In the world of marketing, there's a widely accepted mantra: test everything. From the shade of a call-to-action button to the choice of a single word, every minute detail is analyzed and optimized in the quest for higher conversion rates. Even industry giants like Google and Amazon are known for running thousands of experiments at any given time.

However, despite this rigorous approach, many businesses find their efforts falling flat. Clients I've worked with have poured tens of thousands of dollars into conversion-rate optimization, only to see little, if any, improvement. So, what's going wrong?

The answer lies not in the "what" but the "how". It's not about testing everything - it's about understanding what really drives marketing results and focusing our tests around that. This shift in approach can lead to significant gains, often doubling or tripling previous conversion rates.

So why does the traditional approach fail? And how can adopting a message-first strategy revolutionize your marketing results? Let's dive in and unravel this mystery.

How Marketing Works & What Matters Most

Marketing really only has one lever it can use to drive results. You craft a message. Then you put it in a vehicle—website, ads, brochures, presentations, graphics—and place it in front of your ideal customer.

What happens next takes place in the mind of the customer.

When your marketing works, your message attracts attention, persuades them the product fits their needs, and calls them to action until they buy.

It follows that there can be two, and only two, reasons your marketing fails:

1. The product doesn't meet the customer's needs.

2. The message falls short.

Today, it's more difficult than ever for a marketing message to cover for the sins of a poorly designed product. When customers have a terrible experience with a product, they share it and it often goes viral.

The good news is that as long as your product or service is performs a job that people need done, there's usually a market for it. I live in Austin, TX—taco capital of the world—and despite there being more than a dozen incredible taco places within a mile of where I live, the Taco Bell is still busy.

So as a practical matter, when your marketing has stalled and isn't delivering the results you need, the culprit is likely your message. Only when you improve your message so that it attracts the attention it deserves and persuades your ideal customers to buy will you reignite your growth.

Traditional Approaches to Testing Fail

When it comes time to improve a client's message, most marketing agencies have a limited toolkit to fall back on. One approach is to do a positioning exercise. The resulting positioning statement is then meant to inspire creatives when they brainstorm new ads, landing pages, and other marketing assets.

Another approach is conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO tries to fix the message by testing some of the variables that influence how well a customer receives a message.

However, there's a fundamental problem in most CRO strategies and traditional marketing approaches—they focus more on how a message is delivered rather than what the message actually is.

Don't get me wrong, the delivery of a message matters. I've seen instances where minor tweaks in copy or design elements have led to significant improvements in conversion rates. But this isn't the complete picture.

Most CRO tests don't alter the meaning of the message or test the underlying psychological assumptions that ultimately influence prospect behavior.

Imagine a scenario where one person reads version A of a message while another reads version B. If you ask each individual to relay what they understood from the message, you'll find that, assuming both individuals have similar needs and desires, they've both gleaned the same meaning from the two different versions.

In the end, it's not just about how well a message is packaged—it's about what the message conveys to the customer. How does the message shift their perspectives? How does it make them feel? These are the factors that ultimately determine whether a customer decides to make a purchase or not.

How to Test What Really Matters

If we accept the premise that the content of your message holds more weight than its presentation, then it's essential to develop a testing approach that zeroes in on the variables that truly matter. By adopting a message-first marketing strategy, we can quickly pinpoint and adjust these crucial variables, accelerating our growth.

So, how would a testable marketing strategy look in practice?

We can start by dividing our marketing efforts into the three stages of the customer journey:

1. Capturing their attention

2. Engaging them persuasively to desire what we're selling

3. Motivating them to action with irresistible offers until they make a purchase

Each stage of this journey is influenced by different psychological factors that determine the effectiveness of our message. To maximize our impact, we need to isolate and test these variables during each phase.

Let's delve deeper into each stage and discover how to execute this testable approach effectively.

Attract Attention

The first phase in the customer journey is all about grabbing the attention of your ideal customers. These are the ads that form the foundation of your audience. If your audience size is insufficient, or if your ads aren't encouraging engagement, then this is where you should focus your testing efforts.

Success during this phase hinges on three psychological triggers that drive initial attention and engagement:

1. Addressing a customer's pains or problems

2. Fulfilling a customer's desires or needs

3. Resonating with a customer's closely held beliefs

Understanding and leveraging these triggers can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your attention-grabbing efforts.

One powerful way to test these psychological triggers is with the use of deliberately low-fidelity ads. For example, when selling my book, I used an ad that used variations of a one-liner: "If your marketing team is overpromising and underdelivering, read this." The ad had a picture of my book and linked to a sales letter.

I tested several different descriptions of the problem. One called out the ad agency instead. Another spoke to poor results (i.e., not enough leads, customers, and sales). Another spoke to a desire for a fast way to increase revenue. You get the idea.

Because these ads were intentionally simple and unpolished, I could be assured that the only variable I was testing was the underlying psychological trigger. There wasn't any fancy design or compelling story to distract from the core desire. By tracking the engagement each ad received, I was able to quickly identify the most potent psycholgoical triggers I could rely on to drive engagement when the time came to create higher-fidelity ads.

