Why Tech Start-ups Should Invest in Performance Marketing

Written By: Ajoke Emekene

There are many arguments for organic growth with a heavy focus on word of mouth and they are all good. However, many times, organic growth is preached at the expense of performance marketing. Some marketers at tech companies, or tech founders themselves, feel it is an either-or situation where going ahead with performance marketing means that the start-up’s tech product can no longer grow organically.

Performance marketing is a marketing specialisation that focuses on paying for and optimizing results and is primarily carried out using online channels like Facebook, Google, Twitter and others.

There are numerous benefits to using performance marketing in driving growth at tech start-ups, chief of which is the ability to determine the number of people that need to be reached and going after them, as opposed to traditional marketing where the opportunity to advertise is paid for, but results are not certain.

Even though there are numerous benefits that performance marketing offers tech start-ups, there are a few unique advantages that only performance marketing can deliver at scale. They are;
3 unique ways performance marketing helps businesses that traditional marketing or word of mouth cannot

Visibility on the path to conversion: Businesses thrive on numbers and one thing that’s important to see is the sales funnel for any product. It is important to see how people go from not knowing anything about the product to knowing, liking and trusting the product enough to perform the desired action of the product makers and in this case the tech startup. Unfortunately in real life, it is pretty difficult to track this entire process especially when offline channels like word of mouth are used. If the marketing team at a start-up wants a front-row seat to see how potential leads go from being completely unaware to clicking the sign-up, add-to-cart or buy button, then they definitely need to give performance marketing a try.

Save costs on middlemen: Marketing is a field that is full of middlemen; from marketing agencies to influencers, to talent management agencies, to advertising regulation bodies, there are middlemen everywhere in traditional marketing. The discouraging thing is many times, the cost of dealing with these middlemen is not included in the cost of using the channel that has been chosen for traditional advertising. Plus there is room for these middlemen to inflate the costs so the start-up ends up paying more, straining their already strained resources even further. However, with performance marketing, the result is paid for directly and one never has to worry about the cost for middlemen.

Laser focus on the return on investment (ROI): It’s every marketer’s dream to clearly understand the impact of any marketing investment and connect it directly to the returns. With performance marketing, it’s mostly easy to understand the impact of the various channels or campaigns and determine the ROI. When thinking about ROI it is important to ensure that results are attributed to the right channels and campaigns. Exploring multi-touch attribution models will be instrumental in making sure that impact is not attributed arbitrarily simply to the first or last touchpoint which is very common.

Any tech start-up that is yet to include performance marketing in their marketing strategy can take this as the sign they needed to get started. Sometimes, start-ups focus so hard on organic marketing just so that they can say that they have zero acquisition costs when in reality, organic channels can be pretty time-consuming and time costs money.

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