Testing is not a strategy or a tactic

I am a huge advocate of testing in online marketing.

That being said, testing itself is not a marketing strategy. It’s not even a tactic. It is a mechanism by which to determine which are the most effective strategies and tactics in your market.

You should be testing. Just like you should be spell-checking.

But just because you adopt a testing platform (or a spell-checker), doesn’t mean that you will inherently achieve better results. You’re still responsible for coming up with the strategies and tactics to test.

And just because someone — or some company — understands testing methodologies or offers testing software, doesn’t necessarily mean that they can help you develop a better strategy or discover better tactics. All too often, vendors with a testing hammer take an approach of simply saying “hit as many nails as possible”. You can hit a thousand nails and still learn nothing substantive about improving your online marketing.

At its best, testing can enable a discipline of continuous improvement and creative experimentation.

But at every step of the innovation/iteration cycle, you should be asking yourself two key questions:

1. What does a particular test reveal about your audience?

2. What is the strategic direction in which your experiments are headed?

If someone’s just talking you into trying a bunch of random headlines and images, that’s not testing. That’s roulette.