[MUSIC] When we develop our yearly budget, we establish our business goals. Marketing management develops the programs necessary to accomplish those goals. And then marketers build the programs and produce the KPI's necessary to measure performance. As a result, if we hit the KPI's, then we hit our revenue and performance goals, which mean we also achieve our strategic objectives. They are all interconnected. However, there's a problem. It's called reality. When we build our budget and marketing plan we make assumptions about performance. But because the digital marketplace is constantly changing, some of the KPIs will not hear our established performance goal. Why? Competitive marketing programs and new product offerings change how consumers view us. Economic and changing demography changes the historical relationships we enjoy. For some reason, actual performance will vary from our budget KPI. When this happens, we need to test. Whether you are listening or not, your high value markets are telling you if you are approaching them in the best way. If your marketing campaign is off, the response is below your KPI. If you are doing something really engaging for them, Your results will be above your KPIs. The key is they are telling you. And if you use the metrics and tracking systems presented in this specialization, you will hear them and can make positive actions. When results are below your KPIs this is where you test. As Stephy Decker said, you test for impact, and you test to continually improve your results. It works for Facebook advertising, and it works equally well for all of your marketing programs. Why should you test? Because it is real. It is feedback coming directly from your target market. You can't be more real than that. Give them two or more options, and through their behaviors or lack of behaviors, they will tell you what they like and what they don't like about your content and offers. Second, it's simple and easy. Once you understand how to test, it is a skill you can use to improve every aspect of your marketing programs. Finally, It is low cost. You have already budgeted to do a marketing program. Adding tests to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of future efforts is a small price to pay to increase results. It makes good sense to test with every marketing campaign, social or not. What should you test? Test markets and social communities to find the ones most open to engaging with you. Whether you're using engagement, nurture, or social IMC, you want to develop some type of relationship with the target market. Find where they are add-in social, and test different approaches to find the best ways to engage with them. You could test creative, what you say, how you say it, the graphics you use and every other aspect of your content can be tested to find the best way to engage your high value markets. You can also test your website. Marketers don't assume what is said and shown on a webpage is the ideal way to do it. They continually test variations on key pages to determine if there is a better way to engage with you on the website. You can also test advertising. Testing allows you to find the best ways to move the market down the performance funnel. So what types of testing are there? There are head to head tests, an A/B split test. Because they have specific applications, let's look at each one separately. Head-to-head testing is used when you control who you are contacting. Let's take a simple example. Pretend I have a market with one million people. And I want to send them an email with great content I have created for my nurture marketing program. I know about the content, and I know the market, but I don't know which approach will work best. Rather than mailing all million and risking total failure, I will learn the best approach. This is where head-to-head testing comes in. Let's say I develop four creative email messages. I use different graphics, different messaging, or change other things. Now, rather than mail one million, I develop four lists of 25,000, a decent sample size, and send a different message to each one using different bitly links. When the targeted individuals click through, I can use my four bitly links to determine which of the four is the best. If it is package two, then I will use package two to start marketing to the remaining 900,000 named. However, even then I would continue to test different subject lines, different graphics, and different text or videos, within the marketing efforts to the 900,000. I would always attempt to test to learn what works best. AB split tests are used when I don't have control of the list. For a website I don't know who will be visiting our site or when it will happen. However I know a particular registration page isn't working to my KPI level. So I create two pages, one is the original the second is a page with different elements that's I think might be better. As visitors come to this page the original and then the test page alternate. By tracking registrations I can quickly determine the test page is best so I can change the site to use that one. Two quick things you need to know. Even though it is called AB split test, it doesn't have to have just two things. I might have three or four web pages, or banner ads, or paper click copy. I can test them all using the same AB methodology. Second, for larger companies, testing every other person can be done with the right web or social software. However, if you are new to this or are a startup, there's some other ways to do AB split tests. For your assignment, you will be testing different messages by time of day. You will offer one message in the morning, a different one in the afternoon, a different one at night, and a different one at late night. Remember, social is 24/7. You rotate the day part until every day part gets every message. And then you determine what works best. So like we discussed earlier. Testing is simple, and there are low cost ways to do it. A couple of key testing concepts to help you be successful. First, test everything. As Stephie Decker showed, small changes in graphics, texts, titles, and other elements can produce big improvements in your KPI. Second, think of testing in two ways. I might test very different approaches to one market to see which is the best approach. Then I will test for nuance to incrementally approve my best approach. Finally always test. With every campaign you do, the market is trying to tell you what works best. So listen to them. When we started your first assignment was to get a series of tools including Bitly, a link tracking system, HootSuite a message scheduling system, and Twitter where the short life of a tweet allows us to do some testing. So now it's time to put your testing knowledge in these AB split testing systems to work. Let's test your markets to learn the best way for you to reach and engage them. [MUSIC]
