Testing (yes, again)
I have talked a lot about testing and it’s time to talk about it again just before you start making your plan happen. Some things will work straight away, other things won’t work as you expected them to. It’s important to be ready for this and embrace it. Testing is one of the great joys of marketing; it’s like taking your model boat to the lake for the first time and seeing if it floats. It might not. And that’s fine, it’s why we tested it in a shallow bit first. But now we can see where it wasn’t watertight, fix it and then try it again.
You can waste a lot of time and money by pursuing a strategy that you haven’t yet proven. It’s why we spend so much time getting to know our customers to give us the best chance of creating something that they want, but it’s also why we need to test. Lisa and I tested Vegan Business Tribe using Facebook advertising. I created a very simple website over a few days with some early content, and put a form on it allowing people to sign up for free. We just wanted to test the concept and see if there was a market for vegan business advice before we spent a lot of time creating it. I set up a Facebook advert targeting vegans who had some interest in business and put £10 a day into the budget. That initial week of testing got us 48 sign-ups to the basic site. This proved to us that there was enough of an interest to invest more time in the idea.
In business-language this is called a minimum viable product, or MVP. It’s something that you can get running quickly and cheaply which proves what (until that point) you had just suspected or hoped. I learnt the hard way. In my early career I would spend months building websites for new business ideas, creating brands and setting up procedures for services that no-one bought. I wasted a lot of time and energy (your two most precious resources) on ideas that never got off the ground. There is a high chance that the thing you think that you will find success with now won’t be the thing that eventually makes you successful. Again, if you read an autobiography of a successful entrepreneur the majority of the book will probably be about all their early unsuccessful businesses that you’ve never heard about – but in some way they paved the way to the business that did have success. You can save yourself a lot of pain and heartache by not throwing all your resources into a project if the only opinion you have about whether it’s going to be worth your time is your own.
That’s why whenever Lisa and I now look to start something new, we always test first. We get a simple website up very quickly (sometimes just a single page) and have something on that web page that will allow us to see if people are interested. It might be a PDF that someone has to enter an email address to download, or it might be a pre-register list to be emailed with more information when a service launches (even if in the end it never does). I’ll then find a way to get people to that page, through Google PPC, Facebook advertising, or by promoting it at a live event, and see how many people sign-up or download the PDF. I’ve even seen people set up e-commerce pages for products that don’t yet exist, and when you get to the checkout page it simply says it’s out of stock. They treat every person who made it to that page as an indicator of a likely sale to see how popular the product would be before they buy it or make it. It doesn’t matter if your first test falls flat on its face as long as you learn something from it. Learn, tweak, and test again.
And once you have this minimum viable product up and running, then develop it further once you know that people are interested. With Vegan Business Tribe, those first 48 sign-ups gave us a group of people to engage with and research our customer. We talked with them, interviewed some, got to know who they were, what kind of businesses they had and what help they needed.
You will find all sorts of reasons to put off actually getting going. You think you need to get the website perfect, or you can’t ship your product until the packaging is ‘just right’. Getting things perfect is not a task for the early days of your business. Perfection is for when you are already successful and you have the luxury of spending time getting even better. You will encounter lots of customers over the lifespan of your business, and it’s only natural that those who join you later on will get a different experience than those at the start – but they won’t know that. A ‘good’ business that gets out there and selling fast will beat a ‘perfect’ business that doesn’t launch until months later.
You will also learn so much from your early engagement with customers. When Lisa and I launched our vegan agency Promote Vegan we listed a whole range or services from copywriting to being sales agents for vegan products. We could have spent a lot of time creating content to promote each service, but instead we gave each service a really basic page on the website and then monitored through Google Analytics which pages on the website got the most traffic. Some of the services we thought there would be a big demand for didn’t get a single view, so boy are we glad we didn’t waste months creating compelling content trying to sell it! In the end, only the pages for two services got any real views, which was helping companies register with The Vegan Society’s Vegan Trademark and helping companies understand vegan consumer behaviour. So two months after launch we re-built the site and made these the only two services we offered. And it worked.
As your business grows, keep testing. Sit down every month and see what’s working and what isn’t. Keep your testing mentality as a company even if you have been going for ten years.
