When it comes to grabbing someone’s attention in the business world, you only have about two seconds longer than the most dangerous eight seconds in sports. Professional bull rider Luke Snyder puts it this way, “In this sport, you get paid at 8 seconds, and if you come in with a 7.9, you’re goin’ home with a big fat zero.”
You might also go home with a concussion but, thankfully, marketing isn’t quite so harsh. It only feels like it when your marketing campaign tosses you on your duff in front of a crowd (not to mention your boss, your boss’s boss, etc.). Remember: Your reader makes up his/her mind about you in 10 seconds or less.
So how do you beef up your odds of winning?
In a word…split testing. Okay, that’s two words, but forget about that and stay with me and this whole bull riding analogy.
Every wannabe rider has a plan – until they get bucked off the back of their first bull. And you may have a “sure-fire” marketing strategy…but what happens when it fizzles? Or when you get flung into the air and end up with nothing to show for it but a face full of egg and a badly-bruised ego?
Learn how to take marketing risks without breaking your neck.
In bull riding, it’s not a matter of if you get hurt but when. The same can be said for marketing: If you spend dollars, some of them will go unreturned. And while it hurts, it’s also part of the process. The issue is really, “How many dollars and how often do you lose?”
It’s critical to start by making “little bets” so you can measure what worked and what didn’t. (It’s the same reason you don’t attempt to ride Bodacious your first day on the rodeo circuit.) You need to start small. Ride a few little ones out of the gate, measure and adjust. Conduct small experiments and split test. Again and again. And remember that your first marketing efforts are no more likely to be a raving success than Clem’s first trip to the rodeo will win him one of those fancy buckles.
Start with that eight-second rule in mind.
Your prospects don’t have time to fritter away, so every marketing piece you put out there must get to the point. Pronto.
• Strip it down to the bare essentials and cull the crap
• Look like a pro (clean and easy-to-follow layout, no tacky doo-dads, etc.)
• Make sure your offer is kickass and your call to action is clear
• Test and measure, test and measure
Don’t be afraid to test yourself. Throw your streamlined version into the ring against the one you were planning to send (an A/B test). Assign each option its own unique tracking response (different phone number, different redemption code, etc.) so you can easily pinpoint which performed better. Then let ’em go at it. TFG did this with a recent direct mail campaign and saw a 30% increase in responses just by split testing two pieces: A) the original message and B) a simplified, stripped-down version. Simple won, hands down. It usually does.
Need help getting your marketing ideas ready to go into the chute?
Here at TFG marketing and rodeo clown college, we’re all about taking risks. Small, carefully-calculated risks that not only grab a lot of attention for your company but continually fine-tune (aka test and measure) your marketing efforts to keep you performing at the top of your game. Just give one of our grizzled bull riding coaches a holler and we’ll have ourselves a nice chat.