Engage & Persuade Phase

The second phase of the customer journey is about engaging your audience and persuading them to want what you're selling. During this phase, your marketing efforts should aim to deepen the connection with your audience and convince them that your product or service is the solution they've been looking for.

Success in this phase relies on several 'persuasion levers':

1. How you introduce the solution

2. The unique mechanism of the solution

3. Addressing the customer's objections

4. Types of proof offered

5. The structure of your ad or story

For instance, consider creating an remarketing ad campaign that tests different forms of proof that your solution works. One ad might feature an animated video of customer testimonials. Another ad could showcase a case study detailing a client's success story. A third ad could draw attention to press coverage or industry awards your company has received.

By running these ads concurrently, you can compare their performance to determine which form of proof is most persuasive to your audience. This insight allows you to tailor your future marketing efforts to emphasize the most impactful persuasion lever, thereby accelerating your marketing gains.

Or perhaps it's not the form of proof you think is at issue, but something else. Perhaps your ideal customers aren't engaging and buying because they don't believe your explanation of the root cause of the problem or how your solution works. In that case, you might run ads that test different analogies for explaining the problem or different mechanisms for explaining how the solution works.

Once you've verified what key psychological levers are most persuasive and engaging, you can then use that understanding to rapidly improve your other marketing and sales assets, such as your landing pages and sales letters, sales presentations, and consultative selling maps.

Call to Action and Offer Phase

The final phase of the customer journey involves motivating your audience to take action with compelling offers. This is where you present your product or service in such a way that it becomes irresistible to your audience.

1. Success during this phase hinges on several 'value levers':

2. Pairing features with benefits

3. The content of the offer

4. Value positioning statements

5. Risk reversals

6. Time-bound incentives

To test the effectiveness of your offer, consider creating different ads that explore various aspects of your product or service.

One ad might provide a comprehensive summary of everything the customer will get if they decide to buy, comparing the value of your offer to inferior alternatives. This approach helps to highlight the unique benefits and superior value of your product or service. By tracking how this ad performs, you can get a sense of how much your audience values a detailed breakdown and comparison.

Another series of ads could focus on specific benefits of your product or service, such as saving time or money. Running these ads simultaneously allows you to see which benefit is more persuasive to your ideal customers. This way, you can prioritize the most appealing benefits in your future marketing efforts.

A third campaign might implicitly address common objections and demonstrate how your offer overcomes those concerns. This strategy can help to alleviate any doubts or reservations your audience might have, making them more likely to take action. Monitoring the engagement with this ad can help you understand which objections are most prevalent among your audience and how effectively your ad addresses them.

By comparing the performance of these ads, you can identify which aspects of your offer are most persuasive to your audience. This information can then be used to refine your call to action and offer strategy, helping you to convert more prospects into customers and boost your overall marketing performance.

Bringing It Together

In the last 30 years, we've lived through a revolution in advertising platforms. Today, for $10, virtually anyone can put a message in front of their ideal customers on Google, Facebook, or TikTok. And when they do, they'll get incredible fine-grained data about who interacted with the ads and what they did.

While this technology has revolutionized about ability to target and broadcast our marketing messages, our approach to marketing strategy hasn't evolved to take advantage of what we can do today and how we can harness the resulting data to rapidly improve our efforts.

To succeed in today's world, we must adopt a testable approach to our marketing strategies.

First, we must begin by recognizing that the success of our marketing will usually rest more on what our message is—it's meaning, core ideas, and primary claims—rather than how we communicate it. Our conversion rates will be influenced more by how our message interacts with the pschological triggers and buying levers in our audience's psychological makeup than it will be shaped by their stylistic preferences and linguistic sensitivies.

Then, our marketing strategies must identify the key factors in our customers' psychology and then we must test those assumptions to validate our insights. Once validated, those insights become the framework for our marketing messages and we can use them to reverse-engineer the stories we must tell to turn prospects into customers.

This approach benefits from sensitivity to the customer journey.

For businesses who are in the early parts of their marketing journey, the quickest gains are usually achieved by focusing on the "attract attention" and the "engage and persuade" phases of marketing. Without a large enough audience, it doesn't matter how persuasive you are. You still won't develop enough customers. And while your audience is small, you can engage in ways that are less scalable, such as by inviting email and phone conversations that might prove too costly once your audience is big.

When you are further along on your marketing journey, your analytics should help you isolate the variables you should test first. Here again, the customer journey should be your guide. What parts of the marketing funnel are leaking the most customers? Is there a crucial missing piece of your remarketing sequences you think might nudge most prospects to buy? What is your subjective impression of your offers and how can you improve them?

Next Steps

If you'd like help implementing this testable, message-first approach to marketing strategy, reach out. I've spent the last 15+ years developing message-first frameworks and implementing them in more than 100 clients now. In many cases, those frameworks have enabled me to achieve breakthrough results where other agencies and marketing employees have failed.

I look forward to speaking with you and learning more about what you're trying to achieve.