A marketing practitioner explains how to keep testing alive when experiments fail: budget a fixed portion of your marketing spend specifically for exploration, frame it to leadership as an investment rather than guaranteed revenue, and plan for multiple iterations before deciding to stop. Early failures are fine as long as you're learning.
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Do you have any tips or advice on how to share out the results of these experiments, especially when the experiment maybe isn't positive, where it didn't beat or it did worse in some way? Like, how do you communicate that in a way that makes it so that people want to keep experimenting and don't want to just like stop doing that?
Every year when we do the marketing budget, I actually set aside a percentage of the budget that goes into testing only. And I talk to Rasmus, my boss, around this and telling him, This is not something we should count on will make business right away for us. This is something we need to have as a budget in order to stay ahead of the curve, in order to make sure we have the right setup at all times. So there's no promise from me to him that this is actually something that will give us a lot of business. We also really good at testing things with our partners. So often we also lucky to get ad credits from our partners, which is of course very nice because then we don't have as much on the stake as we would have otherwise. But I guess also part of the discussion, at least with my boss, is that I need to be able to explain him why we want to test this. What do we see as a potential outcome? So what will we gain from this in the long run? We normally, we do a lot of iterations. I just explain it out blank and say that we'll perhaps need 5 iterations of this test before we have something that we can work with. If he buys into that, that could also happen. But then we actually start up running the tests. And of course, if we see after 1 or 2 iterations that this will never be something good, then we can easily say, this is not something for us. This is not something we want to work with and then move on to a new test. But it's totally okay for us if the test doesn't go well in the first 2, 3, 4 runs, but we need to see things improving along the way.
