5 Critical Skills for a Performance Marketing Manager

Performance Marketing in simple terms is a digital strategy where payouts are made to your affiliates based only on performance (or when a user action is complete).

The Performance Marketing Manager is primarily responsible for the management of digital accounts and diversifying the channel mix utilizing display and paid social channels. He focuses on campaign-specific results and drives the marketing department’s commercial performance.

Read ahead to know critical skills for the role of a Performance Marketing Manager:

1. Analytical Skills
The role of Performance Marketing Manager involves a lot of analytical functions like 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 data-driven approach to problem-solving is a must for this role. The performance marketing manager needs to be methodical in his approach while analyzing the statistics and should be able to glean insights to make campaign recommendations.
An analytical mindset will also help the manager garner consumer insights to help develop creative marketing acquisition tactics. Ability to understand and monitor web analytics dashboards and reporting tools is expected and will also make him more efficient and informed. These tools will help him maintain and monitor reports, budgets, campaign performance, ROI, and channel metrics.

2. Strategic Skills
This position involves responsibility for the strategic direction of various marketing channels. This includes:

Setting up, managing, and optimizing campaigns for displaying and retargeting across channels like SEM, display advertising, social media, affiliate marketing, content discovery platforms etc.

Source and implement keywords, measure keyword performance and optimize campaigns based on them
Tweak strategy by evaluating KPIs of all marketing channels and determine necessary adjustments to optimize marketing effectiveness
Understand products, research competition to set up marketing and advertising goals for the brand
Manage placements, interests, topics targeting and in-market audience
Use multi-touch attribution modelling to maximize PPC campaign effectiveness
Develop hypotheses and perform A/B (or multivariate) testing to recommend optimizations
Leverage customer insights to segment, target and reach potential customers
Explore new marketing opportunities like channels, ad formats etc.

3. Decision Making Skills
A successful Performance Marketing Manager is an independent decision maker. He should be enterprising and must demonstrate a thorough understanding of key performance metrics of various channels. A self-starter with quick decision-making quality will help to orchestrate and execute large campaigns.

Set acquisition and growth targets for marketing teams on offline and online channels like search, paid search, mobile, display etc.
Allocate and rebase 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
Analyze and communicate with new channels and new agencies
Scope out and identify new tools and systems to improve performance
Identify pain points to creatively contribute to non-performing areas

Also Read: What are the top performance marketing basics?

4. Technical Skills
Performance marketing can be mastered only through experience and exposure to different levels of campaigns with multiple ad platforms. A performance marketing manager should master the following skill set:

CPA, CPC, CPM, ARPU, and LTV
Experience with PPC, Google Adwords etc is a bonus.
Analytics and database tools like Excel, Google Analytics, Tableau, Marketo etc. and performance marketing platforms
Knowledge and prior usage of tools like Facebook Ad Manager, AdWords, Taboola, Outbrain
Exposure to data visualization and reporting tools is a plus
Keeping abreast of emerging technologies and developments in the digital industry

5. Collaborative Skills
The Performance Marketing Manager has to communicate and collaborate effectively across various levels of the organization. He must work closely with his team members to set goals, report to senior management for campaign status, collaborate with the design team to produce channel-appropriate campaign briefs and creative assets.
He also needs to coordinate with vendors for online paid channels.

Also, extraordinary communication skills (both oratory and written) is a mandate. Being a team player, a performance marketing manager is expected to chart out the goal path and contribute towards goal achievement.

Apart from the above skills, a Performance Marketing Manager should be able to juggle between multiple projects, have an ability to prioritize and meet deadlines and should be adaptable and focused.