To a lot of people, marketing is a science. I disagree. Marketing is the ultimate science experiment. While through learning and past experience marketers can make some pretty good guesses about what might work and what won’t, it ultimately comes down to testing a variety of different ideas and then scaling the ones that do work.
In order to run a successful marketing experiment, you have to be able to do two things. Test and Fail. Then repeat.
That was hard to do when all the tools available to you where expensive mass media vehicles such as television, radio and print. Now it's easy. With the ever increased democratization of web tools and resources, there are many marketing tactics that you can employ without spending big bucks and much time.
Now you can start small, with room to grow.
Don’t waste a bucket of money (well maybe one bucket) and thought on one big marketing tactic. Don’t make it the year of search, email, Facebook or blogging. Test ‘em all.
You should be able to test a different marketing idea every month. If it takes you more than a month to launch an idea, you’re spending too much time and very likely, too much money on it. Plan, start small, innovate rapidly and then scale if the opportunity arises. Not every marketing idea is going to be a big hit, but by getting frequent at bats; you’re increasing the odds of hitting one of out of the ballpark.
If you’re allocating all your time and money to one idea and it doesn’t work, you’ll quickly end up on the marketing mensch cemetery.
Here’s a potential process.
- Write up a one page idea brief.
- Define success 30, 60 and 90 days down the road.
- Launch within two weeks.
- Measure success 30 days later, optimize.
- 60 days later, allocate more resources if you see success. If not, drop it and move more resources to the next idea (You will have a few running at the same time anyway).
To summarize, I am not saying that you should give up if you don’t see success right away. But you need to be prepared that some ideas will work and other won’t. And that the smaller you start, the more likely you are to take risks, innovate, scale and then succeed.
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