The Daily Carnage

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

We’ve talked about the speed of marketing being important, but you gotta get it done right as well as fast. But is moving so fast hurting more than helping? Well, that depends how you’ve prepared yourself and what your goals are. 

These are the 3 ways you’re potentially hurting your brand:

1. You are rushing your brand blueprint: Take a moment to do some zen breathing, and get your blueprint on lock. At every junction, you should have an idea of what works for your audience or customers. The key is that you can tackle every business decision without playing a guessing game.
2. Your brand has no meat: We’re not just talking logo and colors. Users want to hear your story and how you are different from the rest! What is your brand’s substance? Where have you come from? Where will you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe? (sorry)
3. Your personal brand is misaligned: Behind every company, organization, and brand are people! So people need to know their brand, know what it means, and know how to use it. Your personal brand aligning with your brand overall is another layer of authenticity your users can sniff out. Phonies are not welcome.

All brands, no matter if they are corporate or personal, need to live up to the brand they’ve built. Brands need to check in on their promises and deliver. It takes time to get to a point of being able to do that, so read the full Entrepreneur article for all the questions you need to ask yourself to build your brand.