Test Your Marketing On a Small Scale - Adult B2B Marketing Tip

Test On A Small Scale, Because Guesswork Can Cost You A Lot Of Money

After 25 years in the retail jewelry business, an entrepreneurial man retired and sold diamonds at true wholesale prices directly to the public from his home. Because his prices were so low, he managed to sell several diamonds a month based solely on word-of-mouth advertising. But as for his advertising and marketing skill, well, he didn't have a clue. One day he hatched a brilliant idea. He decided to start a company to sell lower-end jewelry and collectibles on a nationwide basis using newspaper advertisements as his marketing medium in the Parade magazine. He would place advertisements in newspapers that looked exactly like the Franklin Mint's. The only thing different would be his company's name and address at the bottom of the ad. He sharpened his pencil and figured that if his ads could pull a measly 6 responses out of every 10,000 placed, net profits would triple the ad cost. If he could only muster 3 responses per 10,000 then he would at least break even. Hey, if Franklin could do it, why couldn't he?

On the strength of projections and his reputation in the community, he raised over $200,000 from local investors to launch the first product, a gemstone ring. The initial ad cost over $60,000 for complete coverage in the Los Angeles Times' Parade Magazine. Since the paper was delivered to several million homes, he figured to be extremely rich very soon.

To make a sad story short, the product bombed. He tried a different product the second time, and still another the next time. Finally, after all of his capital was depleted, he was forced to quit - his investors not happy. How could this have happened? All he needed was a measly 6 responses out of 10,000. Instead of blowing the whole budget on a couple of unproven ideas, he should have taken the time to run some tests in similar magazines with smaller circulations. These relatively inexpensive tests would have told him which ad concepts worked, which prices pulled the most orders, what kinds of terms his customers found most convenient, or anything else he needed to know before rolling out a huge, expensive campaign. Moral to this story: It's better to find out what works and what doesn't work when there's $60,000 at stake. Testing will ensure you never make a major marketing mistake again - ever.

Again, when you test one marketing variable against another, you will find that one always out pulls all others by a significant margin. A price of $19 may out pull $21 by three times. A certain headline in a newspaper ad might out pull another one by as many as 5 or 10 times! That's 5 or 10 times the result with no increased expense. Advertising and marketing offers your business the greatest source of leverage. But you have to continually test to take advantage of that leverage. As you test different approaches, carefully analyze and tabulate the results. When you find something that out pulls everything else, that becomes your "control". Once you know what works best, you can test other variables in your advertising mix.

Once you find a headline that works well in a magazine ad, you can then start to test it in different magazines, or different placements in the magazine, or in different sizes. Just be sure not to test more than one variable at a time, though, or you won't know what effect changing each one of the variables has. If you go changing the headline, the publication, and the format of the body copy, you won't have any idea which component accounted for the difference in results.

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