How Making Mistakes in Your Business Creative Can Add to Your Bottom Line.
By Igor Mordkovich on Jul 17, 2006 in Business Wisdom, Marketing Strategy, General, Traditional Marketing, Online Marketing
I am not a fan of motivation speeches “Make mistakes, strive harder, work hard, if you fail it’s great…” This post is not about that!
What I mean when I say make mistakes is … if you are doing some sort of advertising, you’re using your educated opinion and knowledge in marketing to structure the ad or the offer. Well, how do you know that what you think WON’T work is accurate? Maybe you’re 70% right but not 100%
To test how good your educated opinion is, try doing things the opposite way than what you would normally do. If you’re running an ad using a headline that you chose out of the 3 proposed to you … as a test, try using the headline you thought was the worst one out of those 3. Just be sure to keep it low (it’s a test).
Quite a few ad executives actually did this before. They would first choose / create a piece they think will perform better than others, but then they would do a quick low margin test of the one they would never use.
This is a win/win situation.
If your test ad bombs, you know that you were right … you can pat your self on the back and hold a flag.
If your test ad performs better than the one you chose initially, you’ll be happy that you’ve uncovered something new plus you’ve made some cash.
Go make a mistake now!
Excellent post! We often do our best learning from our mistakes, but put in this context, sometimes you need to do things wrong, just to confirm you’re doing things right.
Stoney deGeyter | Jul 24, 2006 | Reply