9-step framework for performance marketing

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A 9-step framework for performance marketing.

Read time: 7 minutes

If you know someone who is running ads at an agency or for a brand and their entire day is around getting the brief, setting up the campaign, taking the campaign live and sharing the post-campaign evaluation, then that person is not a performance marketer.

Performance marketing starts from what questions you ask while taking the brief to what are your learnings post-campaign that you intend to use in forthcoming campaigns.

It is a flywheel of getting the relevant details in the form of a brief to evaluating the success of a campaign against the brief.

In between there are more steps.

Remember, performance marketing ≉ running ads.

Performance marketing is much deeper than that.

When I take up a project, I spend a good number of hours understanding as much as I can about their business.

The market, the business model, their business levers, the industry, the weaknesses etc. The more I understand, the better strategy I am able to put forward.

At the same time, setting the right expectation is critical.

As an experienced marketer, you would always want to do the right thing but experience doesn’t guarantee success.

Experience guarantees you make 1 less mistake in your business that could save you millions.

Hence, setting the right expectation in the beginning that driving the business outcomes is a long process and a collective effort.

The reason I say the long process is because there are primarily 9 steps involved in doing performance marketing right.

And you have to gather learnings at each step and repeat it for multiple campaigns to arrive at a sweet spot.

Here are the steps:

Every step requires its own detailing.

As a performance marketer, you need to know the nuance of every bit of these steps.

One step is correlated to the other, and if there is a lack of clarity or incorrect expectation set up with the client or brand then that campaign is set up for a disaster.

Let’s talk about each step:

1. Objective/Goal - This is where I have seen many performance marketers or agencies go wrong.

If you are not understanding the goal of running a campaign from the client before setting it up, it is not possible for you to give correct answers to the questions the client may ask later.

In many interactions I have seen a brand asking this question to the agency- It is great that we did top of a funnel awareness campaign and 2 million people saw our ad, but why did only 20 people shopped?

The brand is asking the right question.

2 million people viewing your ad and only 20 conversions sound fishy.

But is it?

No.

Let me explain: when you are running ads on awareness, ad machines (Google, Facebook etc.) are optimising to give you more eyeballs, but they are not optimising to give you sales.

Hence, setting the expectation right with your client before starting an awareness campaign is critical.

Don’t set the expectation of immediate sales from an awareness campaign, define the KPIs that are in sync with an awareness campaign and measure those.

What KPIs to look at when you are doing a brand awareness campaign can be a topic in itself for another newsletter.

The first question that Facebook and Google ask you when you start setting up your campaign is choosing the objective or goal for it.

While Facebook ads have 6 Objectives or goals- Awareness, traffic, engagement, App promotion, sales and leads.

Google ads have 7 objectives or goals- Brand awareness and reach, product and brand consideration, website traffic, app promotion, local store visits and promotions, sales and leads.

Make sure you understand the goal of a campaign first, set the expectation right with the client with KPIs to be tracked and report the performance of a campaign based on the selected objective.

2. Target audience group identification: This is not a guessing game.

I have seen many marketers decide about the target audience for a brand by playing a guessing game. ‘People who do this may also do this.’

That is not an ideal approach to take in order to find your target audience.

From my experience, over a period of time, I have built a framework with the help of which you can segregate your target audience.

The framework is called P1, P2, and P3 audiences.

P1 audiences are the people who are most likely to buy your product or service.

P2 audiences are people who can be convinced into buying and

P3 audiences are people who will need a lot of education before they buy.

Let’s understand this with the help of an example:

Let’s say you want to find P1, P2 and P3 audiences for the mediation app- Calm.

Now before you read ahead, ask yourself who will be the P1 audiences for calm.

When I asked this question in one of the workshops, participants responded- P1 audiences for Calm could be working professionals because they are usually stressed and may seek a solution like Calm.

While this is how I would look at P1, P2 and P3 audiences for Calm.

P1- People who are most likely to buy- people who have taken free trials of Calm, website, app visitors of Calm

P2- Someone who can be convinced into buying- People who are doing Google search on ‘meditation app’, ‘calm app’, or portraying social media engagement with similar apps

P3- Someone who needs a lot of education- People who are working professionals, people with stressful jobs, C-level executives etc.

Hence, try to use the above framework to arrive at your TG definition.

3. Channel identification

Once you define your audience, the next step is to circle down on the channels where these audiences are most active.

Channel identification also depends on the approach a brand wants to take.

If a brand is chasing aggressive growth and in the process creating demand for the product and of themselves then they would do both Google and Facebook ads where a mix of awareness, consideration and conversion campaigns would be done.

If a brand wants to focus on RoAS and wants an immediate return on the dime they spend, then they would usually go with the approach of running conversion ads on Facebook/Instagram or Google.

4. Content strategy- The quality of your input determines the quality of your output.

Content, creative, communication, and pitch are the fuel to performance marketing. In fact, it is commonly said in performance marketing that the right creative finds the right audience.

Spend time cracking your pitch, and it need not be discounting your brand every time.

