to learn quickly. The world of performance marketing changes constantly. It’s very important that you can figure out how new concepts work without having someone else teach them to you. Start by reading blog posts, news articles, following current trends, and basically knowing what’s going on in your industry. You can also attend webinars or conferences for more content-based learning opportunities, as well as to get to know more people in the industry.
2. Collaborative Skill
The second skill is the ability to communicate with others. It’s important that you can share your ideas, ask questions about what other marketers are doing, and convey important information without any difficulties whatsoever. Make sure you have a good understanding of basic grammar rules. So that when it’s time for meetings or presentations, you’re able to ace it.
Some of the daily duties of performance marketers that require collaborative skills are:
- Communicate and collaborate effectively across teams and various levels of the organization
- Report to senior management or client (if you’re in an agency setting like Kaliber) on campaign status
- Work together with the designers/design team to produce creative assets and channel-appropriate campaign briefs
3. Strategic Skill
The performance marketing position involves responsibility for the strategic direction of various marketing channels. This includes setting up campaigns, managing them, and optimizing campaigns to display ads and retarget them across verticals, such as SEM, display advertising, video ads, etc.
Here’s a list of tasks that require strategic skills:
- Exploring new marketing opportunities such as social media channels, apps, ad formats, etc.
- Developing hypotheses and perform A/B testing to recommend improvement on campaigns
- Evaluating your campaigns’ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from all of the existing marketing channels to determine and decide necessary adjustments to optimize marketing effectiveness
- Researching on competitors and their strategies to find the missing gaps in the industry and eventually setting up marketing and advertising goals for the brand
- Managing ad placements, targetting the relevant interests and topics, and using Google’s in-market audiences for search ads
- Utilizing multi-touch attribution to track touchpoints across the funnel, which will help maximize Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign effectiveness
- Leveraging customer insights to better segment, target, and reach potential customers
- Sourcing and implementing the most effective keywords, measuring keyword performance, using negative keywords, and optimizing campaigns based on them.
4. Analytical Skill
The fourth skill is the ability to analyze data. With digital marketing comes measurable results and endless amounts of data to help you improve them. Data can be overwhelming and difficult to understand at first. However, if you’re able to find patterns in it or make predictions based on what’s there, then your skills will go from good…to fantastic! Make sure that you have a foundational understanding of statistics and advanced statistics—along with a deep comprehension of data mining.
Some of the daily adaptability skills of performance marketers are:
- Estimating and allocation of budgets for campaign’s media plan
- Targeting and segmentation
- Evaluating the performance of each channel, and forecasting the performance of campaigns
- Collecting and examining consumer insights to help develop creative marketing acquisition tactics
- Monitoring web analytics dashboards and reporting tools to maintain and monitor reports, budgets, campaign performance, ROI, and channel metrics
5. Technical Skill
The fifth skill is the ability to use technical skills like leveraging database tools, dashboards (Facebook Ad Manager, Google Ad Manager, etc), using automation software, etc. Although artificial intelligence/machine learning has become such a big help for the digital marketing industry (such as automated bidding), it is still recommended for you to have a grasp on using your technical skills to maximize:
- Analytics and database tools such as Excel, Google Analytics, Tableau, Marketo, etc.
- Able to use performance marketing platforms, such as HubSpot, GetSocial, BuzzSumo, SalesForce
- Knowledge and prior usage of tools like Facebook Ad Manager, Google AdWords, Taboola, Outbrain is a plus
- Exposure to data visualization and reporting tools, such as Tableau, Google Data Studio
- Keeping up with the emerging technologies and developments in the digital industry
6. Decision-making Skill
The last but not the least essential skill is the ability to understand and use data-driven decision-making. Data-driven decisions are important because they help marketers make better choices. It will lead to higher conversions for their company, which can result in more revenue or increased engagement with customers (depending on the type of company).
Here are some examples of performance marketing tasks that require decision-making skills:
- Setting acquisition and growth targets for marketing teams spread across offline and online channels such as social, search, paid search, mobile, display, etc.
- Allocating and modifying budgets for efficient spending
- Tweaking strategies and budgets based on current performance to maximize ROI
- Directing and managing agency performance on various channels to achieve goals and ROI targets
- Scoping out and identifying new platforms, tools, and systems to improve performance
- Identifying pain points to creatively improve non-performing areas
Final Thought on Performance Marketing Specialist Skills
The world of performance marketing isn’t easy. A performance marketing specialist is someone who has an understanding of their customer’s journey and how to best use technology to meet that goal. They are also experts at conversion optimization. The skills needed for this position include excellent communication skills, patience with data analysis, creativity when it comes to new ideas on how to reach your audience, technical skill, and the ability to think strategically about what you can do next.
If you feel like these are all things that come naturally to you and interest you, then I hope we see more of you! We’re always looking for bright minds like yours in our team so click here at https://kaliber.asia/culture/ to apply today!
