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Testing Can Be The Best Winning SuperHighway In Marketing

When you have a new marketing campaign, a new product or a new service, the first thing you should do is testing. Testing the market, testing the product or service, testing your marketing materials. It is the same for online and offline, you must test or lose out. It is a well known fact that most people do not test, so you can be ahead of the game by making sure that you do. To use NLP techniques effectively in your marketing, you must test to find out the best copy to make your relationships with clients and sales happen.

Why do not people test? There are many reasons:

  • I do not know how to do it
  • I am concerned the testing will not work,
  • I do not have the right tools
  • I am scared of handling the numbers and statistics involved
  • I do not have time to do it

Do you fit into one of these categories or have you got another reason you do not test?

Testing is the best way to improve your business and make you more successful. You need to develop a mindset to start seeing opportunities that you can not see now. Testing is not an event, it is much more important than that. It is a way of thinking about how you want to improve the way you offer your product or service, making it better than the competition.

For online marketing there are two main ways to test out your website, landing page, or keywords. The objective of doing the test is to gather data to give you a clear winner and loser.

On a website the kind of things you may measure are

  • How many people are visiting my site?
  • Where is the traffic coming from?
  • How many visitors are taking the action you need?
  • How much are you spending on advertising?
  • What is your cost per sale?
  • What is your Return On Investment ROI?

Until you know this information you are walking in the dark and just hoping you will get the right response, but the fact is most people do not get what they want. Often the best designed site or landing page will get zero customers and no-one will know why until they test the alternatives and find the answer.

SPLIT TESTING

Split testing takes just one parameter and changes it. It may be a headline, or sales copy, or a color, or font. First you must work out what you want to test, then develop two different ways to do it. It is by presenting 50% of visitors with option 1 and 50% with option 2 that you will gather data about which is the more successful. You then take the winner and try again with another change and test the winner from round 1 with the new contender. Over enough clicks and views you will find out which layout, or headline, or color, or whatever you tested, works best. GoogleAdwords gives you the free tools to change your copy and test the results.

MULTIVARIATE TESTING

Multivariate or Taguchi testing is the way to test many changes in a small number of tests. You'll still get accurate results, without having to increase your total sample size, and you will be able to identify the impact of each individual change. This means you can speed up the process of finding the best way to market what you have to sell.

There are many products on the market that offer split and Taguchi testing. Now Google has put the package together for use free with AdWords to improve the performance of advertising headlines and copy. The Google product is Website Optimizer and it helps you discover what combination of site content is really most effective at turning your visitors into customers.

An alternative is Jim Jones' Split Test Accelerator package which, as a commercial package, gives lots of information on the best way to use multivariate techniques to get results.

In Jim's words you just. . . identify things you want to change to try to improve your conversion rate. . .

. . . create new alternatives for each of these factors. The brainstorming for this can be fun, and very effective if you take your time. Scientific brainstorming techniques are included with Split Test Accelerator.

Once you've designed your test, it's time to. . .

IMPLEMENT YOUR TEST

For each factor, you just fill out a simple form and do a little cutting and pasting. It's really that easy. Then the program does the rest.

Once you've got your test set up, you let it run until you feel like you have enough information, and then you. . .

CREATE THE WINNING COMBINATION

You can see which of the ad combinations in your test did the best. . .

. . . or you can see how the results broke down, factor by factor to get an even better ad that probably was not even showing during the test. . .

TESTING YOUR NLP TECHNIQUES

The kind of testing offered by a combination of split and multivariate techniques gives you your best chance of successfully implementing the NLP techniques we have learned for rapport building, story telling, preferred learning styles and Emotional Intelligence.

Testing can be the best winning superhighway in marketing so make sure you are ready to get the best out of your campaigns.

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