Marketing experiments are popular right now. Driving engagement and ultimately conversions are becoming harder than ever, largely due to the oversaturation of advertisers targeting the same audiences.
What was easy and worked twelve or twenty-four months ago no longer does. So, how do you cut through and drive engagement today?
Our suggestion? Experiment.
What is a marketing experiment?
Marketing experiments are no different in context to scientific ones; they're the idea that to figure out if something can work, you need to test it.
Experiments are useful for testing things, such as:
- Does my messaging cut through? Does it engage our audience effectively? Does it resonate?
- How should we distribute a blog (or other content types for that matter)?
- How do we solve our deal closure issue?
Experiments work at all stages of the marketing funnel (customer journey). By experimenting, you can fix gaps or issues at every stage of your sales process - from effective engagement at the top of the funnel, to nurturing contacts through, and ultimately closing a deal or opportunity.
So, how do you design a marketing experiment?
When designing a marketing experiment, it's important to not over-complicate the process. An experiment should be very focused on its result(s). Focus on a couple of key areas:
-
What are we trying to achieve? Ladder this back to a challenge you're facing. That way, you know that you're closing a gap. A challenge could be identifying new channels to use to engage your audience, for example.
-
What will the experiment focus on? What are the actions we will take?
-
How will we know if the experiment has been successful? What are the metrics we will measure? Be clear and focused here. If you're trying to identify if your messaging works, then a successful experiment will understand if your messaging works or not. It isn't about generating leads. It's about the messaging specifically.
-
How long will the experiment last?
Stick to these quick headings and you'll get the results you need, which may or may not be what you desire.
So, let's break this down further.
Which marketing challenge should you focus your experiment on?
As marketers, we have so much access to data. In some respects, a little bit too much data than we know what to do with. So, how do you decide what to focus a marketing experiment on? It can be overwhelming, we get it.
To start, map out all of the frictions you're experiencing throughout your marketing efforts. Map this out across the full funnel and then it'll be easier to see the wood from the trees.
Done properly, you might identify frictions such as:
- Struggling to drive engagement across social media, despite posting frequently with content you deem to be right for your audience
- Lack of website traffic despite posting regular content
- Lack of traffic to the pages we expect people to convert on (i.e., product demo pages, pages hosting downloadable marketing content or webinar sign-up pages.)
- Little to no engagement with content (eBooks, blogs, infographics, etc.), despite investing a lot of time and effort into creating it
- Poor email open rates with a previously engaged audience
It can be really deflating and demotivating when you spend considerable time, effort and in some cases money investing in your marketing processes and tactics, only to find out that engagement is low. But fear not, with some small-scale, low-risk, low-cost experiments, we think you can uncover valuable insights as to why, and focus on a plan of action to improve engagement and drive growth.
When it comes to experimentation, start from the bottom of the marketing funnel and work your way up. Why? Because it's important that you create sales opportunities before you begin to add more demand at the top of the funnel. Starting at the top only to identify new frictions as you attempt to move a prospect from awareness through to decision (via the consideration stage) is incredibly painful, and could carry heavy costs.
A landing page where you're attempting to convert leads is always a good start - for example a product demo page. Spend time understanding why you're not converting traffic here, optimise this page to a point that it's now converting and then scale. Once you've got a page that converts, you can feel confident driving much greater volumes of traffic to it. This is where you might decide to execute paid social or PPC campaigns.
How to design a marketing experiment
It's important to put some parameters around the marketing experiment you're going to execute. Being too vague or too broad will set you up to fail. At the end of the day, an experiment is a focused piece of activity, aimed at solving a very specific challenge. What an experiment is not is trying to sold everything in one action.
Thinking about all of the frictions identified above, let's focus on one of them - for example the product demo page.
Our current challenge is likely to be something like:
"We struggle to generate leads via our product demo page."
Now that we've identified a focus for our experiment, let's turn this challenge on its head using the 'How might we' methodology, which is all about open-mindedness and creativity in problem-solving. At this point, nothing should be off the table. After all, experiments are a safe space to test - and to fail (providing we take learnings from said failure). Note: the experiment itself is never a failure - because it reduces the uncertainty in a situation. However, our hypothesis can be proved wrong. So, whilst the experiment itself wasn't a failure, we failed to generate the desired result.
Anyway - back on track - knowing that we struggle to generate leads through our product demo page, what hypothesis could we test that might enable us to generate leads via our product demo page?
