The Smartest, Most Business-Savvy Full-Service Lafayette, Indiana Advertising Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Test Marketing Strategies

I hate failure. Don’t you? But it doesn’t scare me anymore. However, there is one particular brand of failure that I do fear. That’s the failure to gauge and manage the risk of failure correctly.

Sounds like double talk? It’s far from it.

I’m trying to help my clients come to embrace the possibility of failure as enthusiastically as we do the likelihood of success.

My old pappy used to say, “Son, you only need to be right 51% of the time to be successful.” He worked in a marketing firm. Our clients expect better odds than that. But his point is well taken. You do NOT have to be right every time to be successful. I’ve discovered the opposite to be true. The more I fail, the more I learn. And if I’m right all the time, I’m probably not testing enough new marketing strategies. In marketing, especially direct marketing, if we do not “test,” we do not learn what works best. We only experience what “kind of works.” That’s mediocrity.

For IDC clients, testing typically includes the measurement of various prospect lists, testing offers, and testing different ways of presenting the offer/message.

We test the marketing strategy. We test sales and marketing tactics. We test sales channels/ methods of distribution. And we test price, products, and services . . . And much more.

And we evaluate the data—the % response, the close rate, the ROI short term, and the ROI over the lifetime of the new customer relationship. Pretty basic stuff. The key is the installation of systems for data collection, analysis and reporting, and then the recommendation of appropriate rollout strategies. And the Internet is providing new analytics and bringing new dimensions of testing and controlling failure as an ever-present and inevitable aspect of what we all do.

The fact is, stop testing, and someday you will wear out the marketing strategy you are using today. Just keep it up, and you’ll get to experience failure eventually. The only way not to experience significant failure is to make the controlled mini-failure a part of your plan through market testing. Big companies do it all the time. You can too.

Are you looking for some road-tested marketing strategy to get sales rolling? From sales support to marketing to drive leads we are always interested in helping you grow!

First introduced in 1972, idc-marketing is the most helpful, most prominent, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.