How to Validate a Marketing Idea

Idea validation is the Achilles heel of success when it comes to deploying effective marketing campaigns within an organization. I’d even say it’s the biggest weak link on many teams.

Part of the reason validating ideas is so hard is, simply put, because doing marketing at all is harder these days. Look at SEO as an example. Something that used to come down to putting keywords in specific places has really evolved into doing great marketing and building a strong brand.

That isn’t to say that things like link building or on-page optimization don’t matter. They do. But generally speaking, marketing has become more all-encompassing than it’s ever been – and that’s not going to change. 

Couple that with the fact that teams often have fewer resources to work with, more channels to support, and higher costs for doing so – Facebook ad costs alone increased 122% YOY in January 2018 after the social giant made changes to its News Feed algorithms – and you’ve got a recipe for marketing disaster.

The only solution? Nailing down a focused process for validating new marketing ideas.

Why SaaS Companies Need Greater Focus in Their Marketing Efforts 

Having a formal process for validating marketing ideas allows teams to identify the channels and campaigns that are likely to produce the greatest impact, given the constraints described above.

The only problem? Creating a formal validation process isn’t exactly easy.

These days, doing marketing at a SaaS company includes working with the product team, the sales team, and the customer success team. Doing search. Running PPC ads. Looking at churn, and so on. 

Marketing has become so cross-functional that it requires a huge amount of brainpower – and when you’re firing on so many cylinders, it’s easy to get distracted. This lets ideas that sound brilliant, but that are actually pretty crappy, slip through – unless you take the time to validate them. This is why a lot of companies these days are using campaign management tools to help manage this fallout.

I’ll give you an example. About six months ago, one of the marketing guys at Mailshake came to me and told me that a channel we’d been using wasn’t really working any more. So he throws 15 new ideas at me – and then, the next month, he’s got another 30 new ideas he wants me to review.

Let me be clear. I love that he’s taking the initiative, and that he’s putting so much energy into helping Mailshake succeed. But when all we do is look at ideas, we don’t really know how they’re going to perform, what they’re going to cost to execute, or even what we’re going to have to stop doing in order to make them happen.

Without a process that helps us hone in on how each idea relates to our company’s biggest goals, we’d risk wasting time and losing momentum by chasing the ideas that sounded the best overall.

How to Validate Your Marketing Ideas

I’ll be straight with you. The process we use below is one we’ve built up that works for Mailshake. You might need something totally different, though you can still use these steps as a starting point for establishing your own validation process.

Step #1: Establish a Baseline

This one’s pretty obvious, but you have to know how your current channels are performing before you can figure out how new ideas will support them.

Say one of my team members comes to me with an idea that’ll increase organic traffic by 25%. That sounds great, but what’s our conversion rate from organic traffic? If it’s low, boosting organic traffic might not matter as much as increasing investment in another channel that’s sending us more free trial sign-ups or new customers.

Establish a baseline for each of your marketing channels by conducting an audit of what your current performance looks like, in terms of your KPIs. Then, spend time weekly, monthly, or quarterly – depending on how many channels you’re on – to keep your baseline performance measurements up-to-date. 

Step #2: Capture Your Ideas

Next, establish a formal process for capturing ideas on your team. I brainstorm all the time, whether I’m in the shower, driving around Austin, or running a structured ideation session. My team does the same – so if we all fired off emails or sent text messages whenever we had a new idea, we’d either lose ideas or struggle to organize them in a coherent way for consideration.

Instead, set up a shared spreadsheet, Google Docs file, Trello board, or whatever other system works for your team that can act as a central repository for new ideas. Train your team members that you won’t be considering any ideas that aren’t reported using the new system.

And then? Don’t do anything with them. Let them sit. Review what’s been captured on a periodic basis, and – when you come back to your list – you’ll find that the bad ideas naturally sink to the bottom, and that you can focus your validation efforts on those with real potential.

Step #3: Estimate the Potential Impact of Your Ideas

So, let’s say that, after going through Step #2, I’m left with a list of the following ideas:

• Creating SEO-driven content clusters
• Launching a new PPC campaign
• Building a user community

Let’s say I have $50,000 per month that I want to throw at one of these ideas. To estimate which one’s going to give me the greatest value for my investment, I like to use the ICE framework, which judges ideas according to their potential impact, my confidence in my ability to achieve that impact, and their ease of implementation.

