HIGH TEMPO TESTING – It’s fun but serious work
The marketing environment is full of challenges. Marketing demands fast results with the growth curve aimed sky-high. As a result, long-term-oriented gains may feel too slow, while short-term ones are often fleeting. But growth teams may offer the solution!
We interviewed our Dagmar Group colleagues, Strategist Iida Marjosalmi and Data Scientist Ilari Vähä-Pietilä, to determine how your company can do this. Below they share their top 5 tips for successful growth teams.
The primary purpose of marketing is to drive growth. As marketers, we have several options at our disposal to make this happen. Building a successful brand – its associations requires systematic, long-term measures. This journey takes time and patience. Many marketers may run out of faith before the results affecting the bottom line can be seen. More aggressive, short-term tactical means yield quick wins. Rapid results, however, rarely bring lasting growth.
In many marketing organizations, a new kind of operating model is being implemented to overcome this obstacle. Companies are transforming their marketing management and teams into self-directed growth teams seeking growth through a fast-paced, continuous testing business model. Teams test different data-driven measures that, based on the results, are either discarded or scaled for effective marketing use. Testing is structured, and the focus is always purely on results.
Effective “High Tempo Testing” growth teams consist of experts who can formulate data-driven hypotheses and validate them – as either true or false – through hands-on testing. The goal is for them to do all of this independently.
To succeed, teams need clear frameworks within which to operate. Ideally, all team members should help determine – and follow – the rules of play, values, tools, and processes. Everyone’s roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined so that everyone understands what is expected of them. What they should be working on, where they need to be, and how they should prepare.
Thus, the growth team operating model requires self-direction, commitment, proactivity from experts, transparent processes, and an open culture.
Testing is fun!
Almost anyone is capable of testing anything. This is a stumbling block that fact-paced growth teams often come across. As testing is serious work. We use testing to seek growth opportunities and ways to solve our business challenges. A growth team’s main task is to make marketing more effective for their business. Just any old test or result haphazardly gained will not fulfill this requirement.
The cornerstone of testing is knowledge management. The information experts glean from valid data should form the basis for testing. Hypotheses and the tests that verify them must be manageable and meet the set goals. To obtain accurate results: you need to perform tests on correctly-sized test and control groups and interpret the results with sufficient care. Through this method, you will gain scalable, relevant insights on which to base your marketing actions.
Here’s how to make your growth team successful and validate the credibility of your testing for true transformation:
CONTROLLED TESTS -> Divide the tests into sufficiently small, measurable entities. Test only one thing per target group at a time.
HYPOTHESIS BASED ON DATA -> Aim for data-driven testing, harness data as a basis for testing, and utilize an expert analyst to define the hypothesis and test set-up.
SET SUFFICIENT OBJECTIVES -> What goal does the test aim to meet, and when it is scaled for marketing use, what effects can be achieved through it? Define the purpose of the test based on euros or expert judgment.
TEST AND CONTROL GROUPS OF THE RIGHT SIZE -> Define the size of the test and control group according to the wanted effect to obtain a valid result. Take advantage of ready-made tools.
INTERPRET THE RESULTS CORRECTLY AND BEWARE OF ERRORS -> Make sure the results are statistically significant, forget the average. Be careful not to interpret that an effect exists when it does not or doesn’t exist when in fact, it does.