Diary of a Wannabe Performance Marketer: Prologue

Paid marketing has been a key growth-driver to startups and businesses for the longest time. And it is high time I explored this domain of growth marketing.

After working at a startup marketing agency that specializes in performance marketing for almost 4 months, it makes complete sense for me to indulge in some self-education about performance marketing.

Surprisingly enough, this is the only domain that I had never fully explored.

I started my career as a content writer 5 years ago. Got promoted to being Content Strategist, joined a startup as a Demand Gen Associate who also explored community management and a little bit of ABM, moved to another startup (my first YC-grab) as a Growth Marketer, had plenty of scopes to play around with product marketing (which resulted in a few successful launches) and then after a 3 month hiatus, I joined Kaya as their Growth Marketer.

As you can see, I’ve dabbled in almost all fields of marketing except for performance marketing.

This is why after I joined Kaya (YC S21), I knew that even to understand our proprietary advertising tools like COIN, I had to learn paid marketing.

Here are a few things I did vs the results:

1. I enrolled myself in some certifications 2 months ago on Google Ads and Meta Ads. Bc I couldn’t find any good course for LI Ads, I resorted to YT videos.

   
   Results: To be honest, these courses give very surface-level ideas about technical concepts, which are not enough when you are handling clients.

2. Whenever I got stuck at something, I’d search it up on Google.

   
   Results: But most of the time, there won't be any results that could guide me.

3. Then, I decided to go to ChatGPT with my questions.

   
   Results: While sometimes the answers were correct, most of the time they were hypothetical solutions.

4. As a last resort, I resorted to my in-house performance marketer colleagues.

   
   Results: THIS. This is the only way I have been able to learn effectively about different contextual paid marketing concepts.

Other than directly applying these learnings to the projects I’m involved in, I have been noting down stuff in this notebook that you can see in the image to make sure I remember things properly.

And I think it would be a great way to share these learnings here — one by one — so that some noob wannabe performance marketer like me doesn’t have to struggle in future.

That said, I’m starting a series of small chunks of paid marketing learnnings here on Substack and LinkedIn. Tag along if you’d like.

P.S. Content credit definitely goes to my colleagues who very patiently cater to my tons of questions: Chintan, Nirant, and Jee!

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