Enhance Your Marketing Campaigns Instantly Through Simple Testing
There are two main components to any undertaking, marketing related or not, that determine if the endeavor will be successful: Research and Testing. All too often we see b2b lead generation campaigns falter because someone jumped the gun or failed to refine their processes until they were running at optimal efficiency. Today, I?m going to talk about the importance of marketing testing and how you can immediately improve your marketing campaigns through simple tests.
Sales lead generation is one of the more interesting sub-industries simply because things are constantly changing. New ideas, processes and technology make internet marketing an evolving science. It is because things are changing that, we as b2b lead generation professionals, must constantly test our work to make sure we are getting the best possible gains from our efforts. Marketing testing is a great idea but is wasted if you don?t have tangible methods of testing.
Marketing testing protocol contains 6 major parts: the question, testing variables, metrics, validation, results and interpretation. You should establish a plan for these six components before any actual marketing test takes place. The question, pertains to what you hope to answer i.e. what conversion beckon will produce a better click through rate? Ask yourself what you are wanting to achieve to create a primary or secondary market research question.
In the testing variables phase you want to clearly describe what you are specifically going to test. Make sure to include what will become your variables as well as establish a control sample. For example if you are testing a new landing page to see which design works better, you need to establish various options to test. Option one could be a large table with details on the offer. Option 2 could be a small table with less detail. Option 3 could contain no table and only an offer and a form to fill out. The key is to test each one against one another and establish a clear winner.
The third marketing testing protocol is metrics. Metrics are considered the, ?what? phase in a marketing test. You need to determine specifically what you are going to measure in your marketing testing tests. This could be a number of different things from click through rate, conversion rate, number of times a whitepaper has been downloaded or the number of clicks on a flash piece to an a special offer. It really is up to you what you are going to test and what type of internet marketing strategy you are using.
The fourth testing phase is called validation. In the validation phase you are going to determine various factors regarding the actual marketing test itself. Such factors include the sample size needed to perform an accurate test, the time frame required to gather a sizeable test sample, the length of the test itself and any outside influences that might be a factor during a search engine optimization test. Some items to take note of are selection effect (a biased sample), using skewed analytics software (using analytics software which interferes with the code of a website thus making the webpage display incorrectly) and the timing effect (running a b2b lead generation test during peak months or slow months or running a test on a weekend vs. a weekday.)
The fifth phase in marketing testing is the results phase. The results phase is fairly straightforward, it is important to keep accurate data throughout the duration of the test. The last phase of testing is interpretation. It is during the interpretation phase of a test where the most insight can be gained; not only for the specific marketing test but also for future tests. Data and comments should be filed away so that you can learn from your experiment and build upon it at a later time.
One of the important aspects to keep in mind regarding testing in direct marketing is to never stop testing. A common mistake search engine optimization professionals make is to test once and then run with the results. Once you run a marketing test and achieve optimal results you should take your best results and see if you can top them. Many times if you run a marketing test three or four different times you will see better results than you previously thought you would. With some practice in testing you will start to see better results with your marketing campaigns.
