You might have heard this statement very often when people are talking about their ideas, their products, their customers, …
You try to argue with them and they say,
“But I know …”
My response in such a conversation is usually something like these:
“Okay, show me!”
“Can you prove it?”
“Have you tested it?”
The last one is a very significant one for businesses and marketeers. So many of you rely on assumptions rather than facts.
It is easier, cheaper, and quicker to test ideas and concepts than most of you believe.
Stop wasting your time and money guessing.
Start testing, now!
Biased by my professional background and current playing field focused on online marketing I am particularly fond of testing
- market viability
- marketing messages
- product ideas
with
direct response marketing practices.
In fact I think a lot of—especially smaller businesses—test a lot
implicitly by just doing rather than putting items on a to do list or agenda for a meeting.
But still most businesses do not test enough!
The ultimate decision maker is the market, not a director, not a manager. (I am assuming fair play, no tricking, no monopoly.)
My position here is not necessarily innovative, creative in first place. It's listening and responding. There is room for innovation and creation but it usually isn't your cash flow star right away.
- Where does the money come from?
- How do you increase the ROI of your marketing efforts?
Continuous testing is the answer.
Making it a habit pays off big time.
Yours
John W. Furst
P.S.: I think, I will write more articles about testing in the near future.
Image source: Based on The orange bicycle DKNY.Com Guerilla marketing scheme, ©2008 by rollingrck/flickr. Modifications ©2009 by John W. Furst - Some rights reserved. - CC-BY-SA 3.0.