Creating an Experimental Cycle for Successful Marketing – Wash, Rinse, Repeat

A culture of incremental, consistent improvements is a core business practice of successful companies

How do you build a culture of experimentation in your organization?

What sets today’s most successful companies apart from their competition is not some kind of magic.  These companies have created a culture of experimentation, and made continuous optimization a core business practice. A culture of experimentation is geared toward incremental, consistent improvements. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Why?

• Become data-driven over solely intuition-driven.
• Data-driven businesses are growing by more than 30% annually!
• Companies with a structured approach to improving conversions were 2X as likely to see a large increase in bottom line!
• Engaging customers and making customer evaluation a basis for your decision making is the key to success.

1. Stakeholder Buy-In

Make sure to include all the stakeholders. For example:

1. 1. CMO
   2. Copywriter
   3. Consumer Insights
   4. Web designer
   5. Performance marketer
   6. Anyone else

2. Benchmarking

Before you begin optimizing your marketing, it is imperative to create performance benchmarks. You need to assess how your messages and copy is currently performing and set benchmarks for comparison. 

3. Brainstorming

Once you have established performance benchmarks.  Begin with brainstorming a set of new ideas and then evaluate the new ideas together with the benchmark ideas to create a basis for comparison of all the ideas with each other.  Monthly brainstorming sessions focusing on different aspects of your marketing is the minimum effort needed to improve your marketing.

4. Customer Engagement Strategy

Build a long-term customer engagement strategy.  A test calendar helps to keep focus on important tests being launched on a regular basis. It is also vital for resource planning and keeping all stakeholders in a loop. A quarterly cycle of different tests done monthly is a good way to start.  Over time you will see what types of tests need to be conducted more or less often based on seasonality, changes in the market landscape, unusual events and other high impact factors.

5. Schedule

Make experimentation a fixed routine in your marketing.  We all know that consistent positive activities create positive results.  Signing up for a gym membership motivates you to exercise consistently.  The same is true for marketing experimentation.  By integrating a recurring system for experimentation into your organization you will guarantee recurring experiments and as a results continued improvement in marketing performance.