What is this Growth method, "Experimental Marketing," all about?
"Experimental Marketing" is an approach to growing a business using tools and processes that leverage vision and scientific discovery.
It's big-picture, analytical, formulaic, Agile, and experimental.
Experiential vs Experimental
NOTE: Experiential marketing campaigns are different from experimental marketing.
Experiential is the experience the individual goes through. It is similar to experimental marketing in the sense that it's big picture (see next section). However, experiential is more conceptual in nature. Whereas, Experimental Marketing is a specific method with templates, processes, and best practices.
Experiential marketers MAY engage in experimental marketing, but they're not synonymous or related.
The Big Picture
Experimental Marketing strategy is all about your North Star Metric (NSM).
The North Star is the single metric that defines a company's promise to its customers AND itself.
If a marketing effort can't connect to the North Star, it's scrapped.
Being big picture, Experimental marketers support the health of the entire organization. Even if the initial focus is top-of-funnel lead generation, being big-picture means the experience before and after is part of the formula.
To illustrate, let's look at our weapon of choice when it comes to describing the customer experience, "Pirate Metrics."
The Pirate Metric framework does a great job of simplifying how we measure success and leverage the customer journey in our decision-making.
Here are the stages: (click here to learn more about Pirate Metrics)
- Acquisition - lead generation
- Activation - commitment to sales process
- Revenue - closed deals
- Retention - LTV
- Referral - Expansions & easy to close references
The benefit of being big picture is that we can change course with the needs of the business when it's necessary not just convenient. This way it's always convenient.
Analytical and Formulaic
Experimentation requires a commitment to objective truth. Objective truth comes from data, curiosity, and honesty.
That means everything we touch, publish, look at, or think about must have a data objective. This includes all digital marketing, such as blog posts, content offers, emails, and social.
"Analytical" and "formulaic" are great abstract concepts, but what do they actually mean?
Analytical:
Instead of seeing reporting as a necessary evil like most marketers and marketing agencies, we see it as a critical tool for growth. Without it, Growth Marketing isn't Growth Marketing. You have to analyze the past if you want to create a better future. So, we don't shy away from reporting. We crave it and tackle it on day one.
Formulaic:
Our formula puts data analysis at the forefront of all decisions. It's built into the 2-week sprint cycle, and each experiment is assigned a due date and expectation.
Engrained with Agility
Experimentation requires equal commitments to truth, speed, and flexibility.
"Time kills everything," and so do hypotheses built on gut instinct.
As part of the Experimental Marketing formula, we follow a rigid 2-week sprint cycle that prevents opinions from driving and keeps the ideation wheel turning in perpetuity. (learn more about the Experimental Marketing 2-week Sprint Cycle)
Ideation is part of the embedded formula, and the sprint cycle itself is geared toward what can be stood up in that timeframe, not stood up AND brought to completion.
The latter has proven to stall and completely derail momentum.
By committing to 5 or more experiments PUBLISHED in each sprint cycle, adhering to best practices for maintaining balance (learn more with our free lesson: The Experiment), and following a rigid analysis, ideation, and publication structure, Experimental Marketing keeps you Agile.
It's Experimental
As its name states, Experimental Marketing is experimental.
It's an idea that every marketing effort should have a targeted outcome tied to it and follow the scientific method.
- Observations
- Questions
- Research
- Hypotheses
- Tests
- Analysis
- Learning
Even the most basic marketing efforts can be categorized as experiments.
Doing this creates greater clarity around the strategic impact of the effort, which helps you identify upstream or downstream bottlenecking during the planning phase when there's still time to get ahead of it.
Addressing these issues up front greatly increases the likelihood of North Star impact.
But not all experiments will succeed.
The very premise of experimentation implies that there is potential for failure. So, part of the formula is to test multiple things at once and to bring balance to those tests.
Experimentation best practices (take the free lesson for more):
- Standard of 1 x 1 must be met
- 1 goal
- 1 vehicle
- At least 5 experiments per 2-week sprint cycle
- Minimum of one heavy experiment
- Minimum of one light experiment
- Minimum of one NEW experiment idea (benchmark)
- Minimum of one OPTIMIZATION+ experiment idea
- Use ICE scoring to prioritize ideas
- Clearly defined goals at the outset
NOTE: An Experimental Marketing campaign will be comprised of multiple experiments.
Conclusion
What is Experimental Marketing?
It's a Growth Marketing methodology that takes a scientific AND visionary approach to business growth. It covers the entire customer journey and leaves nothing to chance.
Click HERE to learn more about our Experimental Marketing services:
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