Testing for your lead generation engine -3

campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media, Testing

In this sequence of blog posts, I am actually taking you step by step through a real life campaign showing the testing I am doing, the failures and successes , as they happen.

In life in general and in marketing in particular “one” is a dangerous term. Some of you who follow my blog regularly will point at the contradiction. I am also the one who says focus. So to all those people who got this thought in your mind, I will still say FOCUS on one thing at a time, but never be too dependent on any one thing.

Having only one sales person, only one medium, only one partner are all situations which can lead to disaster.

So today I started working on creating the lead magnet using a different medium. Since I focus on B2B, my typical mediums are Google, LinkedIn and YouTube for posting advertisements. I have not yet understood the Facebook mechanism, so I don’t experiment with it when I am advising someone.

So today I have helped create the advertisement to be put on YouTube. We will test it against the revised ads we had put on Google yesterday to see which medium is performing better. Will keep you posted on this as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing for your lead generation engine

education, lead generation, Marketing, single target market, Testing

One of the best assets for your long term business, is getting a person’s email id. Once you have that you can keep educating them, to someday come to test your products or services.

However as time has passed, people have become more and more reluctant to give away their email. So while sending emails is cheap, the costly part is that people have become “blind” to emails being thrown at them. In that manner, email marketing has become more expensive because it’s lost its ability to immediately get you attention.

Which means people have become resistant to the idea of giving away their emails. So until you have isolated your audience very clearly – the single target market – and created something which that specific audience desires, you won’t get people wanting it. And if people don’t want it, they won’t give their email ids.

So understanding the conversation which could go on in the mind of your prospect, due to which she may want to look at what you are talking about, becomes critical. And you can only get this by testing. While I have written so many blog posts on this topic, at the end of the day, until I test and see a response, I am not sure if what I have built will generate leads ( or get email ids) Sometimes what I think the customer may be looking at bombs completely. This is primarily because marketing is 50% psychology and you cannot always get the psychology of your audience right the first time.

Once something starts generating results, then you can go out and and invest your complete budget into the campaign, to get the emails, but till then, test with limited exposure and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Till next time then….keep testing.

Carpe Diem!!!

In marketing “failing” is TESTING

Fear, Human Brain, Marketing, Testing

A lot of people in life go about scared of failing. There could be a lot of professions where failing is considered to be a “sin”. In marketing on the other hand if you don’t try different things you won’t know what will work.

You can’t try out different things without failing. If you don’t fail, you can’t succeed in marketing. That’s why in marketing they prefer to use the word testing.

In marketing you have to test everything – from your market, to your message, to your medium.

I have written a lot of posts on the concept of testing in marketing. So why this addition post. Today I was watching a video of Brene Brown on Netflix. I watch this video from time to time.. The video is all about how shame is the primary reason people don’t succeed. Each time I watch, this video, one thing that stands out is that it is the shame of failing that creates the fear in our mind for trying anything.

While I also fall prey to not trying because of fear, I have seen sometimes ,that the thing that I am resisting , is actually what can solve a lot of my problems. But because my brain wants to protect me from the shame, just in case I don’t succeed, it creates this fear inside me.

In early days of human evolution it was the physical fear of getting killed that caused our brains to resist trying something new. But now those kind of things are very few. Its more about ” what people will say” that causes us to not try anything.

While in your life you may decide to take chances or not is your choice. But if you want to succeed in marketing, you will need to test all the time. A lot of the tests will not work, but you learn from them and move forward.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Perfection versus Progress

Testing

I get quite frustrated with people trying to make things perfect and in turn not letting progress happen.

Being from marketing, my philosophy is to get something good enough and get it into the market, test and keep improving. On the other hand I come across people who would like to keep getting a product perfectly designed, made and only then shipped out. My worry with that philosophy is that time may run out and some other competitors might takeaway the market.

I also realize, if you are an artist, you would like to be the next Michaelangelo and don’t have an argument against it. As a marketer I have very limited capabilities to predict how the market will respond to what I have to offer.

To figure that out quickly, I need to to check the market. Now I can spend an enormous amount of time trying to create what “I” think is the perfect product, and the market completely ignores it. I have lost both time and money.

On the other hand I could come out with a product which meets some minimum requirements and then keep testing with what features the market needs. This way if the market does not accept what I have to offer, I would have spent less time. On the other hand if I see acceptance, then I can improve or add features, make progress, to take it closer to perfection.

Let me know your views in the comments section below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!