Advanced Marketing Strategy and Performance Optimisation Training Course

Course overview

Marketing teams are increasingly expected to prove commercial impact, not simply report campaign activity. Senior marketers must decide where to invest limited budget, diagnose why acquisition or retention performance has changed, and connect channel metrics to revenue, margin and customer lifetime value. This course addresses the gap between campaign execution and strategic performance management, enabling participants to build evidence-led marketing plans that can withstand scrutiny from sales leaders, finance teams and executive sponsors.

Participants learn how to translate business objectives into measurable marketing strategy, segment markets using value and propensity indicators, set channel roles, and allocate investment across acquisition, conversion and retention activity. The course applies marketing funnel analysis, customer lifetime value modelling, attribution assessment, experimentation design, incrementality thinking, dashboard design and scenario planning. Participants work with GA4, Google Ads reporting, Looker Studio and Excel to interpret performance data, identify optimisation opportunities and make defensible budget recommendations.

Delivery combines instructor-led strategy frameworks with practical data exercises, campaign diagnostics, peer review and a multi-channel marketing simulation. Each participant develops a Marketing Performance Optimisation Plan for their own organisation or a supplied business case. The completed plan includes strategic objectives, audience priorities, KPI definitions, channel investment logic, test-and-learn roadmap, reporting dashboard specification and 90-day optimisation actions. This provides an immediately usable document for stakeholder discussion and implementation.

The course is designed for experienced marketing practitioners moving into planning, leadership or performance-focused roles, as well as managers responsible for improving the return from agency, media, CRM and digital marketing investment.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Construct a marketing strategy map linking commercial objectives, audience segments, channel roles and measurable KPIs
• Calculate customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, customer lifetime value and contribution-based return on marketing investment
• Segment target markets using behavioural, value, propensity and lifecycle criteria
• Diagnose funnel leakage using GA4 acquisition, engagement, conversion and retention reports
• Evaluate attribution models and identify where incrementality testing is needed before reallocating budget
• Design controlled marketing experiments with hypotheses, success metrics, sample considerations and decision rules
• Build a Looker Studio performance dashboard specification for executive and channel-level reporting
• Produce a 90-day Marketing Performance Optimisation Plan with budget scenarios, test priorities and governance actions

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Marketing Managers — who must defend marketing plans, budget requests and performance results to senior stakeholders
• Digital Marketing Managers — who need to optimise paid, owned and earned channels against commercial KPIs
• Senior Marketing Executives — who are moving from campaign delivery into strategic planning and performance leadership
• Growth Marketing Managers — who need a disciplined testing, measurement and investment allocation framework
• CRM and Customer Lifecycle Managers — who need to connect retention programmes to customer value and revenue outcomes
• Marketing Analysts — who need to turn channel data into strategic recommendations rather than routine reports

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience of planning, delivering or analysing marketing activity and be comfortable discussing core measures such as reach, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, revenue and return on investment. Familiarity with spreadsheet analysis is assumed, including filters, charts and basic formulas in Excel or a similar tool. Exposure to GA4, paid media reporting or CRM reporting is useful but not essential. Participants do not need to be data scientists, statisticians, SQL users or advanced dashboard developers; the course explains the analytical methods required and provides structured templates for the exercises.

Training methodology

The five days alternate between concise instructor-led briefings and applied performance workshops. Participants assess an anonymised multi-channel dataset in GA4 and Excel, review Google Ads performance evidence, and translate findings into strategic choices using structured templates. Small groups challenge each other’s audience, attribution and budget assumptions in facilitated case discussions. The final day is an application lab in which participants assemble their own or a supplied organisation’s Marketing Performance Optimisation Plan, receive instructor feedback, and define actions to implement within 90 days.

Course outline

Day 1: Strategic marketing performance architecture

• Connecting corporate goals to marketing contribution and commercial outcomes
• Defining market, customer, channel and campaign-level strategic choices
• Building a marketing strategy map and KPI hierarchy
• Distinguishing leading indicators from lagging commercial measures
• Selecting acquisition, conversion, retention and advocacy metrics
• Establishing measurement baselines, targets and performance thresholds
• Creating a marketing performance governance cadence

Workshop: Participants build a strategy map and KPI hierarchy for a business case, producing a one-page performance measurement framework.

Day 2: Audience value, journeys and funnel diagnosis

• Segmentation using needs, behaviour, lifecycle stage and economic value
• Customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost calculations
• Mapping decision journeys across paid, owned and earned touchpoints
• Analysing acquisition, engagement and conversion paths in Google Analytics 4
• Identifying funnel leakage, friction points and drop-off patterns
• Prioritising audiences using propensity, value and accessibility criteria
• Defining channel roles across awareness, demand capture and retention

Workshop: Participants analyse a GA4-style funnel dataset and produce a ranked diagnosis of audience and journey optimisation opportunities.

Day 3: Channel investment and attribution decisions

• Comparing channel efficiency, effectiveness and scalability
• Assessing paid search performance in Google Ads reporting
• Using marginal return and diminishing returns in budget allocation
• Comparing last-click, data-driven, position-based and first-click attribution
• Recognising attribution bias, tracking gaps and channel interaction effects
• Applying incrementality principles to media and CRM decisions
• Developing base, growth and constrained budget scenarios

Workshop: Participants reallocate a fixed marketing budget across channels and produce an evidence-based investment recommendation with assumptions.

Day 4: Experimentation and performance reporting

• Writing testable optimisation hypotheses and expected mechanisms
• Selecting A/B tests, holdout tests, geo tests and matched-market approaches
• Defining primary metrics, guardrail metrics and decision rules
• Understanding sample size, statistical confidence and practical significance
• Prioritising experiments using impact, confidence and effort scoring
• Designing executive and operational views in Looker Studio
• Creating narrative performance reports that explain causes and actions

Workshop: Participants design an experiment backlog and dashboard wireframe, producing hypotheses, measurement rules and stakeholder views.

Day 5: Optimisation plan and leadership application

• Synthesising performance evidence into strategic recommendations
• Setting 90-day optimisation priorities and implementation milestones
• Assigning owners, decision rights and agency governance responsibilities
• Managing data quality, consent and measurement risk
• Preparing investment cases for finance and executive stakeholders
• Communicating uncertainty, assumptions and trade-offs in recommendations
• Establishing quarterly review and continuous optimisation routines

Workshop: Participants complete and present a Marketing Performance Optimisation Plan containing a budget scenario, experiment roadmap, dashboard specification and 90-day action plan.

Tools & standards covered

Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Looker Studio, Microsoft Excel

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions