Economic uncertainty has drastically tightened corporate budgets. For executives, that means taking a closer look at how each technical investment and initiative measures up. For marketers, that means acute pressure to do more with less—and do it faster.
Marketing leaders know that a data-driven approach is essential to making the most of their tools and creativity. And to access the right data, they need to experiment. The tricky part is getting the rest of the C-suite on board.
To the uninitiated chief investment officer, “experimentation” might sound like throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. But the opposite is true: Experimentation is the surest way to find out what works, not just for your own internal processes but for your customers. It is the surest way to eliminate guesswork. Science meets art, and science works.
Chief marketing officers, if you need some ideas for selling experimentation to your peers in the C-suite or to your board, here’s a three-step approach that has worked for me.
Build the business case
Testing and learning yields measurable impact. Meet your CIO at the bottom line with clear examples of tangible outcomes, starting with documented ROI.
A Harvard Business School study of 36,000 startups found that those who began experimenting earned a 10% valuation increase from investors, a 12% uptick in page views, and delivered between 9% to 18% more digital products and features.
I’ve seen similar impact at my own organization, where one customer used experimentation to grow their subscription revenues by 64%, and our survey of 800 customers revealed that three out of four clients credited experimentation with at least a 5% boost in their digital revenues.
The message is clear: For businesses looking to adjust to the new normal, experimentation is a nonnegotiable part of any growth strategy.
Make it personal
An investment in experimentation is an investment in your team and your entire organization. Experimentation is a culture. Bring your product and engineering leader along in the journey. Your customer experience is a team sport, and embracing a scientific method of working is a transformation that your peers can get behind. It will strengthen your case.
Once you’ve presented the high-level stakes, turn to your teams’s day-to-day to bring your case down to earth. Remind your CIO that marketers, product managers, and developers are a limited resource with limited resources that are likely to be even more constricted thanks to the economy.
Marketers are expected to stay one step ahead of shifts in consumer behavior, while overworked developers are often pulled in to help get experiments over the finish line. Thankfully, a commitment to experimentation—the right way—can ease these pain points.
Low- or no-code experimentation allows for faster testing without developer support, so marketers can quickly try out and refine (or retire) any idea. And when the resulting insights are centralized and easy to find, engineers are free to put their skills to more meaningful use. Feature and web experimentation, along with other third-party tools, power fast and accurate audience evaluations, so marketers can confidently tailor experiences based on customers’ key attributes and focus on how they tend to interact with content
These improvements to your teams’s experience translate into results for your customers, who no longer have to receive watered-down or inconsistent messaging developed without actionable data. Creating personalized messaging tailored to speak to specific audiences is a universal need.
Seal the deal
Confidence cuts costs. Level up the discussion. Drive your point home that you shouldn’t be trading off customer-centricity and optimizing your entire tech stack. You can do both even in a budget-conscious environment. With access to data that reflects what customers actually care about, you can become truly consumer-centric. Why waste precious resources guessing where consumer preference might be headed next? Actionable data enables you to move alongside your audience and adapt to their whims as they change in real time. Organizations that have deeply data-informed consumer journeys enjoy a 10-20% increase in revenue and 20-30% decrease in the cost to serve customers.
Take note of the fact that experimentation can streamline organizational spend across your entire IT stack. Allocating your company’s resources equally across your tech infrastructure is inefficient. Experimentation gives marketers a bird’s-eye view of their own processes, allowing them to identify what’s helping to convert new leads and generate more revenue, and eliminate the hidden costs hindering their efforts.
Focus on optimizing workflows that are already highly effective, and don’t waste another dollar on marketing technology that doesn’t produce results. Home in on your desired audience with the best targeting tactics, ensure your spending creates the kind of content customers can’t stop clicking on, and only commit significant capital to advertisements with the confidence that the return on your investment will be worthwhile.
When marketers and developers can fail fast, they can improve even faster. Effective experimentation empowers brands to create truly of-the-moment, bespoke customer experiences while cutting down on marketing costs.
Let your CIO know that when you’re able to identify and optimize every process that has led organizational success so far, you can chart the shortest path to an even brighter future. And if that doesn’t work, you can always test out a new approach.
A marketing leader’s guide to selling experimentation in the boardroom rganizational success so far, you can chart the shortest path to an even brighter future. And if that doesn’t work, you can always test out a new approach.
