How To Science The Shit Out Of Your Marketing Strategy

Every week, there are many high-quality marketing guides published on the internet and on Medium. This is a good thing.

However, I see many beginner entrepreneurs blindly implement these “marketing tactics” and guides without a systematic or scientific approach.

Beginners who:

• Blindly change their website button to red because some article said so.
• Blindly try marketing with Snapchat because it’s the latest craze.
• Blindly start guest posting because every marketing blog says so.

Basically, beginners who are blindly implementing marketing tactics and hoping it’ll work.

You need to stop “blindly” implementing marketing tactics

And that needs to stop. Stop relying on luck and praying something will work.

Instead, you need to have a marketing framework so you can predict which marketing tactics will work for your specific business and circumstances.

I’m not saying not to read marketing guides anymore. In fact, you should — it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on the latest marketing techniques. But the point is this:

You need to have a systematic and scientific approach for your own marketing strategy.

This isn’t just me talking. There’s a reason why many of the top companies (e.g. Hubspot, Uber, Dropbox, SumoMe, Facebook, AirBnb, etc…) all approach marketing with a scientific marketing framework.

A few of the best marketing scientists

The best thing? You don’t need to have a science/engineering background, it’s a relatively simple framework you can learn with enough practice.

So what is the scientific method?

It’s a way to solve a question or problem by making observations and doing experiments. The whole concept is to be able to predict and repeat your experiments.

By applying a scientific/systematic approach to marketing, you can predict which marketing tactics will be the most effective by running small tests to gather data.

With that information, you can make tweaks to scale and improve your marketing experiments.

Here’s a summary of how it works and how you can begin approaching marketing with a different mindset:

Applying the scientific method to marketing

Step 1: Start compiling all the great marketing guides you read into an “ideas backlog” spreadsheet (you can download it here)

After I read an interesting marketing guide, I’ll include it in my backlog spreadsheet

Step 2: Create and define your goal (based on the AARRR funnel) by working backward from your end vision. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related.

The Pirate (AARRR) Metrics

Step 3: Prioritize your marketing tactics based on how it fits in with the goal, and score them based on the: probability of success, resources required, and impact.

Doing too many things at once is a recipe for failure. Prioritize one thing at a time.

Step 4: Validate the assumptions you used to prioritize the marketing tactics by running small 80/20 marketing experiments. Do this by breaking down your goal into week-to-week growth targets so you can measure your progress.

Run small experiments before investing too much time and money into an unproven channel

Step 5: Create an experimental plan by documenting how you will be executing the marketing strategy.

Break your goals down into more manageable weekly growth targets

Step 6: Execute your marketing plan and keep detailed notes as you progress through the experiment.

Spend at least 30 minutes creating your plan so you know exactly what you did. This is useful when it’s time to scale.

Step 7: Analyze your results by asking “why” the experiment was a success or failure. Do research to find out “why” so you can make tweaks. If the experiment was a failure and it’s too difficult to fix, kill the experiment and move on.

Step 8: If the experiment was a success, apply your lessons learned and scale your experiment in iterative steps. Leverage technology or your playbook to 10x your results. Continue to focus on the marketing channel until it’s no longer effective.

Make iterative improvements to your marketing channel

Step 9: Rinse and repeat!

And that’s how you approach marketing with a scientific framework.

Stop copy/pasting marketing guides you’ve read about without any sort of framework (including this one!).

For a more in-depth guide with more examples, and to download the actual tools we use, click here to learn The Scientific Marketing Strategy Behind Exponential Growth.