Secrets to Success
Secrets to Success
Assassinate risk in your
marketing forever
Part seven in a series of eight It simply amazes me how so many business leaders fritter away thousands upon thousands of dollars on marketing that plain doesn't work.Often these are the very same people who are so careful with every dollar they invest in other areas of their business that you'd think they had a magnifying glass on their key chain.
How can people intelligent in so many other areas of business become so complacent and willing to take whatever comes their way when it comes to marketing?
If you're not lucky enough to have one of these true marketing pros in your corner, don't worry. What you're about to learn will put you ahead of 98 percent of the so-called experts in the industry.
More importantly -- and this is critical no matter who is in charge of your marketing -- you will be armed with the only proven way to limit your risk and maximize your returns. No one will ever do a better job at safeguarding your hard earned cash and ensuring optimal results than you.
Now let's take a look at principle 10 of this series. This is the proven scientific way to guarantee that you will never again suffer substantial losses and can consistently experience maximum gains when it comes to your marketing investments.
Principle 10
Test, test and test once again before you "go big" with your marketing.This is one of the single most profound marketing truths you'll ever encounter. And it's also one of the single most ignored.
I'm going to let you in on a secret: Companies that take the time to test their marketing efforts outperform their competitors by as much as tenfold.
There are so many different elements you could potentially test; I can't possibly begin to cover them all here. But what I'd like to do is give you a powerful introduction.
So what do I mean by testing? Let's look at a few examples. Take ads for instance. The same ad, identical in all respects, may pull differently when run at different times of the year. You won't know until you test.
Or how about changing something as simple as your offer. This can result in a performance difference of 250 percent or more, in either direction. Once again you just don't know what works best until you test.
If there's one thing that you can take away from today's installment that will save you thousands, and likely tens of thousands, of dollars, it's this. Always test small before committing major funds to any product or any aspect of your marketing.
Don't ever agree to a discounted rate for running a new ad multiple times. Always "waste" a few dollars up front to run it one time to see how it works.
If it works once, it will work again and you'll quickly recover the few extra dollars you spent on the single run of a test ad. But if it you commit to multiple runs and it fails, there's nothing you can do but take a huge loss for getting seduced by the multiple run discount.
Companies that fail to test usually do so out of a fatal character flaw. They assume that they already know what their clients want. In fact, they assume that they know better than their clients. Then they're shocked when their fancy ad campaign fails to win more than a handful of sales.
The bottom line is that you cannot tell the market what to do. As a matter of fact it's quite the opposite.
The market will always tell you exactly what it's going to do ... whether you like it or not. My advice to you is this: Treat every ad, every sales letter, every promotion and every product as a test. Take only prudent, completely controllable action at first. Once something has been proven in the market, there's plenty of time to reap the bounty.
In the next installment of this series you'll learn two more fundamentals for maximum profit marketing that you can immediately put to use for increased profits and a surging cash flow. This article series is based on our telecourse, "Small Business, BIG Profits."
You can learn more about the course by visiting www.rpmsuccess.com/RLL_SBBP_ details.html.
John-Paul Micek is a small business strategist
and chief operating officer at RPM Success Group.
Reach him at JPM@RPMsuccess.com
or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.