5 Marketing Experiments That Show the Value of Testing Ideas

If you’re still not sold on the importance of marketing experiments, then this article may just convince you.

The basics of marketing experiments

A better understanding of marketing experiments will help you appreciate its role and value in business.

Let’s discuss a few basics in this section, starting with a definition of marketing experimentation.

What is marketing experimentation?

This refers to market research done to uncover new ideas, strategies and techniques or validate existing ones. It is a process of assessing the effectiveness of an idea, strategy, or technique, before you invest much on its execution.

It mainly involves comparing the resulting effects of an implemented idea or strategy against your control variable or benchmark.

The findings from your comparison should then direct your approach to further optimization.

Parts of a marketing experiment

In essence, marketing experimentation has three parts:

1. Subjects. Refer to consumers whose behavior marketers seek to study.
2. Conditions. The independent variable in a marketing experiment is the condition, which can be the type of communication medium or marketing message.
3. Effects. Represent the dependent variable, which is the subject's reaction to the independent variable.

All three must be present before you conduct a viable experiment.

Two main goals of marketing experiments

When conducting marketing experiments, you should care to manage your expectations and know that, while you will succeed at times, you will also fail. The good thing here is that, regardless of win or lose, your tests will always yield helpful results.

In essence, marketing experiments achieve either to:

• validate an existing hypothesis, or;
• discover a new marketing approach.

When a hypothesis is validated, that means your intellectual guess was right all along. In this case, you proceed with your initial idea as planned, and there’s no need for you to test further.

On the other hand, failure in proving a hypothesis leads to further study and, down the line, innovative ideas that may turn out to be a leading edge.

The importance of marketing experiments

As seen through current marketing trends, building your strategies around concepts and theories aren’t enough to work in today’s online world.

It has to be well-formed and informed with the help of testing strategies or else, the solutions you come up with will be no better than guesses. Much worse, this could lead you to waste resources that could have otherwise been used for effective ideas, had you only tested your ideas first.

In detail, marketing experiments put you in control of your marketing spending and allows you to:

• Optimize methods to boost performance and make sound marketing judgments.
• Prove the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
• Validate new ideas you’d like to explore.
• Build on older knowledge from past experiments.

Now, let’s take a look at the benefits of marketing experiments once applied. Further down, you’ll read about design choices, growth strategies, and important business decisions made through a defined experiment and testing strategy.

Sample marketing experiments you can try today

Marketing experiments are not a new-age hype or trendy strategy. In fact, if you think about it, they’ve been applied for quite some time.

In fact, marketing experiments are the secret of most of the innovative companies you know today. And the scale at which they’re doing tests is huge, with some conducting thousands of experiments, annually. All to keep creating innovative ways to grow business.

If that’s a goal you share with these big companies, then here are some places you can start doing simple tests at.

1. Email marketing

If you’re already conducting email marketing campaigns, then that’s already a great place to start. Using the simple A/B testing tools you can access through email marketing platforms, you get a glimpse of how experimentation is done for specific campaigns.

Email testing is a great technique that allows you to deliver newsletters that resonate on a personal level with your recipients.

This matters to your business because your email subscribers are the ones who care the most about it. They are your most engaged audiences. That’s why in your campaigns you must send messages that pique their interest and encourages them to convert.

Here some elements you can test in an email campaign:

• Testing the subject line – The subject line has the most influence on whether or not your audience opens your email. It's the first thing they see in their inbox. You'll lose potential conversions if your subject line isn't compelling.
• Testing the content – Testing the content of your email is essential when your subscribers open their emails but don’t read their content. You can test your material by changing the photos in the email, the headline, or the phrasing of the email.

2. Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are another great choice for marketing experimentation. These paid advertisements bring in crucial traffic for your company. To get the most out of your advertisements, make sure the copy is engaging to your target audience.

You can also test your headline, photographs, videos, font color, size, type, and a variety of other elements. These are all excellent marketing experiments to carry out in order to produce a more effective landing page.

3. Social media marketing

Social media platforms are another excellent venue for marketing experiments. It is critical that you evaluate your social media postings on a regular basis to ensure that you are providing the best material to your audience.

Using visuals is vital in social media marketing. It's frequently the first thing people see when they see your ad, which can help your company gain new followers and conversions. This is because images help increase the effectiveness of data visualization which captures customers’ attention increasing the likelihood that they will make a purchase or share the information with others.

By conducting this kind of experiment, you will have a visual that gets you the best outcome for your advertisements since visuals enable individuals to easily perceive, interact with, and comprehend data. The correct visualization, whether basic or complicated, can bring everyone on the same page, regardless of their degree of skill.

4. Test different messages

Message testing refers to market research that examines how a company's marketing language for a particular product, solution, or brand resonates with an audience. Specifically, message testing can help you determine how to customize a message to your target demographic for optimum impact.

Message testing can guide you in making an effective marketing strategy in two ways: (A) It can help you understand what your customers values by addressing the questions of What do your customers want or need or what their preference is; and (B). It enables you to test your current messaging against your specific target consumers or users.

Message Testing gives you a chance to try out alternative variations of your marketing messages.

5. Experiment with cognitive biases

Understanding customer psychology is the key to creating effective marketing messages. The most effective marketing and advertising campaigns employ these biases to generate motivation, manipulate emotions, and modify potential purchasers' perceptions. Here are some cognitive biases that will help your marketing experimentation be more effective:

• Loss aversion. Loss aversion is demonstrated when a company successfully builds an impression in the minds of consumers that by not purchasing a specific product, they are likely to miss out on something. People are more willing to prevent a loss than to obtain a comparable amount.
• Choice of supportive bias. According to the choice of supportive bias, people frequently make illogical choices and then use logical justifications to justify their purchases. In terms of marketing, if a product creates a desirability factor in the consumer's mind, they will buy it and then justify their decision later.
• Confirmation bias. According to the confirmation bias, fresh information absorbed by the human mind validates pre-existing opinions. The tendency to seek for, process, evaluate, or depend on the information that supports or confirms one's own experiences or ideas makes customers more likely to purchase a specific product.
• Bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias that is well-used by both consumer goods corporations and political organizations. According to the notion, a consumer is more inclined to buy a product that others are buying.

The value of testing your ideas

Even the most successful companies make mistakes. It is imperative that marketing ideas be tested and validated before they are launched. Doing this helps eliminate ideas that are not working.

Furthermore, concept testing allows you to be focused on the best direction going forward. Concept testing can help you locate the greatest alternative from a slew of viable options, or it can assist you in enhancing some of your underperforming concepts.

Testing is an excellent approach to ensure that whatever you're planning—ads, product concepts, messages, and so on—will be a success.

Key takeaways

Testing your ideas does indeed have beneficial effects, from saving you precious resources to having an edge against your competition. That said, here are a few key takeaways that you can take note of so that your marketing experimentation will be successful:

• Concentrate on individuals. Think short and long-term. Individual customers, rather than categories or geographies, are targeted in the most accurate experiments, and their answers are observed. The studies track purchasing behavior to see if changes result in better profitability. Concentrate your experiments on situations in which clients respond quickly.
• Keep it simple. Look for experiments that are simple to carry out using existing resources and personnel. Experiments that necessitate substantial experimentation with store layout, product offerings, or personnel tasks may be prohibitively expensive and may do more harm than good.
• Always test your marketing ideas first. Testing your marketing ideas before launching them can save you resources. You would not want to incur costs that would not be beneficial for you and your business.

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