Experiments should be small and hyper-focused pieces of activity, so we're not talking about creating a new page from scratch here. We could test things such as:
Page forms
-
Moving the location of the form
-
Adding additional CTAs throughout the page (linking to the form)
-
The amount of form fields, or which fields are required
-
The title of the form (i.e., book meeting, book consultation, book demo, book discovery)
Page content
-
Adding additional referenceability/credibility (i.e., data or case studies)
-
Listing product integrations
-
Adding additional imagery (i.e., product photos or platform mockups)
Page structure
-
Moving sections around
Setting objectives for your marketing experiment
Setting clear and achievable objectives is key to success. We're taught about SMART objectives early on in our careers, and they're equally as valid here. Make sure you're setting your experiment up for the best chance of success.
Is your experiment objective specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and is there a fair time parameter?
All good marketing experiments start with a hypothesis
As with any experiment, we need to have a hypothesis to test. Without one, it's difficult to know if what we're testing is a success or not.
Keep your marketing experiment hypothesis simple: "By doing X, we believe that Y will happen."
To put this into context with the earlier example of our demo landing page, this could be: "By adding more CTAs to the page, we expect more people to arrive at our form."
As you'll see, this hypothesis aims at solving a very focused gap in the process - getting people to the form. If we can drive more people to the form, we can assume there is a level of interest. If page visitors are arriving at the form but not submitting their details or completing our desired actions, then we have a natural next experiment: to test things specifically with the form to gain a greater understanding of what it is going to take to convert.
Measuring the success of your marketing experiment
As with any experiment, it's important to set KPIs and metrics to measure upfront. This helps us to remain focused on what we're doing (and why we're doing it), and to come to an objective assessment at the end.
Example marketing experiment metrics to measure for our product demo page could include:
-
The average time a site visitor spends on the page
-
The no. of people who click on our CTA's
-
The no. of people who arrive at our demo page form
-
The no. of people who complete our form
As we're not trying to go from 0-100mph in one sprint of activity, experiments are less about saying that success is about getting 100 enquiries. It's more about going from nothing to something. That's where we know our experiment has driven the desired impact. Once we've got something, we can then experiment around the issue of how we drive greater engagement - for example, how we go from 5 leads to 50 leads (this could simply be a hypothesis of "if we increase traffic by 10x, we expect to convert 10x as many leads" - just be sure to focus on distribution methods that speak to your persona, not just any traffic.)
How long should your marketing experiment last?
Experiments should be quick and easy to execute, analyse and act upon. We recommend a hyper-focused time frame - long enough for u to gather data but short enough for us to have a chance of scaling activities. If we test something over 12 months, we set ourselves up to fail as this generally isn't scalable across everything we do - and getting to an optimised cycle is key long-term.
In most cases, 2-4 weeks is a good timeframe to work with. The caveat here is that we need to be able to gather enough data and insights to inform whether our hypothesis has been proven right or not. Making changes to our product demo page without acquiring any traffic is counter-productive. So, once you've made changes, find a way to drive relevant and targeted traffic to it. For example, execute paid LinkedIn ads to a persona demographic, or send an email to prospects.
How do you know if your marketing experiment is successful?
Every marketing experiment is a success, even if you don't get the outcome you'd hoped for. Every experiment carried out reduces the uncertainty of where challenges lie.
The marketing experiment data available to us
Lastly, we wanted to share some of the platforms you might want to look at when considering where to gather data and insights from - before, during or when it comes to assessing the impact of your experiment. Note: these are by no means an exhaustive list of metrics.
Google Console - search engine (Google) impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate and average position
Google Analytics - total no. of visitors, total no. of sessions, location, average session duration, engagement rate
HotJar - page behaviour (i.e., where people scroll to), heat mapping (most commonly clicked links)
PPC (i.e., Google Ads or Microsoft Ads) - ad impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate, % share of ad impressions (compared to competing ads)
Paid social (i.e., LinkedIn Ads, Instagram / Facebook ads) - ad impression, clicks, clickthrough rate, engagements
Data-led decision making
Marketing experiments remove subjectivity from the situation: by looking at data at every stage, you can remove the age-old "it didn't work" comments, instead having more grown up and meaningful conversations.
Got a question?
Don't hesitate to reach out - we love talking about all things experiments.