How To Turn Your Marketing Into Science

A lot of people assume that their marketing will be successful if they follow their instincts or do what they learned in school. But that’s rarely the case. Today’s marketing is hyper-data-driven. It’s something that requires constant experimentation and learning to get right. There’s not really a formula anymore, especially since the online environment and people’s tastes are changing so rapidly.

But how do you actually turn your marketing efforts into a science experiment? What do you need to do?

Define What You Think Is True

The first step is to say what you think is true. Scientists call this step “forming your hypothesis.” You want to take a look at what you think might be likely given the data you have so you can test it properly in the future.

Leverage Analytics

The next step is to think about what you’re going to measure. You need metrics to determine whether your hypothesis is true.

This part sounds hard, but it is actually much easier than you might think in today’s software ecosystem. Only a tiny minority of businesses still do things by hand.

The reason things are so easy is that most of the platforms you’re going to use for your marketing collect and pool the data for you. You don’t actually have to do anything yourself, other than look at it, of course.

It almost doesn’t matter which platform you choose to use. For example, if you want to check the power of your email marketing, Mailchimp and other providers have built-in tools you can use to determine your level of success. The same goes for virtually all social media sites and Google SEO.

With this data, you can arm yourself with the information you need to thrive. You can test whether you are using the right approaches and if there is anything in your business model that is letting you down.

Run Controlled Experiments

Once you have all this data from various platforms, the next step is to run controlled experiments. You want to spend time figuring out what you think will work, and then run with it.

Most businesses run A/B testing to determine what’s going to work. For example, suppose you have a Google Ad and you want to check whether a small change in the wording will increase click-through rates. What you’d do is continue running the new ad and then get Google to run the new one to the same random population. Then, you’d measure your CTR to see which performed best.

What’s nice about A/B testing is that it can be as granular as you like. You can continually test new layouts and formats against each other to see which are more successful in grabbing attention and encouraging consumers to take action.

Once you start running experiments like these, you can take a lot of the guesswork out of your decisions. Instead of assuming you’re getting the decisions right, you have data to back up your choices.

Segment Your Audience

Another pro tip, and something that platforms like Scalable recommend, is segmenting your audience. The idea here is to get better results by showing the right ad to the right person.

Say, for instance, you are A/B testing on your entire audience but not seeing improvements. This can happen if the changes you make increase engagement from one group of people, but reduce it in another.

The key to solving this problem is to run two separate ads. If you have one for the group that appreciates the original ad, that will perform better. Then, you can create a new, more tailored ad for the other group to get them more engaged with what you’re doing. It’s this combination that makes the most sense.

Of course, you don’t need to limit yourself to just two different segments either. Often, businesses cater to multiple types of individuals who will each respond differently when shown the same ad. Your task is to ensure that you match the optimal ad to the individual character traits of each subgroup.

Measure Your KPIs

At the same time, you want to measure your KPIs and ensure that your advertising makes economic sense for your business. These indicators tell you whether you are on the right track or not.

Most professionals in advertising look for the ratio of the lifetime value of a customer (LTV) to the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Ideally, you want the ratio to be 3:1, meaning the customer gives you $3 for every $1 you spend to acquire them. If you dip below this, it usually means your product is bad or your advertising needs refining. The best businesses can sometimes get a LTV/CAC ratio of 10 or 100, so that’s what you want to aim for, too.

Iterate Based On Your Results

Once you have all this information, you’ll want to iterate your marketing approach. Usually, you will find that specific channels and tactics work better than others, so you’ll want to focus on them to avoid wasting your time.

For example, if you notice Google Ads aren’t performing for you, but social media content is, then switch to the latter. It may simply be a better pipeline.

Once you start iterating, you’ll soon see the power of this methodology. All of a sudden, you can see what’s working and then course correct to get on the optimal path to success.

Automate

Finally, if you think you’re onto a winning strategy and want to cement it, then consider automation. If you can get AI and software to do all the backend tasks, it frees up your team and prevents you from having to spend so much of your time fiddling around and experimenting, which is hard.

Automation is also useful if you want to be consistent. Machines will never forget your protocol and will implement it faithfully until you tell them not to.

So there you have it: how to turn your marketing into a kind of science experiment.