Stop Guessing, Start Testing: Marketing your Startup
There are well-understood, tried-and-true marketing strategies and tactics, that when deployed effectively, will drive predictable marketing results. However, what if your business doesn’t have historical data to inform future marketing plans and decisions? How do you know what will work? Where do you put your precious dollars?
The leaders of newer enterprises, like early stage startups and other types of small businesses, often don’t know enough yet about the dynamics of their market or their customer base to understand the best marketing strategy and mix of tactics to meet their goals.
This is why, when speaking with founders or owners of smaller or newer businesses, I recommend cultivating a test and learn mindset. The concept first emerged in U.S. businesses in the 1980s, and has become increasingly accessible to small companies given the availability of inexpensive, effective digital tools to run, evaluate, and optimize marketing tests.
Think of a test and learn as an experiment, with the following elements:
1. Define a problem or opportunity that your business has.You have noticed that only 10% of your potential customers are completing the purchase process to make a purchase / become a customer on your e-commerce website.
2. Form a hypothesis around an activity that might address the problem / opportunity and the results you might get.
If you improved your checkout workflow on your website, you could increase conversions from 10% to 20%.
3. Create an activity to test your hypothesis.Streamline the flow on your website, taking out unneeded steps and reducing checkout time.
4. Execute the activity for a specific period of time.Make your revised webpage live to people who visit your website for one month.
5. Evaluate the results of the activity. How did it stand up to your hypothesis?After the month-long test has concluded, you determine that during the time the revised webpage was live, conversions went from 10% to 25% -- exceeding your target result. Keep the new webpage!
In general, the test and learn scenarios that yield the results that you want, do more of those, and the scenarios that don’t deliver the results that you want, you can optimize. In the example above, this might involve modifying the purchase flow in a different way, and then re-deploying it on the website for another one-month evaluation. As a general rule for small enterprises, if a marketing test and learn scenario has been optimized and re-run at least once, and it still falls short, then stop doing that activity. That’s right – just take it out of your plans – as you are likely to reach a point of diminishing returns.
One watchout: once you have “good enough” results, look to scale an activity beyond a mere test. There is an opportunity cost to doing a variety of test and learns, especially if they do not ladder up to larger business goals. So, you will want to think about at what point any one test and learn should transition into your larger marketing strategy and plan.
By systematically approaching test and learns in your business, you will quickly build confidence in the strategies and activities that deliver your desired results, establishing a solid marketing foundation for future growth.
