The Anatomy of a Great Performance Marketing Campaign and how Tech Start-ups can Win with It

Written By: Ajoke Emekene

A great performance marketing campaign can be the difference between hitting the company’s user acquisition goals in terms of numbers and cost and not hitting the goals. Performance marketing is a marketing specialisation where marketers only pay for results. Due to their nature, performance marketing campaigns are a way to ensure that the start-up doesn’t spend already limited resources on actions that don’t yield the results or actions that they care about.

Performance marketing has some really great benefits like being able to determine the number of people reached, visibility on the path to conversion, insight on the campaigns or elements that impact return on investment the most and so much more. However, to access these benefits one must check that they have set up their performance marketing campaigns the right way in order to get the maximum benefits possible from the campaign.

I’ll share 5 elements that make up a great performance marketing campaign

Themes that stick: It’s pretty easy to decide on an ad concept and create an ad, but if the campaign is to be memorable, one will need more than a single ad concept. It’s important to have a theme that is memorable, that communicates the core benefit or differentiator in a concise way and is interesting enough to keep people mulling over it days after they have viewed the product Ad. One way to generate new ideas for campaign themes, is to look around and get inspired by campaigns in other industries. Exploring campaigns being run in other industries can spark ideas for new things to try even if they are unconventional.

Creatives that pop – For any successful campaign, the creatives whether they are still images or videos should be crafted to stop people in their tracks. Even though people spend a good portion of their day on their phones, they are inundated with messages from different brands, friends, family, influencers and more that the only creatives that make them pause and act are the creatives that resonate and pop. If an ad creative does not pop, the chances of making people stop and take in the message would be low. Also, if the ad creative does not resonate, it’ll be difficult to get people to click through to learn more about the product.

Pages that inspire – The role of the landing page in a performance marketing campaign cannot be overemphasised. The landing page is one of the key ways potential users interact with the campaign before the app is installed and so should be created with great care. It is important to create landing pages that are beautiful but also clear. Individuals looking to learn more about the product should not leave a landing page confused about the action that needs to be taken. One key way to make sure that the landing page performs it’s primary duty of inspiring action is to use good design principles when crafting the landing page. Checking that the words on the page use a good hierarchy that portrays the information in the way it should be consumed while drawing attention to the most important parts is key. Another critical must-do when it comes to creating high-converting landing pages is to only include one call-to-action on the page while eliminating the links that allow the person to explore other parts of the website. The goal is for the individual to either take the action or leave the page, giving it a 50% chance of conversion from the get-go.

Sequences that bug – Following up is one topic that start-ups can sometimes side-step because of the generally touted saying that “once you build a product that people love, they will come” and so many start-up marketing teams build campaigns that are only designed to introduce the audience to the product, but hand-off to product marketing like a hot potato. The truth is the fortune is in the follow-up. People live busy lives and so, it’s not out of place that they might forget the product after the first introduction even if the team has built a fantastic product with a great user experience. There are multiple ways to follow up with people but the ideal way is to build follow up into the campaign by designing a full-funnel campaign. A campaign that takes into consideration the entire user journey. For example, crafting ads that are specifically for people who have never heard about the product, different ads for people who have heard but are yet to take action and different ads for people who have taken action but need to be egged on to repeat an action or use a new/underused feature. In order to pull off this level of sophisticated follow-up, it is important to make sure that tracking is set up the right way.

Offers that wow – To get the best results at the end of the day, the ultimate action that brings the most value to a start-up needs to be the most enticing. If that action doesn’t get people feeling like they have hit the jackpot or they have scored, then getting many conversions is not to be expected. To craft offers that wow and indeed follow any of the points listed above, one must get as close to the user as possible, to understand exactly how the product solves their problem and how they can derive the highest value by using the product.

At the end, when the elements above are integrated into a campaign, the results can be astounding.

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).