Performance Marketing for Tech Startups; Expectations vs Reality

Written By: Ajoke Emekene

The beginning of the year is a great time to set goals and one critical part of goal setting is managing expectations. For tech start-ups, a familiar goal that is typically set at the beginning of the year is to grow the number of user acquisitions. It’s no longer news that one of the most effective ways for start-ups to acquire more users is through performance marketing, the branch of marketing that focuses on optimizing the conversion process.

While performance marketing lives up to its name and duties, there are a few misconceptions that start-up founders and marketers who are getting into it for the first time, approach it with. The danger here is that if not properly identified, these misconceptions can end up being stumbling blocks preventing the start-up from actualizing all the benefits that this wonderful branch of marketing can deliver. Benefits like the ability to “Scale at will” i.e harness opportunity to decide on the number of people that need to be reached with the product message and reach them or being able to see clearly the user journey to conversion and many more.

Here are the 5 core assumptions about performance marketing that start-ups need to stop making:

Quick Set-up – Some of the most popular channels for performance marketing are social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Search-based advertising platforms like google are perceived to be easy and quick to set up. This view is not entirely wrong, especially when compared to traditional advertising channels, setting up an ad on google, Twitter or Facebook happens with only a few button clicks which can be done in minutes. However, the danger is when the marketing team of the tech company doesn’t take into consideration everything that goes into a successful marketing campaign since the ads will be run on online channels. It is important to take a full-funnel approach and this means thinking about where the potential user is on their journey to discovering and using the product. Have they heard about the product(Top of the funnel)? Are they aware of the product but just haven’t taken any action(Middle of the funnel)? Or are they just on the cusp of making the important decision to use your product in the way that it was intended(Bottom of the funnel)? Whatever the case, designing your marketing campaign to address these different phases would make a world of difference and would definitely take more than a few days. So, yes the actual set-up can be quick, but the entire design and execution of the campaign should be given the time that it deserves.

Quick Launch – It’s one thing to set up the marketing campaign on these online platforms and quite another thing for them to be approved. For newbies in performance marketing, they are typically surprised to find out that there’s a review process before the campaign is allowed to be launched and delivered on the platform. The platforms typically used in performance marketing boast ad review times of a few hours to not more than two business days and this is way better than most people can say for the physical reviews that sometimes happen for offline ads, however, it can be inconvenient if everything else was right on schedule, but the time it takes for ads to be reviewed wasn’t put into consideration. One way to make sure that ads are approved early is to ensure that they are within the platform’s guidelines. Reading guideline materials thoroughly is helpful and can be the difference between being approved in a few hours, a few days or getting rejected.

Quick Convert – People are always met with a look of surprise when I tell them that it is perfectly normal and in some cases even expected when they haven’t generated 100 leads on the first day of running their performance marketing campaign. Apart from the fact that the results are dependent on hard factors like bid budget, time, location, and other demographics, there are also softer factors like the creative being used or the copy in the captions and in the Ads; do they resonate with the audience or are they just bouncing off the walls in their minds? Are they catchy enough to make them scroll or is it just another sponsored post that they can’t wait to scroll or click past? Conversions don’t always happen instantly, it can take some time to discover what works.

Quick Fix – The approach to fixing campaigns that aren’t working can sometimes be hurried and haphazard. Many times, I see tech marketers who are eager to prove their worth run campaigns that may not have been well thought through and so aren’t performing well, but most times in trying to fix the campaigns opt for a quick fix like simply changing the audience being targeted or increasing the budget, or simply just swapping out the creative for another one. None of these quick fixes is bad in themselves, but it is important to take a more systematic test and learn approach. First understand the numbers, what part of the funnel isn’t performing? Are there specific metrics that are too low? What elements of the campaign affect those metrics? These can be indicative.

Quick Scale – It’s very tempting to want to increase the budget allocated for a campaign when it’s doing pretty well, in the hopes that it would keep growing as quickly as it currently is and move the product to start-up nirvana “unicorn” status. However, it doesn’t take long before the law of diminishing returns sets in and shows the marketer that simply increasing the budget of a campaign doesn’t always equal better or more results. It is important to scale carefully and cautiously so that the cost per acquisition isn’t driven through the roof.

This article was written by Ajoke Emekene, a Performance Marketing Expert passionate about helping tech startups leverage performance marketing for growth. You can contact her via LinkedIn (Ajoke Emekene) or Instagram(@ajokee).