- What do performance marketing executives do?
- Performance marketing executive career path
- Performance marketing executive salaries
- Qualifications and training
- Performance marketing executive skills
- Pros and cons of being a performance marketing executive
- Performance marketing executive work-life balance
- Performance marketing executive employers
- Related jobs to performance marketing executive
- More information
Do you have great analytical skills? Are you results-oriented and driven by wanting to achieve the best results? If you’re creative and business-minded, a career as a performance marketing executive could be for you.
Are you interested in working as a performance marketing executive? Explore the opportunities in marketing and PR available to you right now.
What do performance marketing executives do?
Performance marketing executives work on ad campaigns for organisations. This may be pay per click advertising, social media advertising or other forms of advertising in emails or as content on websites. Your job as a performance marketing executive is to make the highest number of people possible access the products or services that your client offers online through highly targeted ad campaigns. Here are the tasks that performance marketing executives perform:
- Have meetings with clients to discuss the type of advertising that they need and any suggested content or requirements for the ads
- Have meetings with your team to discuss the work you should do for the ad campaign
- Research the target demographic to understand their needs and the type of content that appeals most to them
- Create ad campaigns and work with copywriters, film producers and graphic designers to make targeted and professional ads
- Analyse previous campaigns and monitor the performance of current campaigns to identify what was successful and what you can improve on in your future work
Performance marketing executive career path
The career path for a performance marketing executive takes you up to many levels of seniority in a company. Here are the steps that you can take in performance marketing:
Entry-level
Your career begins as a performance marketing executive. In this role, you are responsible for coming up with ideas for ad campaigns, writing and creating the campaigns and monitoring their success.
Career progression
A mid-level performance marketing executive has greater influence over the campaigns than an entry-level position, bringing in more complex ideas and suggesting ad concepts that are original and innovative. In this role, you have more opportunities to speak to clients and understand their needs. You should have a good knowledge of search engine optimisation so the content you make stands out and can be viewed by the highest number of consumers possible.
After a couple of years of experience, you become a performance marketing manager. In this role, you assign budgets for ad campaigns as well as manage the content of less senior colleagues in your team. You may research new ways of advertising and suggest these to your clients.
Future career
With a great track record and a good number of years of experience, you are promoted to head of digital performance. You oversee the work of the performance marketing team, maintaining the standard of work that you expect from your team and identifying areas for improvement. This includes training new employees. You work with other marketing and development teams to design ad campaigns for new products and services in development.
As director of performance marketing, you are responsible for the performance of the entire marketing team. You make sure your team’s work is as successful as it can be because the fault of any missed opportunities or failures in marketing falls on you. Your job includes working on the long-term performance marketing strategy, encouraging consumers to access products and services and encouraging upselling and repeat service through the ad campaigns that you manage.
With a great deal of experience, you move to a vice president of digital marketing role. The scope of this job extends beyond performance marketing and you are in charge of the teams working on the brand and other marketing areas. You monitor consumer engagement and how well campaigns are going to understand consumer trends. Whilst this may be a highly stressful position with a great deal of responsibility, the perks and paychecks may make it worth the years of experience to get here.
Performance marketing executive salaries
Your career in performance marketing could lead to great progression in a company. Here are the salaries that you could have in your career:
- Entry-level performance marketing executive jobs typically give you between £23,000 and £27,000 per year.
- Mid-level performance marketing executive jobs range between £27,000 and £32,000 per year.
- Performance marketing managers typically earn between £35,000 and £40,000 per year but could earn up to £47,000 per year depending on the company.
- Head of digital performance roles pay an average of £66,000 per year whilst directors of performance marketing roles could earn you £100,000 per year.
Learn more about salaries in Marketing & PR.
Qualifications and training
The success of a performance marketing executive is based on how successful the ad campaigns that they run are. Having an education in marketing and work experience in a similar role could help you begin your career. Here are the steps to take to become a performance marketing executive:
Education
Many people in performance marketing executive positions have an undergraduate degree. Some have a relevant degree to the job like marketing, business studies, economics and statistics. However, most degree subjects that provide relevant transferable skills will be accepted. This includes most humanities and essay-based subjects which teach you writing skills to use when designing and creating ad campaigns and maths-based subjects which teach you analytical skills to use when analysing the success of an ad campaign.
A university degree isn’t necessary to be a performance marketing executive. You can also get a relevant college diploma like marketing or digital marketing. These are often shorter and cheaper than a degree and may give you more skills that are directly relevant to a performance marketing executive job. Hiring managers for some higher-level jobs may prefer a degree to a diploma. However, having a good track record and experience should mean having a diploma instead of a degree shouldn’t hold you back.
Work experience
Alongside a degree or diploma, having work experience ideally positions you for a job as a performance marketing executive. This is because you already know the types of tasks that you will do in an entry-level position and already have some experience. You could do an internship or a work placement in a marketing firm or in the marketing department of a company.
Are you interested in gaining work experience? Explore the marketing internships and industrial placements available to you right now.
Performance marketing executive skills
Being a performance marketing executive requires a good understanding of how to advertise well, what the target demographic responds to and how to use online platforms to your advantage. Beyond this, here are the necessary transferable skills that you need to work well as a performance marketing executive:
Soft skills
- Creativity. Your job boils down to making ad campaigns. Having a creative mind helps you suggest new and interesting ideas for ads that catch consumers’ eyes and make them want to check out a product or service.
- Analytical skills. You need to identify how well your ad campaign is going and how successful the previous ones you’ve completed were. This requires analytical skills so you can understand the statistics.
- Attention to detail. Creating ads could mean writing a paragraph or just a few carefully selected words. Using exactly the right curated words to describe a product or service in the way that your client wants requires good attention to detail.
- Teamwork. You need great teamwork skills to build up an ad campaign with your colleagues which you are all proud of and sell the product or service well. Working collaboratively helps you improve your own work by learning from the team around you and also improves the work of the team as a whole making the client happy and the campaign more successful.
Learn more about the skills you need to get into Marketing.
Pros and cons of being a performance marketing executive
Pros
- It is a high earning career with good progression and pension schemes
- You may receive great benefits to working for some top companies including access to gyms and free private health care
- You have the opportunity to work with lots of different clients and learn about many areas of business and products that you didn’t know about before
- You can leave your work in the office when you go home
Cons
- Whilst there are many jobs available in performance marketing, it’s a highly competitive field and so it may be difficult to get a job
- Since performance marketing is almost entirely results-oriented, if your ad campaign doesn’t perform well, the responsibility is on you which you may find stressful. Successful ad campaigns encourage the client to use your services again and less successful ad campaigns do the opposite
- You have many tasks to do in a day and work long hours to complete them
Work-life balance
This is an office-based job in which you could work standard working hours of 9am to 5pm from Monday to Friday. You may work overtime hours around deadlines or on more difficult projects. Since you have frequent deadlines and a high workload, working long hours may become standard.
Performance marketing executive employers
Since performance marketing is such a well-established mode of advertising, there are many top companies hiring graduates to learn the basics and begin their careers. Here are some companies that you could work for in performance marketing:
Jobs related to performance marketing executive
More information
Are you interested in a career as a performance marketing executive? Explore the current performance marketing executive jobs available to you right now.