What differentiates you, why should your audience care about you, and what impact will you make in your audience’s life are some of the questions you have to answer.

And please follow an honest narrative here.

Your audience is smarter than you think, anything that you pitch as a larger-than-life solution with lofty promises will be caught sooner than later.

5. Landing page setup/testing- Leave a lasting impression.

Imagine you have cracked the best pitch with your ad, did the right targeting, your ad is served to the correct target audience but when they click on your ad, they are exposed to a poorly designed landing page and now they struggle to understand what you stand for and what problem are you solving.

The landing page is a very important part of the successful ad campaign and your job is to make the browsing and purchase experience smooth for your audience.

If you are a non-e-commerce business then you can watch this reel for your homepage and campaign landing pages.

If you are a small business, you can consider using tools like Unbounce to create quick, no-code landing pages.

If you are e-commerce ensure your page load time is 2-3 seconds and you serve the relevant category page to users based on their interest or intent.

6. Budgeting- Delegate monies as per objective.

More often than not, whenever I ask a potential client about what is their budget for performance marketing I get a response- we can spend any amount of money as long as we are getting sales.

This is a big red flag for me.

Again, more often than not, I avoid working for them.

The reason is simple, lack of clarity.

As a business owner, you need to arrive at a safe number to begin with.

A number against which you may not get the 100% ROI.

For agencies, this number is typically the first month spends and the rest of the planning is done depending on this number.

There are hardly any brands that get 100% ROI or 1x RoAS in the first quarter of business operations.

It takes time to build a foundationally strong business.

And this expectation has to be clear between the brand and the agency.

Note, I am not referring to blended RoAS here. I am referring to platform-based RoAS.

7. Launch campaign- Devil lies in execution.

Setting up the campaign right is so underrated.

I would like to thank each and every one of you working on the agency side or brand side who set up actual campaigns on the dashboards.

To someone who has never done it themselves, to them setting up campaigns may feel like an execution-heavy task.

But apart from just execution, the job also needs a lot of patience, expertise and skills.

You may make the best strategy on paper but if the campaigns are not set up right, everything can go south.

It is so important that one should take their time and create all the necessary audiences, test pixels, use UTMs, and create a robust hierarchy of campaigns.

Once the campaign is set up, one should always review it thoroughly before taking it LIVE.

Because once it is live and if you make a significant edit to your campaign later, its learning goes for a toss.

8. Track performance

This is where you circle back to the KPIs you decided while defining the goal of your campaign in step 1.

The general rule of thumb in running ads is that you plan monthly and optimize weekly.

Every campaign goes through 3 phases: Review, learning and active. This is true for both Facebook and Google.

The review phase is where Google and Facebook review your ads whether they follow their ad policies or not.

Once the ads are approved by Google and Facebook, they go under the learning phase.

When your campaign is in the learning phase, it is recommended that you make minimum changes because the campaign is not stable yet.

One day you may get a sale for ₹500 the other day this number could be ₹1500. So wait till your campaign comes out of the learning phase.

Thereafter comes the third phase where your campaign is Active, which means you should expect your campaign to stabilise now.

Also, ensure you are looking at the right metrics or KPIs depending on the goal.

For ex., if you are doing an awareness campaign, CPM is a better metric to look at than CPA.

9. Optimize campaigns- A never-ending process.

There is no general rule of thumb to optimise campaigns on Facebook and Google.

Everyone applies their own experience and learnings.

However, in my experience, there are 2 foundations one needs to look at in order to optimise their campaigns- data and creatives.

Meta reports 50+ metrics of an ad, almost similar to Google.

Once you decide on metrics that you want to track, you take optimisation calls depending on how close or far you are to better that metric at the given budget.

In the case of Google search ads, one of the most important metrics to look at is the Quality score and one needs to optimise a campaign based on this score.

Quality score is a score on a scale of 10 that tells us what is the quality of our ad and user experience against a particular keyword.

In most cases, the lower your quality score, the higher will be your CPC.

Hence, in the case of Google search, optimisation is done on the basis of Quality score.

In the case of Google search, optimisation can also be done on the basis of actual sale data.

For ex., if a fashion brand is getting 85% of its sales from the top 5 cities, but if its campaign is running PAN India, it can think of approaches to further scale the campaigns for those 5 cities.

In the case of Google search again, the optimisation can also be done on the basis of Impression share. The % of times your ad shows up for a keyword v/s your competition.

Many brands I have seen when they are in the aggressive growth phase, chase an impression share of 90% or more in order to show their ads more often.

So there is no fixed path to optimising your campaigns, the best thing to do is to use logic and your experience.

If you have limited experience, seek help from people who have more experience.

But this optimisation cycle is usually ongoing, one needs to continuously optimise the existing campaigns, and try out new promotions in order to sustain.

These are the 9 foundational steps of doing performance marketing right.

Ensure you spend enough time on each step to follow it diligently.

That’s it for today, folks.

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Have an awesome Sunday ahead.

Cheers,

Apurv