Defining and documenting key processes as an early step in building your performance marketing program will keep everyone aligned on responsibilities and the frequency with which updates are shared. When people know what to expect, there will be fewer interruptions in people’s workflows and fewer surprises and wasted budget. Documenting can feel like a waste of time, but it should be thought of as a method of creating agreement across the organization and confirming that everyone has the same understanding.
Budgeting
Key stakeholders: Performance marketing & Finance
For the high level budgeting process, it is key to define how frequently the budget will be revisited, what information each party needs to bring to the table, and what parties need to be kept informed once a decision is reached.
It’s important to include key breakdowns in this budget, including the amount to be spent on creative testing and the split between budget for existing, proven campaigns and new tests. This split will be dependent on the lifecycle of the marketing program and the product, the level of risk the organization is willing to take, and the level of success the program has had in the past. If the program is in its early stages and previous campaigns have been unsuccessful, all budget should go to new testing.
Creative Ideation & Production
Creative is the engine of customer acquisition. Creative production processes should define how much creative you need based on your scale of spend, as well as who is responsible for defining the target market and value proposition priorities, ideating concepts, prioritizing concepts and producing concepts.
Creative Testing
Clear creative testing process should be set up to ensure consistency of results and clarity around costs. Key items to define are:
- What channels and platforms will be used for creative testing (you may be defining separate process for separate channels and creatives)
- How many stages will your creative testing process have
- What will your KPI be for each stage
- How much delivery will each stage require, whether that is a dollar amount, impression, click, or install count. Is this based on a target level of statistical significance?
- How and to whom do creative testing results get reported so that they feed back into the ideation process
Campaign Testing
Campaign testing processes are meant to ensure that the most likely campaign candidates are prioritized, that they are tested with the lowest budget possible while achieving some level of statistical significance. The goal here should just be to determine if the campaign is likely a loser so you can kill it. If it meets that minimum threshold, you will learn if it is a game changer as you scale it.
- Create a central place to record new campaign ideas and score them based on likely profitability and scalability
- Determine the minimum number of events you need to have a high level of confidence in the measurement
- Understand if there is some “learning phase” that should be excluded from measurements (this will be different by channel)
- Determine how quickly you want results, then set a daily spend cap and testing calendar to fit that desired cadence
Product
Changes in product can be major risks and opportunities for performance marketing. New features can provide new creative opportunities. Major updates can risk bugs that degrade marketing performance. Changes in performance marketing activities can change the type and scale of users entering the product. Set up clear processes so that leaders in both organizations have clear visibility into these changes.
Reporting
Different groups in the company will need reports on both plans as well as results. Finance teams will need different information from executives and product teams may need yet another set of information. The cadence, content, and distribution of each of these information shares should be defined, as well as whether an e-mail or Slack share is sufficient or if an in person walkthrough is necessary. Regardless of format, these reports should include clear tracking of KPI along with plain language explanations with cause and effect and any next steps from the team.
Final Thoughts
These processes will change over time. They will get more complex and documentation should be updated to reflect the changing nature of your business. Having a record of them will help provide transparency to the organization. The more clearly and precisely they are outlined, the easier it will be to see opportunities to grow and improve. As processes start to solidify a good next step is to look for automation opportunities to free up resources for further innovation.