Small Business Marketing Secret #3: What You Should Have Learned In Science Class

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Remember way back in science class, every year you had to come up with a new science project. You had to create a hypothesis. Then you had to conduct a series of tests to prove or disprove your hypothesis statement.

Remember how fun that was?

Glad it's over with aren't you?

Well if you advertise it's never over.

In reality, all advertising is an ongoing science project. No advertising professional can be certain any advertising is going to work. They can only make an educated guess, they can only hypothesize.

By definition a hypothesis is a tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation. This is exactly what an advertisement is.

It is only proven effective and true after it has been tested to be so. Before the testing, it is only a tentative explanation and nobody knows if it will prove to be truly effective. So what can you do about it? I'm glad you asked.

You must test and measure your science project…in this case, your advertising campaign. A good advertising agency will have past experience and expertise that will allow them to form more cogent hypotheses that require less testing.

Testing costs money but is absolutely imperative because without it you can have no ad or campaign that is effective…unless you stumble upon it. And if that's the case you probably aren't even sure exactly what you did right.

If you're that great at guessing, you should buy a lottery ticket and pick one up for us too.

Each ad placed must be created with metrics so it can be evaluated. Good metrics will allow you to tweak or dump the advertisements and media vehicles real time.

This saves you tons of precious advertising dollars because you are positive that the copy, layout and media are dead on target and move people to take your desired action.

If you aren't testing and measuring every advertisement you roll out, you are most likely wasting your money. Advertising that can't be directly attributed to a return on investment is a bad investment.

I know, I know, but you got your name out there, right? WRONG.

Jim and Travis' small business marketing secret #4 reveals the truth about getting your name out there.

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