Habits are comfortable, but not necessarily safe. Especially when it comes to marketing. If you aren’t regularly experimenting with your marketing, your routine could be running you into a rut.

From technology to trends, headline-grabbing crises to moral revolutions- the world is in a constant state of chaotic change. Your market, your customers, and your business are no exception.

When it comes to marketing, by the time someone gets around to writing a best practice guide or “How To” piece, it’s often already obsolete or about to be.

Remember, it’s more important to be adaptable than “perfect” by standards that are always, always in flux.

So how do you find your marketing voice and strategy in the midst of such constant change?

You experiment.

No One Likes Static

We all get sick of too much of the same.

If you haven’t changed up your marketing strategy in the last few years or even months, your website, blog, and social media feeds could be signalling to prospects that you aren’t keeping up with the times. Or, worse, that you never got a handle on the messaging that speaks to them in the first place.

Now, it’s 100% understandable that business owners covet the feeling of safety that a solid, routine, marketing strategy provides. But if you aren’t trying anything new, making small and large adjustments based on customer feedback, and if you aren’t having much fun with the promotions you’re creating… you aren’t marketing effectively.

Change It Up: Experiment With Your Marketing

Change doesn’t have to be scary. In fact, it can be a lot of fun. Change also doesn’t have to be massive.

Sometimes a small adjustment is all that’s needed. Throughout my marketing career, I’ve seen businesses have big payoffs for making changes as slight as publishing 2 blog posts a month instead of 1, posting and engaging with followers more frequently on social media, cleaning up Calls To Action, reposting top performing older content that’s still relevant, or reducing the number of mandatory fields in the contact form.

When you’re ready to try something big and bold, remember that marketing experiments are certainly not one-size-fits all.

Maybe the thing that will hook your audience is a public-facing study, a downloadable educational resource, hilariously biting satire, fashion-forward glamazon shots, or a heartwarming and sentimental story.

Maybe it’s adding video to your content mix, partnering with a local event, upping the frequency of your posts, or having a young teach you how to TikTok.

The thing that should guide your marketing experimentation is your target market. What type of messaging and mediums have they already indicated they want more of? What do you know about their interests? What tone tends to drive the most engagement with your ideal customers?

Your marketing experiments will require some guess work, but it should be educated guesswork. As in, anchor your marketing experiment hypotheses in your knowledge of your buyer personas.

Tap Into Your Talents

That said, you shouldn’t discount your own creative inclinations.

Do you have a creative talent you enjoy in your free time? Why not find a way to utilize it in your marketing strategy?

If you like to dance, maybe your marketing videos start involving dance. That would be a nice break from all the corporate-y slides plastered over Instagram for business! If you like to draw, maybe your social media posts feature your art. It’s always a boon not to see the same stock image over and over again. Got a great fashion sense? Maybe you go live to educate your audience while sporting your outrageous fashion. Are you extremely droll? Let your marketing voice reflect that and drop all that sugar-high corporate positivity!

Just because it’s business, doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Joy is something others want to take part in. If you’re having a blast and providing value while marketing your business, you’re indicating to customers that they will have a blast working with you.

Set The Bar: Make a New “Best Practice”

Hinging your entire marketing strategy on following already-established best practices may prevent you from ever moving past middle-of-the-pack.

I’m not knocking best practices, it’s good to learn from the tried and true, market trends, and to avoid repeating industry horror stories.

However, keep in mind that the first person to try what is now considered a best practice didn’t know it was a best practice when they tried it. It may even have been a break from the conventional wisdom and trends of the time.

So, you should try your bold new marketing campaign idea and commit to giving it a fair shot at success. Promote it. Promote it again. On different platforms, at different times of day. Add it into your email signature, etc. etc.

If it drives sales, engagement, and grows your following, then yay! If not, then maybe you need to tweak your promotion strategy, adjust your Call To Action, or make some edits to the content.

If your marketing campaign ultimately doesn’t further your business goals enough to justify the effort, well, then you still win. Now you have some valuable insight into what won’t work for your target audience.

The Courageous Vulnerability of Standing Out

It always takes courage to go against the grain, to do something new, to put your name on something that hasn’t been done before.

But, as an entrepreneur, a business owner, or an artist, you’re no stranger to bold moves. You’ve got this.

Think of marketing as a playground for your creativity, ambition, vision, and, yes, your vulnerability. These are the ingredients of a strong and memorable brand identity that will make your target market empathize with you and dream with you.

