Are You Curious?

As a marketer, do you KNOW? Your business, your customer, how to get results, how to get more? Most of us would say “Yes,” we’re good at what we do and we know a lot, that’s why we’re making the decisions we make.

One thing I’ve realized is that if you know, then there’s no reason to test something out. Think about it: Why should you waste your time testing when you have a pretty good idea of what will work and what won’t?

The reality is that we don’t know a lot more than we do know. The beauty about being curious and testing is that we let our customers help us, make us smarter and guide the decisions.

The Eisenberg brothers are one of the great evangelizers for testing. They have a slew of articles about how to learn about testing and advice for trying it out. One of the better ones here is about the value of learning even when the results are small, “Don’t dismiss the base hits.”

As marketers and especially online marketers, testing needs to be part of our DNA. Since we can get results back quickly online, we need to build testing into all parts of our marketing mix. We need to be curious.

The funny thing is, it works. Check out a case study Marketing Sherpa wrote on a test I did for Unicel.

In Zen, they call this beginner’s mind. Are you brave enough to be curious?