In episode #634, Eric and Neil discuss the easiest way to be successful. Tune in to hear why experiments are key.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: The Straightest Road to Success
- [00:33] The key to success is experimentation!
- [00:51] A lot of people forget to build out an experimentation framework.
- [01:02] Neil will split his team into four groups and each group will submit ideas each week for “crazy” experiments they can run.
- [02:38] Each group needs to run experiments every week.
- [02:46] GrowthHackers created North Star, which helps you track experiments over time.
- [03:00] Northstar is a free service.
- [03:18] Try Google Experiments as another tracker.
- [03:34] Build experimentation into the fabric of your company.
- [04:00] It’s ok if experiments fail!
- [04:28] By doing radical experiments, you can learn how to grow your company at a fast pace.
- [04:50] Read Crazy Egg to learn more about experimentation.
- [05:01] That’s all for today!
- [05:04] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post The Straightest Road to Success | Ep. #634 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about the straightest road to success, which is experimentation. This is one of the key components that's very predictable when it comes to marketing. If you continue to experiment over time, you build out some kind of experimentation framework, you are going to be able to grow. Whether it's 1% a week, 2% a week that you're aiming to grow, 3% a week, that adds up over the course of a year. You're going to be able to see long-term success that way. A lot of people forget to build out an experimentation framework. Neil, I'm curious to learn what kind of framework you've used and what kind of experiments you've seen succeed.
Neil Patel: Our framework is very simple. We take the team, we put them into small groups, three or four people per group. It's not just marketers, it could be a marketer, a sales guy, developer in one group. Another group could have a customer support person, a designer and a manager. There's different groups and we randomly select the groups by the way.
When we create these groups, by Monday, everyone gets together and they submit their ideas on crazy experiments that we can run that'll solve problems. Some of these experiments aren't really crazy. They could be just really small experiments based on the same question or email that's coming through from support. Each group is picking their own ones. By Tuesday, they need to not only decide what they're going to end up running the experiment, like which one they're choosing but by Tuesday night or ideally Wednesday, you should be up and running. By Friday, meet up and everyone evaluates the results.
You may not have a lot of data, you may not have a lot of traffic but if you can't do fast experimentations, even if you're a new business, you're not going to grow fast enough.
For example, we had one person when we started this new division or new product, it was like a push notification product, barely had any visitors traffic. He's like, "This week's experimentation, I'm going to go call up 100 companies and see if I can sell any of them on it and if I can make the numbers work." He's not waiting for A/B tests or saying, "Hey, we need 1,000 visitors before we can run an experiment." He's willing to do whatever.
That group was willing to do whatever and more so, they split up the calls between them and they started just cranking through them. But the point I'm getting is each group needs to continually run experiments each and every single week.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and to get you started on this kind of stuff, growthhackers.com, if you search for Growth Hackers NorthStar, they have a product that helps you track these experiments over time. It's basically a experimentation framework tool. Yes, you can certainly use a project management tool out there but they built this specifically to project manage your experiments.
Now, you can use NorthStar for free. It's free for the first 20 users. Sean Ellis, which is the CEO of the company. He's well-known. He led growth at Dropbox and a whole host of other companies. LogMeIn as well. Highly recommend that you check it out. He's a friend of both of ours.
Then also, if you're looking to run these experiments, you can just use Google Experiments. It's free and if you're looking for the paid solutions, you can use Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely, which I do believe Optimizely is more for mid-market to enterprise companies now.
Starting with those is good but just also what Neil's talking about, having that kind of cadence where your whole entire company is bought in on experimentation. It's not just this thing that is this annoying meeting that you have to get through. You're talking about learnings and then you come in with different hypothesis and you're constantly testing.
Again, if you can get that 1% every single week that comes out to 50% plus for the year if you can do that.
Neil Patel: Yeah. When you're running a experiment, it's okay for them to lose and not work out. Everyone thinks that the best route to go to succeed is going to be a straight line. It's not. It's really squiggly. It goes everywhere. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, to the left, to the right.
Eventually, you'll go up into the right where you want to be but you have to continue to experiment and you have to be willing to shake things up. Sometimes we look at what's our cash cow and sometimes we're willing to even experiment crushing our cash cow and trying something else or giving something away for free. But by doing radical, crazy experiments, you'll eventually figure out how you can grow faster and they won't all work out the way you want, but hey, if one out of four work out every single month, that's huge. Because over time, it starts compounding.
