By Rawan Al Hussein: Paid Media Strategy & Performance Lead at Expo 2020 Dubai

Rawan Hussein, Paid Media Strategy & Performance Lead at Expo 2020 Dubai

By definition, performance marketing is a form of online advertising in which the advertiser or brand pays only when there are measurable results. When it comes to the experts in this field however, I believe their importance as marketers and their skills can be deployed beyond this simple equation.

At the client side of things, in many instances within large organizations or startups I worked with in the Middle East, I found that the performance marketing division is usually treated as a digital execution machine that mainly reports on media metrics delivered from a particular digital campaign then records some insights and recommendations according to results.

While this could be a major part of what performance marketers do, it isn’t their sole purpose. Much like any other marketing department, their role should ideally be woven into the fabric of the overall marketing functions (be it CRM, Branding, Content or Web development etc.) Here are some reasons why:

  • They fortify your marketing strategies with numbers. (i.e., forecasts and industry benchmarks) – in other words, help you formulate a data driven plan. What company wouldn’t want this competitive advantage?
  • They keep your feet on the ground when you want to achieve unrealistic marketing goals (i.e. a million app downloads in 1 month or 5,000 ticket sales by end of the quarter) by educating you on what’s possible to achieve and what isn’t based on online data and insights coupled with their common knowledge on the digital marketing realm.
  • They help their business’s or marketing’s senior management to make informed decisions a lot more efficiently by predicting the best way forward in conjunction with the business’s objectives. 

While there are business analysts who can help guide businesses on their processes, systems and profitability, for most of the marketing departments within the global brands I’ve worked with for the past 7 years, it is usually the strategists who identify the marketing roadmap which is a perfect scenario but in most of the cases I encountered, they aren’t consistently data driven. Strategists can be extremely organized with their thought process and have a distinctive creativity but there are scarcely any predictions or guarantees that their direction will work. I strongly believe the integration of performance marketers into strategy and planning can pay high dividends for a marketing function and ultimately for the business because they are what will get your engines going when it comes to the execution of your objectives. They translate whatever the business wants to achieve into something that’s tangible and something that you can easily control, optimize against and manipulate. Realizing the potential of the shift in the performance marketer’s role can be of a competitive advantage rather than a pitfall. 

Besides the inclusion of performance marketers in an attempt to be a more data driven modern marketing function, an econometric modelling is essential to adapt into as it is the holy grail of measurement. What it does is it looks to scale the impact of every single piece of marketing you do on the end goal or sale you’re trying to achieve regardless of whether it is an online or offline activity you carry out. So long as marketing functions in the MENA market work in silos and deliver on results independent of each other, a cohesion within the different functions and their results are far likely to be in place.

A fresh process, fresh perspective

Hot desking which is essentially the rotation of employees of different functions within a particular department could help break these silos and get individuals to understand the importance of each function and how they add value into the ecosystem of the marketing department or the organization as a whole.

Now more than ever, I believe that integrated marketing functions in the MENA region will allow for a high success rate of any business as what the world has been experiencing in terms of paradigm shifts (i.e., the pandemic, disruption of data, the evolution of fintech and the list goes on) has threatened many brands’ survival thereby altering the way we normally do business.

So, dare to experiment with your team and dare to make bold decisions for the better of the business. What this time requires more of us is courage, curiosity and creativity. And I can only hope the leaders of our day would oblige.