If only growing your business was as simple as making a plan and dutifully completing each task so that you could surpass your goals and go on vacation.

Unfortunately, even with the most strategic and thoughtful plan, our ever-evolving world forces us as small business owners to adapt and innovate. But before we focus all our time and budget on the newest social media platform or ad targeting, we likely need to test a few things.

Strategic Marketing Tests for Small Business Owners

Website: You can test new landing pages for special events, advertising campaigns, or sales. Try improving your organic SEO with a blog that answers the most searched questions about your industry. Refresh your website branding and messaging to help customers find what they need more easily. Improve your local SEO and add technical schema markup so you appear higher in search results. Be sure to write down your current website metrics like page visits, time on page, conversions, and keyword rankings, so you have a benchmark to measure your efforts.

Email: Try sending on different dates and times, and even changing up the frequency of emails. Subject lines, snippets, headlines, images and other variable content can be personalized for each customer. You might consider one call to action in your emails, or you might try a newsletter style with a handful of links that entice a customer to click.

Social Media: Boosting your posts to different audience mixes and using unique photos, graphics, messaging, and calls to action can help you find your community on each platform. You can also test the length of your video content, number of photos in a carousel, or which hashtags you use.

Pay Per Click Advertising: You can manually choose your audience demographics, spend, and creative assets (headlines, copy, calls to action, and visuals), or you can let the tools do it for you using artificial intelligence and see which methods get better results.

How Much Should You Spend Testing Tactics?

Each test is different and most are free beyond your time spent. For social media and PPC advertising, we recommend you set aside about 10% of your marketing budget for each respective tactic to innovate and try new things. You want to continue spending where you know you get the returns, but that won’t keep you growing forever so you should always be testing something new to optimize.

How Long Should You Test Small Business Marketing Tactics?

We like framing testing as an ongoing, forever type of thing. For example, each time you send a new email, you can first set up an A/B test to 10% of your customers, where you test two subject lines against one another. Whichever subject line earns the most opens in the first hour or two, then that’s the one used to send the email to the remaining 90% of folks in that segment of your email list. 

How To Tweak Marketing Tests?

It’s so important when you’re doing any kind of science—and truly this is a version of marketing science—to only have one variable at a time. You can’t compare results from an event email invitation to a weekly newsletter. And you can’t compare an Instagram story view count to that of a reel that you boosted.

Instead, you might send your email newsletter on Wednesdays at noon for two months and then do the same thing on Tuesdays at noon and see which ones get better open rates. That way even though you are changing the subject lines and the content of the newsletters, you are measuring the same thing over time and can account for any outliers. Then after you know which day of the week works best, you can look at the time of day. A poor example is sending each newsletter at a different day and time and expecting a simple analysis of that data. Way too chaotic!

You may also want to test different ad spends. For example, if you want to know how much you should spend on Google paid search, perhaps you start with $10 per day for 7 days. Make sure there are no major holidays or world events happening, then use that as your baseline. Then you can test the exact same copy and demographic parameters spending $5 per day for 7 days, and then the next week you use the same stuff and test $15 per day for 7 days. None of this spending is bad since you’re likely still hitting targets, and this testing will help you find that sweet spot of efficiency. You may find that spending $10 earned you 100 clicks but spending $15 earned you 175 instead of the expected 150. Spending $15 is clearly the more efficient use of your marketing dollars. 

What Does A Successful Marketing Tactic Look Like?

We love making a matrix for this kind of question. The scale from top to bottom indicates impact and from left to right indicates effort (effort can be time, budget, fun factor, etc). We always want to find the tactics that are in the top left (high impact, but low effort). These are the tactics that best serve your goals whether they are Instagram followers, website traffic, or actual sales and profit.

We avoid tactics that fall into that bottom right (low impact and high effort), and are open to trying some things in the other two quadrants (high impact and high effort, and low impact and low effort).

If you’ve mastered your marketing measurement and have every tactic and customer interaction tracked and tagged, you may want to build yourself a ROMI or Return On Marketing Investment formula. Back in our Corporate America days, we didn’t even consider a tactic if we couldn’t prove that it has in the past or would likely earn a 2 ROMI, or twice as much as we spent. Without complex spreadsheets, your answer may be more anecdotal and that’s perfectly fine too.

When Should You Abandon A Marketing Tactic?

The beauty of being a small business is that you’re in control. For example, you can decide that you’re going to make a concerted effort to build up your BlueSky account. But in six months reevaluate the amount of effort versus the payoff. Are you having fun doing it? Does it take time away from other more successful tactics? While we don’t recommend starting lots of new things and abandoning them, it’s okay to stop doing something that isn’t serving you. Just communicate your plan and move forward. E.g. If you decide to leave Tiktok because creating video content is just too time consuming, make one last video sharing that with your audience so they know what to expect and can find you elsewhere.

All this testing can be put into your strategic marketing plan and we can take care of this behind the scenes if you’d rather focus on other ways to grow your small business. You know where to find us if you want support!