Week 9 - Testing Critical to Success

Testing is simply learning what works best when you attempt to market your business. You test early, gather feedback and draw conclusions long BEFORE embarking on expensive city or country wide marketing programs.

Day to day, you need to track the quality of leads (those calling or emailing your business) but more than that, you need to start with the materials that motivated the prospect to make contact in the first place. These include testing different headlines, colors, texts, offers, pricing and just about anything else until you are confident you have the best combination of factors to attract the most qualified customers.

Testing can not only pinpoint the most effective way to get your message across, it also offers huge leverage - remember, an advertisement might pull 3 or 3000 responses but still costs the same to run.

Testing doesn’t end with the style or appearance of a marketing piece. You can also test the most effective medium, the page number if it is a newspaper, the size of the advertisement, the most effective page within a Blog to run your banner, the call to action or the timeslot when a radio ad runs.

These days Internet clicks are easy to track and many small business owners are using the data to alter their marketing programs, some on the fly. Although more traditional advertising mediums are not as flexible, why not apply the Internet logic when analyzing the effectiveness of your offline marketing? It’s your money, don’t waste it. Test, measure and test again and you can sleep each night knowing your marketing dollars are deployed in the most effective manner.