A Step By Step Detailed Strategy for conducting Marketing and Business Experiment

Over the past decades, experimentation has been scary. After months of extensive hard work, multiple coffee breaks, intensive analysis of every aspect of the business. Some companies still fail to measure the effectiveness of their respective business and marketing campaigns.

 

To successfully be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, you should consider conducting business and marketing experiments. Yes, small experiments, tests, and changes in the business and marketing campaign are a risky affair but they help you collect the real-data needed to scale your business. It’s always better to perform a round of tests and derive metrics before implementing them to your business strategy.

 

If you wish to know more about ways to conduct marketing and business experiments in your strategy, keep reading.

 

 

What are Business and Marketing Experiments?

 

As an entrepreneur, coming up with new and innovative ideas is a usual routine but having to execute them effectively in your business will require evidence. The evidence needed lies in the data that can be obtained by performing various business experiments.

 

Business Experiments are a process of testing procedures, articulations, and design as per the test and learn approach. It helps entrepreneurs to test their hypotheses, assumptions, and experiments against the actions of potential customers. Therefore, solving the problem of defining and understanding a specific problem in the long run.

 

Next, to get hold of a problem and understand the customer’s perspective, an entrepreneur needs to perform market research. This is when Marketing Experiments come into the picture and help you perform market research giving you all possible directions to a successful marketing and business campaign.

 

Ultimately, these experiments will help you attain the assurance you need for a campaign to be effective. Next, let’s dive into a strategy to conduct Marketing and Business experiments.

 

How to Conduct a Business and Marketing Experiment

 

1. Devise a Hypothesis

The first step to any experiment is to create a hypothesis of what you want to test. The hypothesis is an assumption made for the objective of being tested which always has a predetermined outcome. In this step, you have to derive what questions are to be answered and what decisions are to be made.

A few characteristics for a defined hypothesis are –

• For a reliable hypothesis, it should be clear and on point.
• A hypothesis should be specific and provide an opportunity to conduct more tests in the future.
• While performing the research hypothesis, all variables and their relationships should be mentioned clearly.
• Lastly, a good hypothesis should help you achieve clarity on what is to be achieved and learned.

 

2. Perform your Research

The next step after devising a hypothesis is to conduct research. This research will give you an idea of how other experiments in the same niche have performed and their possible outcomes. The research will also help to make changes to your hypothesis as per the industry to achieve the predetermined outcome.

 

3. Plan out the Testing of your Hypothesis

Now, it’s time to choose what metrics are to be considered for measurement. Here, you have to measure everything that matters.

For example, if you have to test an email campaign for a marketing experiment, you would measure –

• impressions
• reach
• CTR
• conversions

Further, metrics like the number of emails received, opened, and read would give you the results to analyze your hypothesis.

 

4. Execute the Experiment

Now comes the step where you have to create the experiment and execute it. There are multiple types of marketing and business experiments that you can opt for, the most popular being A/B Testing.

 

Remember, this step is our science lab. We will be testing and measuring all variables here to know which has the highest impact on our business. Herein the sample sizes and control groups determine the validity of the results.

 

Once done planning your experiment, you have to come up with a schedule to monitor your results achieved and recipients to experiment with. Lastly, make sure you have adequate funding to perform the experiments.

 

5. Analyze the Results

In the analysis phase of your experiment, you have to use the metrics you decided on in the step above and draw conclusions to see whether your hypothesis was correct or not and if it answers all your questions.

 

With regards to business, make sure you run multiple experiments and then opt for the one that goes best with business in the long run.

 

For example, your 1st experiment might have better results compared to the 4th experiment. But, in the long run, the 4th experiment delivers better results. In this situation, opt for the 4th experiment as you should always think of your business in the long run.

 

The above process applies to every experiment you have in mind but do not expect guaranteed success from this process. For it to deliver the best results you have to keep a few principles in mind –

 

• Choose the experiments that give you the best benefits and make wise decisions while deciding which test to opt for.
• Test meaningful variables that would make a difference and not the smallest details such as the font or button color.
• The main point of an experiment is to learn something new every time. Every experiment gives you valuable insights and increases your knowledge and expertise.

 

Now that we know how to conduct business experiments, let us dig into a few ways to conduct them.

 

Ways To Conduct Business and Marketing Experiments

 

1. A/B Testing 

A/B Testing method is one of the most popular methods of testing in which you have two versions of experiments and it gives you a clear insight as to what is preferred by your customers.

 

2. Concept Testing 

In this testing method, you have to choose an area in your business that can vary from business model to customer products and services which will then use customer input to assess the idea.

 

3. Experiment with CTAs

Changing CTAs from time to time can give you an insight as to what works better and gives you more engagement. Experiment with colors, fonts, and try animating your CTAs for better effectiveness. Make sure you consider the correct metrics for an effective experiment. Also, use the best tools available to make relevant designs that would appeal to your audience.

 

4. Social Media Platforms

Try out the new platforms where you see more of your potential customers. Having a social media presence on Pinterest and Instagram is essential. You get to explore the untapped audience that you didn’t even know existed.

 

Keep experimenting with hashtags to better your reach, make content that is in trend and stay on top with all the top animations and visuals breaking the internet.

 

5. Experiment with your Positing Schedule

Try posting at a time where most of your audience is usually online and make the best use of user-generated content. Experiment creating content that your audience can best relate to therefore relate to your brand or business. If you have any global offices, you can highlight your employees from all over the globe and post area-specific content in their local language or so.

 

6. Animated Ads

Try conveying your content to your audience through small videos, GIFs, or cards that can catch customer’s attention at once. You can try different concepts, languages and create content to know what intrigues your audience the best.

 

7. Experiments Outside the Digital Framework

The principles mentioned above can not only be used for digital testing but can also be applied to any part of your business. For example,

• Automated checkouts vs non- automated checkouts.
• If the change in the brand name, the brand logo makes a difference in the number of visitors to the store or website.
• If you’re a retail store, you could experiment with your products and customer service to check the change in customer flow.
• You could even experiment with the discounts you have to offer. For example, keeping bundles on discount could increase the number of items purchased.

 

TAKEAWAY

In this article, I’ve explained to you the base of marketing and business experiments. It should be enough to help you get new ideas and develop new testing for yielding the highest results.

 

Just remember whatever the results, you should not stop exploring and trying new experiments. Experimenting is the key to the best insights which will help you get a better understanding of your customers and therefore lead to making better decisions in business. Successful business experiments are not an overnight thing. They consist of failure, refinement, failure, and then Success.

 

So, all in all,

 

If you want to improve your business performance, you have to consider taking up the merits of a business experiment and not lose hope.

 

Let me know in the comments below if you have any more ideas for testing!

 

Till then, Happy Testing!