This week in TechCrunch Experts: Don’t blow your Q1 2022 marketing budget

The TechCrunch Experts program had an active week!

Joey Noble, community manager for Demand Curve, returned with a teardown of Customer.io’s homepage with insights you can apply to your own company’s website, and Jonathan Martinez shared his essentials for creating an optimal growth marketing tech stack.

With the new year almost upon us, I interviewed several of the experts we’ve identified through the Experts program and asked each of them how they’d manage a small Q1 2022 marketing budget, and on Wednesday, Senior Editor Walter Thompson hosted a Twitter Space with Octane.ai co-founder Ben Parr to discuss using zero-party data for personalization.

Our coverage this week also includes notes on how DevOps efforts are supporting recent and upcoming trips to space. Find a full recap below.

Software consulting

DevOps transformation: Taking edge computing and continuous updates to space: Fred Simon, co-founder and chief data scientist at JFrog, wrote about the field’s contributions in the past two years to space exploration.

“One of the great revelations of the new space industry is that it’s being eaten alive by software,” says Simon. “Software is getting smarter, better and easier to update; however, the amount of compute power needed to execute software commands in space is growing exponentially.”

There are plans to launch as many as 40,000 satellites in the next few years, but how do we transform the way we continually update software that runs in space?

My personal view is that we need to create a new way of performing continuous delivery and continuous updates in space. On Earth, many organizations use an orchestrator to handle the continuous update processes — automated configuration, management and coordination of systems, apps and services to help IT teams manage complex tasks and workflows efficiently. As of now, there is no equivalent to this for use with satellites in space, and those that exist are extremely limiting.

Consultant: Emit Knowledge
Recommended by: Envoice
Testimonial: “We were able to focus on growing the business while Emit Knowledge has helped us to build and manage the product from idea to delivery.”

Growth marketing

(TechCrunch+) Growth marketing experts survey: How would you spend a $25,000 budget in Q1 2022?: Miranda Halpern spoke with seven marketers that we’ve come to know through our TechCrunch Experts program. The question each expert was asked to answer was, “If you only had a $25,000 marketing budget for Q1 2022, how would you spend it?” Read the full article to see how these marketers break down their “budget.”

A lean startup’s growth marketing tech stack: Without a robust marketing growth stack, startups can’t easily integrate the myriad work that goes into building a customer base. According to paid acquisition expert Jonathan Martinez, here are its main components:

• Customer data platform (CDP).
• Mobile measurement partner (MMP).
• Data warehouse.
• Business intelligence tool (BI).
• Customer engagement tools.
• A/B testing/experimentation tools.
• Acquisition mediums.

“Think of these tools as the parts of a car, where the customer data platform acts as the engine and the other tools are the parts hooked up to the engine.”

Demand Curve: How Customer.io’s homepage converts readers into customers: Joey Noble, Demand Curve’s community manager, is back this week with another teardown (check out last week’s teardown here). This week, Noble focused on Customer.io and provides tips for you to apply to your own website. Noble says, “A general framework for writing a good header: If a visitor reads only your header, they should still know who you are and why they should use your product.”

Marketer: PVTSEO
Recommended by: Flynax
Testimonial: “[With their help] we successfully reached the audience, got the higher positions on SERPs, which brought us revenue.”

Marketer: Eli Schwartz
Recommended by: Anonymous at a16z
Testimonial: “All of my portfolio companies had been pouring money into consultants that were not driving results and now we have altered the way we approach SEO and are driving toward revenue and product.”