Online marketing is all about experimentation. As the saying goes: Your mileage may vary. What works for someone in their market may not work for you in your market. While you should definitely consult sources online for advice, the bottom line question is:
Based on my experiences, does this approach work for me?
Evaluating this question can be tricky, though, so we’ve provided some basic guidelines on how you might make the determination whether or not a particular approach online works for you.
1. Establish your goal. How will you know if the effort is a success? What metric will you use to define success or failure? Is your effort to get people to register on your website? Increase the number of comments on a post? Try to select a goal which is specific and measurable. “Sell more houses,” or “Get more referrals,” isn’t necessarily a goal you can measure. “Add new subscribers to my newsletter,” though, is perfectly measurable.
2. Allow time to pass to measure results. How long have you been trying? Is 24 hours enough? Is a month more realistic? Give yourself a timeline against which you can measure results. While the number of “Likes” on a Facebook post may increase in the few hours after your post, getting better visibility in Google could take months. Know your timeline for measuring outcomes.
3. See your efforts through other people’s eyes. When working with online marketing efforts, asking other people to test your experiment can reveal pitfalls or problems you may have missed. While you might think it’s perfectly logical to put the sign-in form on the bottom left side of the page, you might find that most people were looking for it on the top right. Get perspective from others to limit your bias.
4. Learn to admit defeat. If something doesn’t work, shelve your ego and admit it. It doesn’t matter if you spent five days setting up the test, don’t waste a sixth day pretending it will magically work. The more ideas you try, the more you’ll learn.
5. Review failures for information. When something doesn’t pan out, a brief review of what might have gone wrong will help inform future efforts. How did you arrive at this tactic? Whose thinking did you follow? What alternative approaches could you have tried? Don’t dwell on it for too long, but do spend enough time to see what you can carry forward with new experiments.