If all of your marketing looks perfectly polished, perfectly corporate, and perfectly calculated… You're not giving your customers enough fallible humanity to relate to. (Think of your lurking sense of dread when you watch the original Stepford Wives and Get Out. Something that lacquered and saccharine is not to be trusted.)

Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone who only ever smiled, copped to zero weaknesses, and seemingly never experienced any problems or hardships whatsoever. Oh, and they looked absolutely flawlessly edited 24/7. How on earth would you relate to that? I don’t know about you, but this is not the person I’m going to seek out when I need a solution to a problem.

You want your customers to be comfortable going to you when they have a problem you can solve. So, you’re going to have to be a brand that is relatable, memorable, and likable for your target audience.

(Caveat: it’s OK if your brand isn’t likable for everyone. Your ideal customers are the ones that count.)

How To Know It’s Time To Try Something New with Your Marketing

Experimenting with new marketing campaigns should be a regular part of your marketing strategy. However, here are a few clues that it’s high time to hone and evolve your marketing endeavors.

Dipping Or Flatlining Marketing Metrics

• Customers aren’t coming in through your website.

• Your social media isn’t funneling people to your website or other intended destination.

• Although your social media posts are reaching a wide audience, you’re not getting much engagement (likes, comments, shares, etc.)

• Your website, social media, digital ads, and/or newsletter aren’t earning conversions (link or button clicks, form fills etc.)

• You’re getting lots of unfollows and/or unsubscribes.

  
  

Platform Mismatch

• Customers are hanging out on social media platforms you don’t have a presence on.

• They’re not hanging out on the social media platforms you do have a presence on.

• Customers are on the social media platforms you’re on, but they’re not there to buy.

• You don’t have content for the channels customers explore on their buyer’s journey.

Negative or Blah Feedback from Customers & Prospects

• Your blog posts, social media posts, newsletters, or videos are gaining a lot of negative engagement or not much engagement at all.

• Prospective customers aren’t mentioning your marketing during sales intakes.

• You’ve invested heavily in newsletters, but prospects keep telling you they never read newsletters (or Twitter, or Instagram, etc. etc.).

• Prospects tell you your website or other marketing assets are hard to understand or misleading.

• Prospects and customers say they are unclear about next steps or where to go for more information.

  
  

Sellers Are All “I Don’t Know Her” About Your Marketing

• Your sellers aren’t using any of your marketing assets to help make the sale.

• Sellers say they don’t refer customers to the website or marketing assets because they are unhelpful or outdated.

• Sellers can’t remember or are unaware of your marketing assets.

  
  

If you’re experiencing any of these scenarios, don’t despair. It’s playtime! Turn into a mad scientist marketer and start concocting some hypotheses, experiment, and track whether your adjustments to existing campaigns or new campaigns are having the desired result. Don’t forget to keep your sales team in the know, they can keep you apprised of direct customer feedback.

How To Gauge Success For Your Marketing Experiment.

With every experiment, don’t forget to start by establishing goals. Is this campaign about building your Instagram following? Or are you trying to get viewers to click a link? Or do you need people to hop on that landing page pronto and fill out a contact form?

Goals set? Great. Experiment away and keep tabs on whether it’s having the desired effect.

Not getting the subscribes you were after? Getting web traffic but not form fills? Before you light the experiment on fire in frustration, now is a good time for some little tweaks. For example: try posting at different times of day, or change up the photo. Put a different header on your contact form or drop some of the mandatory form fields. Add in some extra promotion with a video or a blog post, etc.

Calling It Quits

After you’ve given it a fair chance to work, made some tweaks, but it's still not paying off, there is no shame in calling it quits. But don’t think your experiment was a waste.

Reflect on why it failed. Maybe it got a lot of shares because it was cool, but wasn’t directly related to the buyer’s journey enough to drive sales. You may even want to ask some trusted customers and your own sales team for feedback on why it didn’t resonate. Now you know what not to do in your next experiment!

Make no mistake, knowing what not to do is a very valuable insight. So don’t let the fear of failure prevent you from experimenting with how to improve your marketing.

Remember, just because one experiment failed doesn’t mean every experiment will fail. In fact, with each marketing failure, if you play your cards right, you have more data to redirect you towards what will work.

Try It

No risk, no reward.

If your marketing isn’t getting you the leads you deserve, change it up. Experiment. Have fun with it!

Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Einstein’s definition of insanity). The right kind of marketing madness is the willingness and courage to keep trying new things so you can hone what works and drop what doesn’t.

Not sure how to make a splash with your marketing? Whether it’s a bold content marketing campaign or a fearless, edgy marketing strategy, M.Isa can help.