I hope you can see by now that marketing is a science. And good science is repeatable. When scientists stumble on to a discovery, they must be able to reproduce it before it can be accepted within the scientific community. Therefore, they dissect the discovery to figure out what about it works. Once they have consistently reproduced the effects, they know they’ve got something real.
Likewise, if you want to produce consistent success for your business, you must figure out what marketing actions work. And what works for one business won’t necessarily work for another. Don’t get me wrong, if someone in a similar situation did X and it worked, you would be smart to try X before you try Y.
ABT: Always Be Testing
There is a movie called Glengarry Glen Ross. In it, Alec Baldwin plays a sales expert who is talking to a group of salespeople who are struggling. His rule is ABC: Always Be Closing.
Since good marketing is repeatable, I’m going to advise you to ABT: Always Be Testing. By testing, I mean A/B testing. In A/B Testing, you try two things and record which one works better. By continuously A/B testing, you’ll eventually find out what consistently works for your business.
The only way to truly get better at marketing is to continuously test your assumptions.
- Does this really work?
- Could this work better?
Let me give you an example, when I was cold calling attorneys I A/B tested small things. I found that saying,” I work for a company called Trauner Consulting Services,” was much better received than “I work for a company called Trauner.”
It’s surprising how little changes make a big difference. Would the conference be more fruitful if you sent person A rather than person B? Test it.
Email campaigns are great to A/B test. I set up 15% of my list to receive headline A and 15% to receive headline B. The remaining 70% gets whichever headline received the best open rate.
I even A/B test when I’m speaking in front of a group. I had this slide where a mongoose calls a turkey a “jackass.” Someone told me that might be offensive when I was preparing it.
So, I gave the presentations to two different groups. The “jackass” slide got a better response than the politically correct version. Guess which one I use to this day?
I even tested different variations of ads on LinkedIn and discovered which ad performed 219% to 500% better than the others.
A/B test as much as you can. A small change could dramatically improve your results.
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