How to use experimentation to craft a compelling and impactful story?

Experimentation is a critical factor in the success of your story. Because the pace of change is accelerating, user needs and mental models today may greatly differ from just a few months ago. This will impact how successfully your message is being received. What worked a few months back may no longer work today. That’s why you should always be testing, measuring and experimenting.

My approach to marketing experimentation

Nearly everything we use in our daily lives was released after 1 or multiple tests or experiments. The cars we drive, the medicine we take, the computer or mobile device you are using to read this post – all of them have gone through some form of scientific method applied many times over a period of months, years, or even decades. Would you ever drive an untested car, take a unclinically validated medication or even buy an untested mobile phone? Experimentation is critical to ensure the product or service works as intended. Most companies today would never release a product without a pilot phase…why should marketing release content, channels or even campaigns without testing them first? This is where Marketing experimentation comes into play. 

A marketing experiment is a form of market research in which your goal is to discover new strategies for future campaigns or validate existing ones. For instance, a marketing team might create and send emails to a small segment of their readership to gauge engagement rates, before adding them to a campaign.

Experimentation is to marketing what pilots are to product. Most marketing experiments are ineffective; that’s because they lack scientific rigor and hypothesis-driven testing. Product Marketers or Marketers should define a series of hypotheses based on data insights, then validate or disprove them through customer focus groups or A/B tests. Each experiment brings marketing one step closer to getting a pulse on how customers might engage with your campaign, story or product launch. 

It’s very important to do a narrative assessment before launching an entire brand strategy or marketing campaign. A narrative assessment is the analysis of a story told by a brand to assess how the target audience might understand the language, visuals and values being communicated. In other words, it’s a pressure test to your narrative or storytelling capabilities. When you’ve created a great story, you should be able to provide satisfying answers to these questions:

1. Who is your human hero? Identify the person who will be on the journey.

2. What is the hero’s constriction? What is pressing the hero to action? Something in their world is broken and the hero is being pushed or pulled to fix it.

3. What is the hero’s desire? What is the conscious or unconscious desire of our human hero?

4. What relationships can help? What (or who) are the important relationships that will help your human hero move through this adventure?

5. What is the resistance? What is the active resistance to your hero? What seems impossible to overcome?

6. What are the adventures? What are the series of tests and challenges that must be overcome? Have you truly tested your hero? If you have holes in your story – where your audience will disbelieve your argument – it is usually because you haven’t truly tested your hero.

7. What Is the truth? – What is your argument? It may be connected to a conscious desire or the hero may discover the truth through the adventures that transpire.

Once you have these answers you want to see how these are being communicated, presented, understood and shared by your audience. For example, you can test your story through your website and run customer focus groups or A/B experiments and score these 5 elements of your story: 

1. Organization: Do you have a clear narrative that has been created and acknowledged by your organization? Does it include a library of elements that you can use and reuse to create meaningful stories for different audiences and contexts? Does your entire organization have access to it? Is it reviewed, examined and updated over time?

2. Presentation: Is your narrative presented well? Usually your primary narrative presentation is on your website, but it can be in other places as well — brochures, presentations, other media, social media and so forth. Is it presented in a way that is easily found by its audience? Easy to follow? Interesting and engaging?

3. Clarity: If I can find your narrative and follow it, do I get it? Does it make sense? Do I understand how it relates to me and my needs?

4. Resonance: We want to look at two kinds of resonance — emotional and intellectual. For the first, the key question is this: Does it make me feel something? Is it exciting? Does it speak to who I want to be? But we also need intellectual resonance. Does it make sense? Do you make a convincing argument well supported by evidence?

5. Shareability: Perhaps the most important element. If I can find it, and follow it. If I can get it, it makes me feel something. It makes sense. Can I turn around and explain it to someone else? Do you make it easy to share?

This structured review will give you a clear, focused direction for elevating and improving your narrative. Once you’ve done this analysis, you can start having the right discussions, and start generating clear responses that will have an impact.

I like to experiment messaging already during the research phase through customer focus groups. The way to conduct the experiment during this phase is by defining a series of hypotheses based on some internal assumptions or data points. For example, the assumption could be that when traveling for work, Millennials enjoy spending an extra day for leisure. I would then test a few value propositions in customer focus groups that represent these two groups and measure its effectiveness.

Experimentation shouldn’t stop here. Once you have a good value proposition defined from your research, you now want to test different keywords and call-to-action (CTA). Basically A/B testing. You can do this by dividing your audience into 3 or more test and control groups.

For example, let’s assume that your value proposition is that “a business traveler can earn points while traveling for work and redeem them for leisure”. You can now run an experiment and divide your audience into 3 groups. Group A (33%): “Earn more points when traveling for work - learn more”; Group B (33%): “Higher rewards, best perks - get started”; Group C (33%) this is the control group, you don’t target them with any messaging. The results should give you an indication of what worked and what didn’t for that particular channel.

This does not mean that your results can be easily translated to all channels. You will need to run simultaneous experiments on all channels. Never assume because one message drove higher engagement in one channel that it will have similar success in other channels.

As the growth engine of a business, Marketing needs to grow and evolve and avoid stagnation, as the adage goes: “If you always do what you always did, then you will always get what you always got.” Experiments are Marketing’s way of finding new growth levers, measuring effectiveness and deciding which narrative, channels or tactics to double down on.