What is failure in marketing/growth/business/life?
If you ask me: it’s when you lose a battle, you don’t know why you’ve lost, and you give up.
How to make sure any endevour of importance (big go-to-market or ABM programs) will not fail? Create thoughtful experiments. That’s how your growth will be bulletproof.
1. test assumptions and ideas on a small scale
2. only go big when the concept has been proven
3. have plans B, C and D for the cases where initial ideas don’t work
Experimentation is how we approach everything we do. We tell clients up front: look,
– I don’t know what will work for you
– I have a good idea based on previous experiments, but they may not work for you the way they did for others
– what I can promise is that we’ll a) have ideas and b) create a way to test and find the most viable ones
+1: we might break shit along the way
Knowing how to set up and run experiments pretty much guarantees that we’ll find successful growth avenues.
Here are a few examples of the “experiment-based approach” taking shape in marketing.
– when setting up webinar-flows, we run 1-2 small-scale webbies to companies already in the pipeline before going wide and far at the top of the funnel
– when testing ads, run posts organically first, then with a small budget
– when creating new messaging/positioning, test its stickiness on organic and paid social posts before engraving it in collateral and the website
How to set up experiments is a whole different topic, the point I wanted to make is you should
– figure out how to test big things (budget/resource-wise) on a small scale
– know what constitutes success in the given experiment
always have backup plans if parts of the machine break along the way.
The two most common ways to screw up experiments in marketing?
1. stopping too early and abandoning. E.g.: running an outbound campaign, not getting responses and concluding it doesn’t work
2. not knowing what success is – running a test and having no idea whether it was good, OK or it blew.
