How To Implement, Test & Prove A Winning Marketing Strategy So You Can Roll Out A Winner Every Time

Have you ever wondered about the difference between the small business owner, and the person who can scale and grow and make it big?

It’s not really a question of time. Ideas and scalability aside, it’s more about the knowledge and the attitude. It’s what you do and how you do it.

Almost all professional copywriters and marketing strategists will tell you this: in business, feedback is what makes you better. You have to have a thick skin. You have to leave your ego at the door.

If you’re not testing new things constantly because you think you’ve already “done it right”… you’re dead in the water.

This goes for your landing pages, sales pages, marketing funnels, media buying angles and everything else.

When I was making a living as a consultant and a copywriter, I used to love the kind of jobs where all it would take is for the client to really like what I’ve done. Okay, experienced clients will be able to tell the difference between good copy and not-so-good copy.

But the attitude that led to the some of the biggest success stories I’ve seen was very different from that.

To illustrate this point, let me tell you a story.

One day I walked into a client’s office… we were getting prepared to work together on a project for a few months. One of the first things he asked me to do was write some copy for his Facebook ads.

I’ve had some winners by then, and I have to admit: I was bloated and arrogant.

I thought to myself “I’ll write some great ads, he’ll love them, and appreciate how great I am.”

Boy was I in for a surprise.

I wrote the coolest ads using all the copywriting best practices I’ve learned and taught for quite a while by then.

“Do you like it?” – I asked.

“That doesn’t matter. The market will decide in about half an hour.” – he answered.

It turns out this guy had it all figured it out. He had a system set up around getting quality scores of 9’s and 10’s on Facebook. That means getting access to some of the most inexpensive clicks Facebook has to offer… and his method involved failing as fast and as many times as possible, in order to hit that goal.

Well let me tell you, up until that point I haven’t seen a 10 before. And I had no idea what it required. I’ll say this much: it’s not just good copy.

So I thought to myself “Okay, no problem, I can do this”.

And so I did.

And failed, and failed and failed again.

And then I succeeded. And then I knew how to succeed, consistently, and how to do it over and over and over again.

I think there are a few lessons to be learnt here. Lessons they don’t teach you in school.

Here are my conclusions:

#1 Embrace the fact that almost nothing ever works first.

No matter how good you are, if you’re looking to scale you’re probably going to end up re-doing things over and over and over again until they start working.

That means endless tweaks, looking at heat-maps, watching customer behaviour recordings, checking customer service chat logs, tweaking objection handling and FAQ-s, re-writing ads and figuring out new angles for media buying campaigns again and again and again, until eventually you hit a combination that brings in those conversions at the right price.

#2 Leave your ego at the door.

You may have been doing this for a very long time, and may have acquired a very good sense of what works in your market and what doesn’t.

But your opinions don’t matter. Your experience doesn’t matter. Your knowledge doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is how the market responds to what you’re doing.

If you get overconfident, the market will humble you. Don’t be afraid to ask others for feedback, for new ideas, angles and tweaks.

And if someone doesn’t pull their punches about what they see on your page… then be grateful, and test. Have a thick skin, and leave your ego at the door. Without a test it was all for nothing.

#3 Always keep testing new things – but test the right things!

I have been doing media buying on a professional level for quite a few years, and just like every professional media buyer tells you, when you do this kind of thing you need to test the elements in your marketing in the order of importance.

For example in case of an ad you need to tweak the copy, then the hero shot, then the body text, the call to action text, the colour of the button, etc., roughly in that order.

I was doing that for years, diligently setting up split test after split test after split test… when I had the opportunity to attend a private session with some of the people behind one of the largest direct response marketing and direct mail companies in the finance niche.

It was a real eye opener for me: one of the people behind that success story said “Testing colours and call to action buttons is nuts. Don’t test anything that you don’t expect to have at least an 50% impact on your result. It’s just not worth your time.”

So – if it sounds like hard work, then you got it right. Creating marketing that actually works and scales big is not easy at all… And people who have done it before will most likely either negotiate for equity, or give you a price you won’t be able to pay for unless you have a venture capitalist involved.

Which is why I wrote this article about how having great ideas and scaling them are so vastly different. It’s not about the idea. It’s about having seen enough working business models, and knowing how to scale them.

If you’re interested in learning more on how we do just that – please download our mind-maps right here. If you want you can also reach out to us and take a complimentary strategy session and learn how to apply what we do to your specific business.