This title might sound clickbaity or like an exaggeration, but it’s true! People often point to the inherent measurability of digital marketing as one of its biggest strengths, but the ability to take measurements is next to useless unless you carry out tests to try to improve them.
When it comes to testing your digital marketing campaigns, the easiest type of test to carry out is a split test (also known as an A/B test or a multivariate test). This is basically the digital marketing equivalent of a scientific test, allowing you to change one element at a time to see exactly what effect that has.
This allows you to improve individual elements across all of your marketing, whether you’re tweaking your messaging or whether you’re trialling some new images to see what effect they have on your conversion rate. You can also usually pick up some quick wins by simply testing the layout and design of your landing pages and by tweaking the wording and location of calls to action.
Testing On Steroids
Of course, A/B testing is only one option. As marketing technology continues to get better and better, we’re given access to more and more powerful tools that allow us to test multiple different factors at the same time. We can even test different messaging for different prospects to see what’s most likely to encourage them to make a purchase.
At the same time, marketers are starting to see the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies when it comes to processing the huge amount of data that they have on their customers. With information coming from all sorts of different sources, from people visiting your booth at trade shows to people interacting with you on social networking sites, it’s difficult to consolidate all of that data and to draw overall conclusions.
But AI can do all this and more, and it has a huge part to play in the future of digital marketing and the tests we carry out. It can help us to draw conclusions that we could never previously have dreamed about. We no longer need to test one thing at a time. Now we can test everything at the same time, but with metrics and results that actually take that into account the different variants that are being served up to give you individual statistics for whatever you want to test.
Conclusion
Testing is arguably one of the most important aspects of a digital marketing campaign, but just like measuring the analytics in the first place, it won’t do you any good by itself. The first step is to create something, the second step is to test it and the third step is to make changes and to test again. Your marketing approach will always be a work in progress.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.