The following are a few of the questions I’m asking at each stage:

Impact

• What’s the impact likely to be?
• How much traffic is that going to bring?
• How many potential customers will you acquire, based off of real data like your conversion rate? 
• If you have a free trial or freemium product, what does each free user you acquire mean to you, and what’s the potential impact in terms of revenue?

Confidence

• How confident are we that we can produce the results we estimated?
• If things don’t go perfectly, how much could these estimates be off by?

Ease of Implementation

• How much work is it going to take?
• How much is it going to cost?
• Do I have the resources internally to take this on?
• Will I have to pull someone off another channel to do this?

One quick and easy way to compare ideas against each other would be to assign each idea a numerical score for each ICE framework stage.

• Because SEO takes a long time to produce results, its initial impact is going to be pretty low. But let’s say I already have someone doing this work. Because of that, I’m confident that we can expand our efforts easily without taking anybody off another project and without a huge learning curve.
• PPC, on the other hand, is likely to have a more immediate impact, but it’s also going to be harder to get a campaign up and running. I may need to bring on a new team member or contractor, and I’m going to have to put money into click fees, which may or may not pay off right away. As a result, I’m less confident I’m going to be able to produce the impact I’m expecting.
• Finally, I might estimate that although building a community could have a good impact in the long-run, I may be less confident that I’ll be able to create a compelling enough experience that users want to actively be a part of it. It’s also going to take time to implement and manage, which is why it’s got solid “3s” across the board.

Because these are rough estimates, I wouldn’t necessarily make decisions based off of them alone. But they could be a good way to determine which ideas I want to explore further. I could then take the winners and put them through a more in-depth validation process to actually estimate how many visits, sign-ups, and conversions I expect each idea to produce, as well as what it’s going to cost me to do so.

This is a good habit to get into, even if you aren’t in a leadership role. If you’re presenting your ideas to a manager or director, going through an exercise like this makes it possible to go to them and say, “I want more budget on this and I need to hire this one person, but my idea is going to bring in 50,000 visitors that’ll produce 5,000 leads and 500 new customers.”

Essentially, you’re starting with a problem, and then mapping a solution to it – rather than starting with a solution you haven’t validated because it sounds like a good idea. 

Non Revenue-Generating Ideas vs. Revenue-Driving Campaigns

Here’s one limitation of the process described above. Although it’s a great framework for catching bad ideas quickly, it doesn’t always accurately reflect the impact of long-term brand or community building campaigns.

Take trade shows as an example. If I were to compare trade shows to pretty much any digital marketing channel in terms of the time, money, and hours it’ll take my team to actually attend them, they’re crap when it comes to ROI.

But from a branding perspective, from the ability to connect directly with customers, and in terms of building my reputation, they’re amazing. 

So if I were to say, “I only have X amount of dollars and I can do trade shows, build a community, or do SEO,” those three channels don’t really compare. SEO is going to have a direct revenue impact, while trade shows and community growth are more about long-term branding. They’re both important, but that’s not necessarily going to be reflected when you estimate impact, unless you take both short-term and long-term value into consideration

At the end of the day, marketing budgets are finite. You have to think about where you’re going to spend your money – or your boss’s money – and how you’re going to allocate resources across different needs, like direct demand gen and user acquisition, versus brand.

Not all of your ideas have to have a direct, numerical impact. But you also have to be careful not to cut something that’s working in terms of producing long-term wins or brand advantages, but that isn’t captured by your metrics.

The Impact of Validation

Now that I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, I’m able to do the math quickly on whether or not an idea makes sense. I’ve even noticed that my team has been coming to me with better and better ideas, because we all use this kind of defined process to validate ideas before pursuing them.

I highly recommend adopting something similar, but keep in mind that this is only one pass. It’s not all-encompassing – and it shouldn’t be, because you’re not going to think through everything on the first pass. 

For example, I could talk to my team, find out we have more PPC expertise in house than I’d realized, and all of a sudden PPC becomes a more viable idea than SEO:

I might also do a little digging and notice that one of my competitors is starting a community building initiative. In that case, following suit might be a higher priority for me so that I don’t fall too far behind.

The important thing here isn’t the specific results you come up with – it’s that you have a process in place for validating ideas in a structured way. Build one and practice it enough, and you’ll quickly find your team able to save time and money by pursuing the best ideas from the start.

How do you validate marketing ideas at your company? Share your experiences or any other tips you’ve come up with by leaving a comment below:

Image Source: Unsplash