Strategy #2: Marketing Decisions – Never Make a Major Marketing Blunder Again

In his classic book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill lists one of the major causes of failure as people’s “preference to act on opinions or unsubstantiated judgments rather than facts.”

Therefore, marketing decisions based on what you think will work or what members of a focus group say they would do – rather than what the marketplace is actually willing to respond to; and put their money where their mouths are – is one of the primary causes of business failures.  As an owner of a small or medium-sized business, your livelihood depends on your uncanny ability to determine what messaging will effectively attract new clients and entice your existing customers to come back and buy more.

If you’re willing to do what I’m about to show you, you can uncover definitive answers by putting every important marketing question to a vote by the only people whose ballots count: customers and prospects.  This process is done in the form of small, inexpensive ad tests.

A marketing test is different than a survey, questionnaire, or a focus group.  These methods more often than not, do not accurately predict where prospects are willing to put their money where their mouths are.  The reality is that the results are usually skewed toward what the prospects think you want to hear.

Testing, on the other hand, enables you to find out precisely which headlines, offers, prices, etc. the market will respond to before you spend a wad on advertising. Through testing the effectiveness of certain parts of your ads on small but representative samples of your market, you can learn what works and what doesn’t.  In today’s marketplace this is often referred to as A/B testing.  The results are reliable because each marketing “test” is answered with a completed purchase – with real money.  This is how you make solid marketing decisions.

The ultimate purpose of testing is to insist on maximum performance from every marketing dollar you spend.  You will find that one approach will always substantially outperform all others. However, unless you test, you won’t know specifically which version is the best one.  And remember, testing is an ongoing process; not something you do once or twice and then you’re done.  The marketplace is extremely dynamic and the variables that influence a prospect’s decision-making process is ever changing.

Tomorrow, “It’s not nuclear physics, but…”