Why Start-ups in India must prioritize and automate Performance Marketing

With over 77,000 startups, India has emerged as the third-largest start-up economy in the world. With the growing competition, startups are indeed stretched for margins, especially post the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020.

The startup funding spree to Indian ventures dropped to $3.6 billion in the second quarter of 2022 from $8 billion in the January-March ‘22 quarter and from over $10 billion in 2021 (Source-CB Insights). At this very point of time in India, many of the young ventures are not only rationalizing their marketing and advertising spending but are also realigning the strength of their resource pool. Similar trends can be seen in other geographies as well, especially in the aftermath of ongoing political crises which have compelled many venture-capital and private equity firms to cut down on their investments in the private sector.

There is light at the end of the tunnel..

Till today the marketing budget of startups is the first to get affected whenever there is an industry funding freeze. While the advertising industry is getting impacted by the funding challenges being faced by startups, the overall scenario isn’t entirely gloomy. Industry estimates attribute a reduction of 55% to 65% in a brand’s customer acquisition cost (CAC) if it drives an equal amount of SEO traffic as compared to paid search traffic (Source- AdLift). No wonder, marketers are giving a huge push to growing organic channels such as SEO for reducing their CAC coupled with their efforts towards increasing revenue and transactions. Additionally, the onset of the festive period earlier this year helped startups to re-arrive with a bang and we expect to witness a splurge in advertising budgets in the upcoming high-spending season.

Need of the hour for a startup- prioritizing performance marketing over brand building…..

As compared to brand creation, more and more startups are expected to enhance their ad expenditure by prioritizing performance marketing, affiliate marketing, and sponsored ads via influencers pages. Automation is helping marketing teams in pacing up, scaling out, and focusing on tasks that can give a push to their brand’s growth in the current changing dynamics of business models, operations, and even preferences of their target consumers.

However, marketers need to be aware of a few important aspects especially when they are striving to achieve business goals. In order to strike a chord with the target audience, it is imperative for them to pick platforms and advertising mix coupled with optimization goals for creating campaigns that focus on their audience base. This is where the power of automation in performance marketing has come to the forefront like never before- as it helps them align offers and advertising campaigns with the assistance of real-time data analysis and critical insights.

Advantage automation..key to building and scaling a high-performing marketing organization!

For marketers who are yet to hop on the automation bandwagon, let’s take stock as to why investing in artificial intelligence (AI) powered integration and automation are empowering marketers to integrate their apps and data and automate their processes and workflows.

The effectiveness of performance marketing gets heightened when automation comes to play. The AI behind automation improves constantly, making it easier for teams to work smarter, freeing up time to do business-critical work, and making performance marketing strategies more efficient and scalable. Only when marketers automate repetitive processes will their teams be able to focus on value-adding tasks. This is important even more so for small teams looking to maximize their spending on advertising.

In today’s competitive business arena, access to real-time insights is helping marketers to make fast data-backed decisions which in turn helps them to get ahead of their competitors. Let’s look at an industry example.

Dentsu India Designs Future-Ready Performance Marketing Powerhouse

In order to grow its business during the pandemic when resources were limited, Ads and More, a prominent mobile marketing agency opted to partner with a leading performance-based tracking platform for its state-of-the-art campaign management, advanced automation features, and powerful analytics tools to access critical insights for gaining a competitive edge. The tracking partner not only helped Ads and More with the integration of all the required MMPs (Mobile Measurement Partners) like Appsflyer, Adjust, etc. as well as the set-up of other advertisers on the platform without any data loss. Additionally, the agency was able to increase its revenue by over 1000% in the first 3 months after the company was launched. To date, Ads & More has been growing consistently month over month establishing itself as a key player in the industry in a very short period of time.

Automating performance marketing can help startups in India to elevate their business revenue in 2023. Partnering with a new-age technology expert tracking platform can help them move forward on their desired journey of achieving business goals. Amidst the uncertainties which have loomed over a major part of this year, in the new year, startups should only channelise their energies towards focusing on what matters most- giving a push to their brand.

About the author:

Yogeeta Chainani, CEO & Co-founder, Swaarm