There is never a single formula for successful marketing. Every brand has to find its own special sauce for effective advertising and audience-pleasing content. How do they find it? Marketers have to roll up their lab jacket sleeves and experiment. It’s all about testing, tinkering, and tracking what works.
Here are the five steps to get started in your own marketing experiments:
- Hypothesize: A hypothesis is an educated guess based on your existing knowledge. To start hypothesizing, ask yourself about your current channels, audience, trends, etc. and see what you can do to influence a given component to your overall marketing.
- Research: Time to gather some information and similar brand experiments. This stage might even influence your original hypothesis, depending on your findings. Ain’t nothing wrong with shifting gears.
- Measurements: This stage is all about establishing your metrics and KPIs. A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a performance measurement to keep you on track. Gathering this information would include looking at analytics for your site, email, social media, and all other channels.
- Execution: Time to make it official! Be sure there is only one variable in any given experiment so you can truly determine what influenced a result. Perform a change to that variable, and see the results for a set testing period before changing a different variable.
- Analysis: Once your marketing experiment has been done its testing time frame, review the results against the metrics you defined earlier. Sometimes further testing is needed, and you’ll find different tests to do on your variable.
Marketing experiments are our way of measuring effectiveness and deciding whether to change or add something to our ever-changing strategies. For specific examples on marketing experiments, check out the full Business 2 Community article.
