Sway Engine Marketing

What does it mean to test marketing strategies in a lab environment? It means that you shouldn’t try to re-engineer all your marketing in a day.

A ‘lab environment’ is a low-risk, low-expectation means of trying new strategies. The goal is to learn valuable lessons and tinker with new ideas. It can be as simple as trying a new tactic you’ve never tried before, such as Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Creating a ‘lab’ culture is important, because you will never use new marketing tools if you don’t test them out first. You’ll be afraid of what happens if they don’t work. And if you haven’t played around with them first, they probably won’t work.

What’s really important about testing new strategies, tactics and technology is not the strategies themselves. Those you can read or hear about from any number of sources. A lot of basic strategies are proven, so that’s not what you look for when you’re testing something new.

What you focus on is  the internal mechanics. When you start a ‘lab’ project, your attention is on how it  would work in a real-life situation. Who would be responsible for what? How would you react to surprises? What seemed to work best? What unexpected challenges arose? Going through these ‘drills’ is a good way to train staff and prepare for a large-scale implementation. Or to find out quickly that the tactic won’t benefit your company.

For instance, say you want to start a blog. In a lab environment, you set modest goals and a definite timeline. Then assign responsibilities to staff. Launch the project and see what happens. What problems arise? Do you have problem coming up with content? Do you have a problem staying on schedule? Do you have a problem with editing? Do you have a problem with the content management system you’re using?

You can’t work through problems until they happen, and you won’t know what they are until you deploy pilot projects like these.