How To Never Make A Major Marketing Mistake Again
In his classic book, "Think And Grow Rich", Napoleon Hill says that one of the major causes of failure is that "...people prefer to act on opinions created by guesswork or snap-judgments rather than facts." Advertising decisions based on what you think will work rather than what the marketplace wants is the main reason advertisements don't work - and businesses fail, for that matter. Your livelihood depends on your ability to determine which messages will effectively attract new customers and entice your current customers to come back for more.
You can make these determinations by putting every important marketing and advertising question to a vote by the only people whose ballots count: customers and prospects. This "voting" takes place in the form of small, inexpensive tests. An advertising test is different than a questionnaire, a survey, or a focus group. These things don't necessarily reflect your prospects' willingness to put their money where their mouths are - and the results are usually skewed toward what the participants think you want to hear. Or what they think they might do. Testing, on the other hand, allows you to find out definitively which headlines, offers, prices, etc. the market will respond to - and cause them to buy - before you spend a fortune on advertising.
You can test the effectiveness of certain part of your ads on small but representative samples of your market, and you can learn what works and what doesn't. The results are reliable because each advertising question is answered with cash, check, or a major credit card. So ultimately, the purpose of testing is to demand maximum performance from every marketing and advertising dollar you spend. You will find that one approach will often times substantially out-perform certain others. But unless you test, you won't know which approach is the best one.
You might think the concept of testing sounds so obvious, so simple, that everyone must already be doing it. Well, are You doing it? Are you really testing? And just running an ad, then saying, "Darn, it! That didn't work!" does NOT count. The fact is ALMOST ALL businesses haphazardly run whatever advertisements 'seem to be pulling well lately.' If you methodically test and calculate your advertising efforts, you'll shred your competitors' advertising to pieces, and win their customers in the process. In short, every aspect of your advertising can and should be tested - advertising mediums, placements, headlines, prices, offers, packaging, formats, type fonts, sales pitches - everything.
Through the process of diligent testing, you ensure that you will never make a major marketing mistake. It's impossible. If an advertisement or promotion fails in a small-scale test, you either adjust it and test again, or scrap it for something different. By testing, you take the guesswork and conjecture out of advertising. You should be very scientific with your marketing - keep experimenting until you find what really works.
For more information
SUBSCRIBE to our new weekly marketing newsletter.
How To Never Make A Major Marketing Mistake Again - Adult B2B Marketing Tip
Linear Mode
