We marketers do love inventing new names for old ideas.

Today we talk about conversion tracking, A/B testing, campaign optimization, performance marketing, and data-driven decision-making as though somebody discovered all of this shortly after inventing the smartphone.

Claude Hopkins might have found that amusing.

More than a century ago, Hopkins was already obsessed with a wonderfully simple question: Did the advertising work?

He did not have Google Analytics or dashboards showing conversions in real time. He had coupons, coded offers, mail orders, samples, and whatever else he could devise to connect an advertisement with an actual response.

The technology was primitive by today’s standards, but the thinking was not.

Hopkins understood that marketing becomes considerably more valuable when you stop treating it like an expense you hope works and start treating it like something you can test, measure, learn from, and improve.

Advertising Should Not Require Faith

There is a strange conversation that happens in businesses all the time.

Someone asks, “How is the marketing doing?” and the answer is something like, “Pretty good. People seem to like it.”

That is nice. My mother likes most things I write too, but I have never included her opinion in a quarterly marketing report.

Hopkins came from the world of direct response, where advertisers wanted a clearer connection between money going out and money coming back. If an advertisement included a coupon, they counted the coupons. If two offers produced different responses, they compared them.

The objective was not to remove creativity from advertising. It was to stop creativity from becoming an excuse for ignorance.

Your Marketing Is Already an Experiment

Every campaign tests something, whether you realize it or not. You may be testing an audience, message, offer, headline, price, promise, channel, or some combination of them.

The important question is whether you are paying enough attention to learn from the result.

Imagine spending $20,000 on a campaign that underperforms. That hurts, but it becomes considerably more painful if you finish without understanding why.

Perhaps the audience was wrong, the offer was weak, people abandoned the landing page, or leads arrived but never converted. Maybe the campaign actually attracted fewer customers than expected, but those customers were considerably more valuable.

Those answers determine what you do next. Without them, you are not improving your marketing; you are simply placing another bet.

Test Something That Matters

Modern marketers can test almost anything, which means we occasionally get carried away.

Someone discovers that the green button generated 2.7 percent more clicks than the blue button, and suddenly there is an emergency meeting about the transformational power of green.

Meanwhile, nobody has asked whether the offer is any good.

Testing matters most when it answers important questions. A stronger headline, different offer, new audience, better guarantee, or easier next step can fundamentally change the economics of a campaign.

This is also where testing can save us from endless meetings. If two smart people disagree about an offer, we can invite six more people into the conference room, create a spreadsheet, and schedule another meeting to discuss the spreadsheet.

Or we can test both offers.

Data has a marvelous way of ruining a perfectly good argument.

Do Not Confuse Activity With Progress

Modern businesses face a problem Hopkins never had: we can drown in data.

Impressions increase, traffic rises, open rates improve, followers accumulate, videos get watched, and people click things. Everyone looks wonderfully busy until somebody asks how many customers we acquired.

Then the room gets quieter.

Those intermediate numbers can be useful because they show us where a marketing system is working or breaking down. The danger comes when the easiest number to measure becomes the number we care about most.

If your goal is qualified appointments, 50,000 visitors are not automatically better than 5,000. If your goal is profitable customers, 1,000 cheap leads are not automatically better than 100 expensive ones.

The measurement should serve the business objective, not whatever happens to look nicest on the report.

A Failed Campaign Can Still Make You Smarter

Testing also changes the meaning of failure.

If a small test reveals that an offer is weak before you spend $100,000 promoting it, that failure may have saved you a fortune. If you discover one audience responds three times better than another, you know where to concentrate your resources.

That is why smart marketers ask more than, “Did it work?” They also want to know what they learned and how that information should change the next campaign.

The goal is not more data. It is better decisions.

Claude Hopkins understood that generations before we had a fashionable name for it. He tested because testing reduced uncertainty, tracked response because response provided information, and measured advertising because measurement made the next advertisement better.

More than a century later, we have tools Hopkins could never have imagined. With all that technology available to us, it would be rather embarrassing to go back to guessing.

If you are spending money on marketing but cannot clearly see what is working, visit www.meetparthiv.com to schedule a complimentary Strategic Growth Session. We’ll look at what you are doing, what you are measuring, and how you can turn your marketing into a process that gets smarter every time you use it.

Having more data is useful, but knowing what to do with it is considerably more profitable.

To your unstoppable success,

President
eLaunchers.Com