The Competitive Squeeze
Increasingly more of our sales conversations feature businesses that have subsisted for years on an “if it ain’t broke…” approach, and are now finding that what once worked well for them isn’t cutting it anymore. Over the past 21+ years in business, we’ve seen the digital economy expand astronomically. More recently, and especially with the introduction of AI-driven tools, we’ve seen the number of slices growing faster than the pie itself, with lower barriers to entry for competitors in the digital marketing auctions. Even data-savvy, financially-focused businesses are feeling the squeeze. So, what’s the answer?
Perhaps you need to expand more in paid social, to create more demand. Or maybe you need to focus on your website to optimize your conversion rate. Maybe the key is to have a good creative strategy, or to launch a compelling branding initiative and try to go viral. With increasingly crowded and overlapping markets in the digital space, the odds are against you that you will tap into some secret gold mine of opportunity with one single strategy. You must find a way to try many strategies without overextending yourself or your budget.
The Quantum Entanglement Theory of Digital Marketing
How do you know what’s worth the investment of time and money? This is also trickier in the progressively more AI-driven landscape, due to something we’ll call “The Quantum Entanglement Theory of Digital Marketing,” which states: by participating in digital marketing, you change the market dynamics. Digital marketing activity is real-time, meaning historic data and market research may give you some clues and hypotheses to operate from, but are likely outdated by the time you enter the mix. The very fact you’ve entered the auction, or changed your bid strategy, or your creative, or made any other significant change means your historic data has already become less representative of what’s happening at the present moment.
The Power of a Testing Mindset
While this seems like an impossibly complex situation to unravel, the answer is neither to spend tons of money on things that may or may not be working and hope for the best, nor to admit defeat and close up shop. The solution is to embed testing into your digital marketing program by adopting a Testing Mindset: a frame of mind that allows you to balance what’s worked for you historically (but may not work forever) with methodically exploring the digital frontier for the next opportunity.
The best case scenario is that this approach keeps you well ahead of the curve and ahead of your growth goals.
The worst-case is that you’re prepared to adapt when the go-to campaigns that always worked for you in the past are suddenly less effective for a changing audience, competitive space, or political landscape.
In this series, we’ll explore:
Why we resist testing
The core principles of a Testing Mindset
How to build a testing framework
The AI factor: testing in an algorithmic world
Infusing testing into your strategy
Overcoming common testing challenges
More than any tool or best practice, adopting a Testing Mindset is the best way to future-proof your business, and we sincerely hope this series sets you up for that success.