Today’s marketing leaders are using marketing tests and experiments to increase insight and action. And organisations committed to marketing experiments are transforming their businesses with increased sales.
How? Because experiments are the best way to create new knowledge systematically and to learn more about your customers and your audience.
They force you to question your own ideas, beliefs, and the best practices you’ve read so much about.
Continually testing and learning is crucial to making future marketing decisions that are based on proven results rather than opinions.
After all, at the pace customer behaviours are evolving, it’s becoming even more challenging for marketers to stay on top of how brands and customers can connect.
Why Run Marketing Experiments?
In the short and long run, marketing experiments are pivotal for success. On a deeper level, testing what works and analysing your data makes it easier for you to determine your ROI and make data-driven decisions.
Here are 3 of the top reasons why you should prioritise marketing experiments:
1) Improved customer experience: Marketing experiments help you understand customer needs, and how you can deliver more personalised customer experiences.
2) Better decision making: Marketing experiments help you make better-informed, data-driven decisions. By conducting marketing experiments, you’ll be able to get a snapshot of what’s working and what’s not working.
3) Understand customers more deeply: Marketing experiments allow you to easily learn and predict customer behaviour based on data and make course corrections along the way.
Get Inspired: 21 Marketing Experiments & Test Ideas
The Planning and Testing Process
Before setting up a marketing experiment, make sure you plan for maximum effectiveness. We’ve pulled together our top tips for planning and testing your marketing experiments.
Start with a goal and hypothesis: Good marketing experiments start with a clear goal to validate. A hypothesis forces you to think about the experiment. Ask yourself questions about how and why you think outcomes will occur.
Analyse where you are now: Once you understand what needle you’re trying to move, look at existing data in your marketing management tool to see where you are, so you can know when you reach your goal.
Brainstorm ideas: Equipped with insight on your starting point, you can meet with your team to come up with the highest-impact ideas to get where you want to be with marketing and sales.
Prioritise your ideas: Use the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) method to create an abundance of ideas, before you need them, so you can respond rapidly to performance data. After this step, you should have a clear idea of which experiments to go after.
Run the experiments: Start small and prove the value of experimentation with small wins. Allow campaigns of at least 3 weeks to gather info about what works best to optimise your results.
Measure campaign success: And last (but definitely not least) in your marketing experiment process, measurement solutions are crucial when it comes to understanding impact, and making any needed real-time adjustments.
| TrueNorth allows you to test assumptions about your messaging, audience, and ad creatives in real-time. You can cut down on the amount of time you’d have to spend on manually collecting data from multiple platforms. Find out more > |
Final Marketing Experiment Tips
Most marketing experiments will have one of two objectives: optimising performance or unlocking growth.
To optimise performance, you can start by testing out different tactics, tools, and strategies. Try new content types or ad formats.
In terms of looking for growth opportunities, try something completely different. Throw your existing landing page out the window, and try something new. If the fresh version works better, use that as your benchmark going forward.
Ideally, you’d want to test one variable at a time, but you also have to realise the impact of a small change will be small.
The final precondition for a good marketing experiment is that it’s run as a split test. This way, you can really compare the effectiveness of different ideas.
Bonus point: Build a culture of data-led experimentation. Encourage testing through ideation sessions with your team. Prioritise discussing ideas and reviewing results in order to develop learning for further growth.
Whether the results are good or not so good, every marketing experiment is an opportunity to learn.
Are you ready to start your first marketing experiment?
In an environment that’s always evolving, constant learning becomes crucial to ensure we stay ahead of the curve.
Experimentation makes us think about what works, why it works, and what might be done differently. This is part of what makes it an important tool for marketers to keep a finger on the pulse of the evolving nature of marketing.
TrueNorth brings all of your data together to run marketing experiments at scale. It helps by continually surfacing insights to help you course-correct as you go.
With marketing experiments software, there’s no more need to log into multiple tools to track important marketing metrics.
You can even automate ideation alerts and goal projections, and respond rapidly to drops in performance to stay on track.
Get started with your first marketing experiments for free with TrueNorth.
