Why good marketing feeds off of uncertainty

How can you predict the outcome of something you haven’t tried before?

This is the major challenge most marketers face - we often operate in the realm of the new and untested. Launching a new product to market. Trying out new creative or messaging. Developing a new brand concept.

Even with solid strategies, insight and reasoning behind us, sometimes we simply can not predict outcomes because we have no historical reference data. Or what we are trying is so different that we can’t even use competitor performance as a benchmark.

On the flip side, if we constrain ourselves to the world of the known (selling to the same audience year in year out or reusing the same messaging), we never have the opportunity to experiment. We remain locked in a recursive box which stifles the opportunity to innovate and create new competitive opportunities.

I’ve worked with businesses that have relied on the same old marketing formula for the past decade, all while the world changes around them. You can clearly see the year-on-year decrease in their marketing performance.

Their competitors are taking the risk of trying out new channels and strategies and are reaping the rewards of greater market share and improved ROI.

How to ask for clarity from your marketing team

Firstly, you need to ask the marketing team to be upfront about what they know and what they don’t know. This may be difficult for marketing teams to do in low trust environments, so you need to be clear that they will not be penalised for not having all of the answers.

It’s also important to ask for their level of confidence and certainty when assessing multiple strategies or tactical options - this way both sides can be absolutely clear on the levels of risk involved and prioritise effectively

How to balance uncertainty and risk

I’ve come across numerous methods of managing the risk when it comes to launching new ideas and campaigns. The one that will work for your business will depend on your unique environment and constraints, but the important thing is to have a way of allowing innovation.

As a bare minimum, I would urge you to:

Set experimentation budgets

This is where a pot of money is defined for use in experimentation. It is usually separate from the main marketing budget and is typically not included when calculating overall marketing ROI.

Defining leading and lagging indicators

When running an experiment, it’s important to have metrics that allow you to determine success or failure, ideally at speed. Leading indicators are usually indicative marketing metrics (impressions, likes) that “influence” lagging indicators (marketing outcomes - e.g. signups).

Defined leading indicators will allow your teams to report a measure of performance in the short term. However, you will need to do the work to define the leading indicators that are the clearest predictors of your lagging indicators.

Develop a shared hypothesis document

A hypothesis document is a shared list of marketing hypotheses that the team believes can be tested to see if they improve performance.

The beauty of having these hypotheses in one place is that they can be ranked by the team to produce an experimentation order that takes into account risk and impact. This document is also a very useful way of feeding risk scores directly into marketing priorities.

I typically rank experiments against the following criteria:

• Feasibility - how easy/time consuming will it be to develop and run the experiment (1-5)

• Risk - what is the risk the experiment will fail (low, medium, high)

• Potential impact - what is the potential impact on business outcomes if the experiment succeeds (low, medium, high)