5 Easy Ways Tech Start-ups can Spend Leftover Performance Marketing Budget

Written By: Ajoke Emekene

The end of the year is always a great time to take stock of what worked well and what didn’t go so well. It’s also a good time for start-ups to plan for the new year and craft the marketing strategy for their product. One way to gather some last-minute data and insights ahead of the new year is to do some campaign testing with the budget that’s left after running the major marketing campaigns.

These ideas are quick and easy to implement. The whole point with these suggestions is that they are things you can implement using what you already have, rather than creating new ideas from scratch. You have run campaigns throughout the year and you can simply take the copy, creatives and other relevant assets created in the course of the year and repurpose them for this.

Audience Experiments – Testing new audiences is one of the easiest things to do in performance marketing as most channels like Facebook and Google allow you to see numerous options for interest groups that you can target. On most platforms you can also try targeting custom audiences, meaning people that have interacted in some way shape or form with your product or start-up.

Channel Experiments – Channel Experiments are a little more challenging and may require a learning curve especially if one has been primarily dependent on one channel. Despite the challenges, once the marketer has gotten the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to set-up, made even easier by the availability of the creatives (Old creatives will be used).

Placement Experiments – Placement Experiments focus on where the individual sees the Ad while using the channel. Many times startup marketers only want to bid on already established placement options. For example, Facebook has placements like the news feed, stories, off-platform placement called audience network and many more. It’s typical for tech marketers to insist only on the most popular placements like the news feed, but exploring other less popular placements can be a good way to see what other placements have great potential or yield cheaper cost per acquisition.

Format Experiments – When trying out different platforms or placements, it’s important to adapt the creative to fit the recommended format. For example, convert pictures to videos and vice versa to see how this impacts on conversions.

Mixed Experiments: The final easy way that I suggest you spend your leftover budget is to create new combinations with existing assets from past campaigns. For example, taking a losing Ad copy and combining it with a winning creative or switching up the call to action and other similar changes.

These experiments might seem like small actions but they often drive big discoveries and/or last-minute victories that help you close the year on a great note and chart the course for the new year.

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).