Yes, I mean marketing testing- not market testing. How do you know the best way to spend marketing money?
In my opinion - the easiest way is just spend it and see what works. The beauty of the online world is this can be done for hundreds or even tens of dollars. Buy a few Adsense ads on Google. Buy different words or phrases. Use different offers, colors and pictures to see which one gets the best return. Try the same thing on Facebook and Linkedin.
Track everything to figure out which ones work and which ones work the best.
Then just spend money on the ads that work. Spend if the sales/gross margin generated is more than the cost of the ad.
Clearly this approach does not work if you are selling big ticket items or things that people do not place the order right away for. And sometimes there needs to be some assumptions. For example, if you are signing up a subscriber who pays $10 per month and the cost to get a customer is $50 is this a good decision? It all depends on whether the customers stick with you for more than 5 months.
If you happen to hit a success formula, your business can scale very quickly. Keep tracking though since success can be fleeting. Things change all the time so keep testing and tracking.
And of course, I am a big advocate of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) (Canrock invested in a Long Island SEO company). I read once that people click 7 times more frequently on natural search results than they do on ads. So once you know which words or phrases work to buy. SEO can magnify the result and can get the same traffic but often for less cost.
Tech Crunch published an article by Robert J. Moore on the lack of statistical significance in many AB market tests. They also pointed out that over testing can cause analysis paralysis. (I agree heartily with the latter point)
At first Moore seems to be saying "do not AB test" but he is not. He is just saying "do not let it slow you down".
Success in business is often tied to velocity. Sense of urgency wins.
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