The real toolkit for Performance Marketing success
August 4, 2025
Hemadri Negi, Head of Paid Media, THG
Want to become a more desirable hire in marketing? It's not about tactics, it's about mindset and skillset that deliver long-term results. Here are three essential pillars for marketing career success from my own experience.
Leadership traits: It's about actions, not titles
Your title doesn't make you a leader, your behavior and ability to influence does. Whether you're an executive, manager, or individual contributor, these principles apply.
The honest truth is that you won't be liked by everyone all the time. Great leaders make unpopular decisions based on foresight that others don't yet see. You must be willing to ruffle feathers while maintaining strong relationships, making your boss shine, giving your team confidence without micromanaging, and treating peers as friends.
Direct, open feedback is kindness. Forget the "shit sandwich" technique (compliment-criticism-compliment), people see right through it. Why not try this framework instead:
State your observation (not your story): "Tom, you didn't deliver this report"
State the impact: "The impact is X, Y, Z"
Learn and listen (most people skip this step)
Align on next steps
Offer assurance and build confidence
Thank them for being open to feedback
This delivers constructive feedback while building long-term trust and respect.
Adaptability is the #1 skill businesses seek. As Darwin said: "It's not the strongest that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most willing to change."
Here’s three ways you can enhance your adaptability:
To your team: Be consistent and patient. Simple for you isn't simple for them. Be willing to actually change your mind, not just listen to make people feel heard.
To external teams: Everyone speaks different languages. Finance speaks numbers, brand speaks creative vision. A "hook" means different things to performance marketers versus brand teams. Learn their definitions and speak their language.
To managers and seniors: Get off your mountain and stand on theirs. They see more context. Ask: "Am I missing something? Help me understand the context."
Stop chasing a single source of truth
At Myprotein, we use multiple sources: platform data for short-term daily optimization, MTA (multi-touch attribution) for day-to-day decisions and analytics/incrementality testing for long-term directional planning (26+ weeks).
This approach enabled radical budget mix changes that delivered 5% revenue growth, 4% gross profit increase, and maintained cost of sale efficiency, massive gains for a multi-million pound business.
There's no fixed playbook for marketing success. If there were, we'd all have consistent results. Marketing is about constantly solving current challenges and evolving your strategy. When everything goes south, you either accept it or get to work solving one problem at a time.
Learn more to earn more.
Over time, I’ve managed to increase my base salary by 124% while staying at the same company through intentional learning, moving from paid to CRO (learning HTML/CSS coding), managing 20+ person teams, handling multiple markets, and building AI-powered creative systems.
Growth is intentional, nobody accidentally climbs Mount Everest. Learning isn't just knowledge; it's knowledge plus action. Test, apply, and evolve.
My final takeaway is to make learning accessible: five minutes of reading every two weeks through curated book summaries can transform your career trajectory. The compound effect of consistent learning creates exponential value over time. It’s why I created Inside the Learning Loop, feel free to subscribe and see if it works for you.
