How well is your marketing working? How are you measuring its impact?
I know that marketing measurement might sound a little bit boring (or even impenetrable). But this is the foundational topic to explore when you’re trying to improve your marketing.
Marketers often estimate that most of their efforts don’t have the expected results; some strategies vastly overperform expectations, but many just don’t work, even for the best marketers. Really being able to determine which of your marketing efforts are working and which are not, is essential to getting more clients and spending less time on marketing.
In today’s post, we’ll explore how can you test if your marketing is working and how to improve your efforts so you can bring in more clients in less time.
The scientific method might feel like an unusual place to start when talking about marketing, but stay with me.
I actually earned a degree in chemistry and started my career in medical research before moving into marketing. One of the reasons I feel I was able to make this transition was because I really understood the scientific method. Using a scientist’s (or a psychologist’s/researcher’s) approach to telling what is working and what isn't can help you maximize your marketing.
Any time we start working on a new problem in science or psychology, we begin with background research. That's absolutely the case in marketing as well.
Before you choose a path forward in your marketing, you should learn more about marketing tactics and strategies and what may or may not work for your practice.
(Congratulations, you are in the middle of the first step right now by reading a post on how to improve your marketing! We also offer webinars on different marketing tactics, and a number of blog posts on our site that can help you learn a little bit more about different marketing tactics that you might want to try.)
As you are researching, write down a few tactics/strategies that you think might work for your practice.
Once you've learned about marketing tactics, the next step is to form a hypothesis. This is a big, fancy term that just means that you should come up with an estimation of which form of marketing you think will work for your practice and why.
If you are helping millennials and Gen Z clients who are new to New York City, you can probably form a pretty confident hypothesis that you can reach them on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. But, it might be a little less likely that you could reach them through a newspaper.
Hypotheses allow you to narrow down the marketing channels which might work for you to reach your ideal clients.
The next step, once you've formed a hypothesis around what will work for you, is to set up an experiment. In this case, an experiment is just a defined test to try the marketing method.
We'll walk through how to identify experiments and set them up later in this post.
Once you have finished your experiment, the next step is to analyze your data.
What happened in the experiment? How many leads or clients did you get?
If the answer is none, that's completely fine. You've learned a really important lesson about which marketing tactics aren’t working for your practice.
I cannot stress this enough: the results of the experiment are not a reflection on you or your ability to market. As I mentioned, marketers say the majority of their marketing attempts don’t work as expected. So if something you try in marketing doesn't work, it doesn't mean you're bad at marketing, and it doesn't mean that you will never find something that works for your practice. It just means that this one thing isn't going to work and you're going to find something else.
Finally, you're going to draw conclusions based on your experiment. Did the method you tried work? Why or why not? How are the lessons you learned going to impact your marketing moving forward?
If you use the scientific method to set up marketing experiments for your practice, you will gain a better sense of how well different marketing strategies work for you. Next week, we’ll go into more depth into how to set up experiments.
Match with the *right* clients for your practice while growing your professional community.
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Mariah was Head of Growth at MyWellbeing. She is a marketing expert in the areas of content strategy, digital advertising, business growth, and anything related to helping therapists grow their practice.