Eric Siu: Yeah. Run the experiments, get your team on top of it. I think maybe even the best blogs read about this kind of A/B testing. Well, you can read Crazy Egg. You can read, I think Qualiver has ... Actually if you search conversion rate optimization or growth experiments, you'll be able to find the resources that you need to start this stuff off.
Anyway, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get access to our marketing tools and we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to write and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about the straightest road to success, which is experimentation. This is one of the key components that's very predictable when it comes to marketing. If you continue to experiment over time, you build out some kind of experimentation framework, you are going to be able to grow. Whether it's 1% a week, 2% a week that you're aiming to grow, 3% a week, that adds up over the course of a year. You're going to be able to see long-term success that way. A lot of people forget to build out an experimentation framework. Neil, I'm curious to learn what kind of framework you've used and what kind of experiments you've seen succeed.
Neil Patel: Our framework is very simple. We take the team, we put them into small groups, three or four people per group. It's not just marketers, it could be a marketer, a sales guy, developer in one group. Another group could have a customer support person, a designer and a manager. There's different groups and we randomly select the groups by the way.
When we create these groups, by Monday, everyone gets together and they submit their ideas on crazy experiments that we can run that'll solve problems. Some of these experiments aren't really crazy. They could be just really small experiments based on the same question or email that's coming through from support. Each group is picking their own ones. By Tuesday, they need to not only decide what they're going to end up running the experiment, like which one they're choosing but by Tuesday night or ideally Wednesday, you should be up and running. By Friday, meet up and everyone evaluates the results.
You may not have a lot of data, you may not have a lot of traffic but if you can't do fast experimentations, even if you're a new business, you're not going to grow fast enough.
For example, we had one person when we started this new division or new product, it was like a push notification product, barely had any visitors traffic. He's like, "This week's experimentation, I'm going to go call up 100 companies and see if I can sell any of them on it and if I can make the numbers work." He's not waiting for A/B tests or saying, "Hey, we need 1,000 visitors before we can run an experiment." He's willing to do whatever.
That group was willing to do whatever and more so, they split up the calls between them and they started just cranking through them. But the point I'm getting is each group needs to continually run experiments each and every single week.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and to get you started on this kind of stuff, growthhackers.com, if you search for Growth Hackers NorthStar, they have a product that helps you track these experiments over time. It's basically a experimentation framework tool. Yes, you can certainly use a project management tool out there but they built this specifically to project manage your experiments.
Now, you can use NorthStar for free. It's free for the first 20 users. Sean Ellis, which is the CEO of the company. He's well-known. He led growth at Dropbox and a whole host of other companies. LogMeIn as well. Highly recommend that you check it out. He's a friend of both of ours.
Then also, if you're looking to run these experiments, you can just use Google Experiments. It's free and if you're looking for the paid solutions, you can use Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely, which I do believe Optimizely is more for mid-market to enterprise companies now.
Starting with those is good but just also what Neil's talking about, having that kind of cadence where your whole entire company is bought in on experimentation. It's not just this thing that is this annoying meeting that you have to get through. You're talking about learnings and then you come in with different hypothesis and you're constantly testing.
Again, if you can get that 1% every single week that comes out to 50% plus for the year if you can do that.
Neil Patel: Yeah. When you're running a experiment, it's okay for them to lose and not work out. Everyone thinks that the best route to go to succeed is going to be a straight line. It's not. It's really squiggly. It goes everywhere. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, to the left, to the right.
Eventually, you'll go up into the right where you want to be but you have to continue to experiment and you have to be willing to shake things up. Sometimes we look at what's our cash cow and sometimes we're willing to even experiment crushing our cash cow and trying something else or giving something away for free. But by doing radical, crazy experiments, you'll eventually figure out how you can grow faster and they won't all work out the way you want, but hey, if one out of four work out every single month, that's huge. Because over time, it starts compounding.
Eric Siu: Yeah. Run the experiments, get your team on top of it. I think maybe even the best blogs read about this kind of A/B testing. Well, you can read Crazy Egg. You can read, I think Qualiver has ... Actually if you search conversion rate optimization or growth experiments, you'll be able to find the resources that you need to start this stuff off.
Anyway, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get access to our marketing tools and we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to write and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.