It’s a wonder that Marketing did not start in the sciences! I would think that marketing is the epitome of cause and effect. You communicate a message, a benefit, a product’s function at large and your company would see a rise in inquiries, a bump in opportunities and hopefully a sizable blip in sales!
I guess back in the day it was not easy to measure the effect and tie it to specific causes, but as long as the results were directional one could accept with a level of confidence that the marketing worked. Today we have some many tools available to measure each marketing channel that one can easily take out the guess work from marketing. Additionally with the capability of making rapid changes on the internet Marketers can actually experiment with their programs to see which one gives the best desired effect.
A small example. Take something as simple as an email’s subject line. Randomly split your email list into two and send your message to your contacts with slightly different subject lines. This would test out a single variable, i.e. your email subject line. Want to test more? Send your two email messages out at different times of the day or on different days of the week. Additionally you can drive the respondents to different landing page variants.
In a very short span of time you can test out multiple variables and get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, i.e. figure out what causes the best outcome. The tools available to track all these results are so commonplace that over a series of 5-6 email tests you could have a very good idea of what part of your artwork is popular - which subject line works best, what time of day (or day of the week) is ideal for sending out emails and what landing page variant converts more responders to customers or leads.
With technology or the science of marketing we can take the guess work out of our campaigns. The other underlying phenomenon taking place is the wisdom of crowds. Instead of using a single person’s expertise or experience to determine our best practices, we take the responses from hundreds or thousands of respondents to improve our marketing. This is one of the powers behind social media marketing and it is used in various ways. More on this in future posts. Happy building!
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