DIY Low Risk, High Return Marketing Test Project
If you’ve avoided digital marketing, it’s understandable given how competitive and challenging the channel is.
There’s the risk, the investment, the time and expertise, and confidence needed too! But any challenge can be conquered with faith, determination and strategy. The first part of the strategy is to develop an initial small scale project to help you build your confidence, decision making skills, and explore the opportunities.
Conducting a brief testing project is wise. It can guide the rest of your investment and give you the confidence to spend and become a market leader.
As an example, a one month campaign might involve only a PPC ad campaign where you zero in on your very best prospects. Or you might want to test a new organic content and SEO strategy to see if it moves the traffic needle.
A marketing pilot project is a great way to test out a campaign idea, promotional channel, content effectiveness, and results in a short period of time. The risk is low and potential payoff is immense. And the insights are priceless.
Such a project can help dispel untruths, misconceptions as well as uncover sweet spots where you can access new customers.
Pilot is a strange word that describes someone who steers or guides a ship. So the project’s real purpose is to guide your marketing of your business for smooth sailing ahead.
Minimal Risk, High Pay Off
So rather than committing to hiring a digital marketer, agency, or other person full time or on a longer term contract, you can try out a campaign and see what happens. And with a more focused scope in a certain region aimed at a specific demographic, you’ll be able to collect much more relevant metrics.
How about going right after your ideal client and see what happens?
However, it shouldn’t be set up with great performance expectations but rather as a test for discovery. This way you’re focusing solely on visitors responses and actions.
What Great Revelations Might Come out of It?
- which types of content help create real leads for high quality customers
- how a large group of new visitors interact with your website and product catalog
- which channels create a lead and which content paths/touchpoints generate sales
- which graphical materials do customers prefer
- whether videos help improve engagement, website visits or bookings
- run experiments to discover customer preferences
- run surveys with a prize to get valuable feedback on customer preferences
- which keywords produce the best leads
- which advertising time periods produce the best leads
- ROI on this marketing campaign
- which tours are more preferred and profitable
- which incentives and offers are more effective in advertising
- ROI on SEO or organic social media posts
- ROI on types of content
- about engagement with travel stories, topic themes, photos, authors, and destinations
- which topics generate the most engagement, leads and revenue
- discovering which demographics like your company and tours/packages/brand
- which cues or calls to action work best
- testing which paid social media channels perform well
- discover content/offers that consumers don’t like – turnoffs that result in bounces
There’s more to learn of course, and that’s the purpose of a pilot project — to learn as much as possible about whether marketing and advertising can benefit your company.
And perhaps the most important insight is how consumers see your brand and value proposition. If it’s not relevant to them, how could it be modified to make them like it?
Implementation Steps for a Digital Marketing Pilot Project
- Determine Your Weaknesses: and thus what you should be working on (e.g., content, SEO, PPC, product focus, product promotion, branded graphics) to create needed results.
- Define Objectives: Clearly outline what you want to achieve and the objectives for each part of the project.
- Select KPIs/Metrics: Assess which metrics will tell you where success happened and set up analytics that can verify them.
- Project Target Audience: Identify a specific segment of the audience that is appropriate for this particular project.
- Project Budget and Resources: Allocate a budget that ensures you have enough exposure and impact to generate traffic.
- Project Implementation: Execute the strategy according to your prioritized process.
- Monitoring and Analysis: Continuously monitor the campaign and collect data to ensure you’re on track to get the insights you need.
- Review and Refinement: Analyze the results, refine the strategy to see if you can affect or improve the results as the budget permits. Repeat.
A marketing pilot project is an affordable way to be enlightened about your travel company brand, business and product packages. You’re likely anxious about the revelations, but don’t be. We can make this successful.
At the end of the pilot project, you’ve got actionable information collected, are able to make much better decisions, and reduce your anxiety about what’s not working. We might also discover what is the problem with your lead generation and travel bookings, thus freeing up your energies when that is solved.
Call Gord now at 416 998 6246 to begin our marketing success story.
