Triple Your Marketing ROI With ‘Test, Learn & Improve’ Approach
The test, learn & improve approach is a concept in data science, which allows businesses to test their business assumptions to make better marketing actions for improving their return on investment (ROI) for the resources invested.
This concept can be used effectively for digital marketing too as marketers can easily measure the test variations and overall performance of a marketing campaign.
There are chances that you have heard of conversion rate optimization (CRO) and the ‘test, learn & improve’ approach is a good example of CRO.
An effective CRO strategy has two important objectives when using in digital marketing:
- Improve the conversion rates through testing of different variations of digital marketing activities.
- Learn from the tests that you had taken and apply the business findings to make effective future marketing decisions
“Test” To Take The Guesswork Out Of Marketing Activities
One of the key benefits in using this approach would be developing a data-driven system to gather valuable insights by testing numerous variations.
The root cause of why most businesses are achieving low Return on Ads Spend (ROAS) in most of their digital marketing campaign is due to the lack of structured thinking to identify the right desired business goals
Before launching a new marketing campaign, marketers should create a measurement framework to structure the campaign,
Pro tip: time is an important balancing act to achieve reliable testing results, you will need a significant amount of time to gather enough accurate data to achieve statistical significance for this approach to work effectively.
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Learn From Your Insights To Triple Your Marketing ROI
The learn approach is all about interpreting the valuable insights collected to allow marketers to make better marketing decisions.
For example, you can analyze the data collected from the testing campaign and understand which paid marketing channels can triple your digital marketing ROI.
Or else, it is also possible to feed all the data into a machine learning algorithm, so that it can develop a predictive analytics model and figure out the opportunities to triple your marketing ROI.
Leverage On Insights To Make Better Marketing Decision
With enough data gathered from the implementation of a testing campaign, marketers are able to predict important future marketing trends like dropping engagement rates or declining in other key metrics and implement contingency plans.
For example, based on a research conducted, the average person in Singapore is exposed to over 300 marketing messages a day.
Attention is at a premium, hence businesses must effectively interpret the insights to figure out the best marketing decision to earn this increasingly precious commodity, which can be important if your business is spending a lot of resources in marketing.
How To Apply A Test, Learn & Improve Model
Based on the outcomes, you can discover the most effective marketing strategy. This will be a continuous process, which will help you to make the right decision-making.
On top of that, you will be able to learn from your mistakes and convert them into successful marketing campaigns effectively.
Let’s say you’re planning a “test, learn & improve” campaign to understand the effectiveness of different ad headlines in your paid advertising campaigns to entice the targeted audience to learn more about your products or services.
The first question you should ask yourself is, what is the reason you want to test this?
Are you looking to triple your marketing ROI of your affiliate campaign, increase CTRs, or improve the engagement of your landing page?
It’s crucial to take time answering this question because it defines how you plan, start your tests, measure results to gather actionable insights.
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Clearly Define What You Want To Test To Triple Your Marketing ROI
Before you proceed with the testing campaign, it is important to clearly define what exactly you want to find out.
Then you will have a direction to move forward which can help you to make better business decisions to triple your digital marketing ROI .
For example, you can test which blog headers contributed to higher bounce rate or which videos are capable of contributing more engagement to your marketing campaigns.
On other hand, you may also test the key metrics of your marketing campaign generated on different days of the week. For example, what are the landing page bouncing rate metric and sales brought in from Instagram Paid Ads on Monday vs Tuesday vs Wednesday?
Likewise, you may also test and compare the Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate of Instagram Ads vs Facebook Ads vs Youtube Ads?
Understand The Audience You Want To Reach.
Technically, before marketers launch a campaign, they should have a clear understanding of the targeted audience, as it will assist them to create relevant marketing content, messaging, and advertising copywriting.
It will assist them in answering important questions such as does the marketing message solve the challenges, address the pain points, or satisfy the wants of the audience that they wish to target?
Remember: businesses can’t target everyone with the same marketing messages of their products or services.
The message can’t speak effectively to their best potential customers if they are trying to speak to their targeted audience of different age ranges with the same message.
There will be some differences in their needs and wants between the 2 groups of different targeted audiences, hence the implementation of segmentation will be needed.
Turn Insights Into Action
If you are not turning your insights into action, you will not be getting the maximum returns that the test, learn & improve model can deliver. Hence, you should have a clear picture in mind about how to turn insights into action.
For example, assume that you are working as a digital marketing specialist in a women’s online clothing store and you come across the need to turn your insights into action so that you can make effective marketing actions to to triple your Marketing ROI.
This is where you figure out that most of your customers will only complete their purchases after 8:00 pm through Instagram ads and Facebook ads even if you are running the campaign throughout the day.
You can assume that they are busy with other commitments in life such as being caught up with meetings with their bosses in the office, and only have time to shop for what they want after 8:00 pm.
Based on this, you should move 80% of your marketing budget to run paid ads after 8 pm as this is the period you most likely to catch your targeted audience interest and attention to your paid ads
Conclusion
Now you have a clear understanding of what the test, learn & improve model is and how it will be able to assist you in making better marketing decisions and triple your digital marketing ROI.
I personally believe that companies that successfully leverage these models effectively will be able to overcome the current coronavirus pandemic and the future challenges, leaves their businesses a step ahead of their competitors.
