Marketing can often feel like preparing an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink soup:
You throw together a bunch of ingredients and hope it works.
The problem is, that makes it easy to get lost in meaningless activities and to miss what actually helps your brand drive revenue, build market share, etc.
We suggest focusing on the two most important processes any marketer can have:
- Experimenting to find out what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t.
- Optimizing to get the most out of the things that do work.
Getting these two things right requires structure, effort, and consistency. And that’s worth investing in.
Let’s take a closer look at these processes…
Experimentation
You never know what works until you try it. Some ideas may seem smart in theory, but they bring in underwhelming results, and vice versa.
When you experiment with a variety of ideas, you gain enough insights to deliver better results, increase conversion rates, reduce costs, and more.
If you’re not experimenting, you’re not learning what works and what doesn’t. You’re also missing out on opportunities to beat your competition.
Many are afraid to experiment because it means “failing.”
Failing is not bad as long the cost of doing so is small (or even zero).
For example, lots of things simply involve the cost of your time, not necessarily money.
Optimization
Once you have a few experiments under your belt and know what works, it’s time to optimize those activities to get the most bang for your buck.
This is where you take the things that work and make them work even better. Maybe it’s a matter of tweaking your messaging or offer, or perhaps it requires a more significant change, like altering your target audience. Sometimes that’s as simple as turning off underperforming ads, and sometimes it’s tweaking your landing page until it starts getting conversions.
Whatever it is, optimization allows you to get the most out of your marketing efforts so you can achieve even better results.
By optimizing, you make continuous improvements to your campaigns, which enables you to get better results while using fewer resources.
The key is to focus your optimization efforts on the things that will have higher impact and are attainable – in other words, you or your team can actually execute them.
This can apply to any business, even YouTube:
Trending Topics, Deleting Comments, Experimenting, and Optimizing Uploads- YOUR Questions Answered!
Final Word
Long story short, make a consistent process for testing which will reveal these optimizing opportunities, and then finetune them until they start delivering.
That’s how you’ll see meaningful and profitable results over time. And isn’t that the goal, anyway?
