The benefits of a culture of experimentation

As marketers we’re ambitious, hungry for results, and always looking for ways to improve our activity. We PERMANENTLY want more bang for our buck. We don’t want to merely hit our targets, we want to exceed them and set new records. Entrepreneur Jim Rohn famously said: “If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.” In a digital age where everything changes so quickly, not only is playing it safe mundane for employees, but it also stunts your businesses growth! According to Airship, a culture of experimentation can lead to 4 times more growth than a business that doesn’t embrace testing new things.

Accelerating growth is high on the priority list, but what other benefits can you expect from building a culture of experimentation?

Innovation mind-set

Stephen Bartlett is renowned for adopting a culture of experimentation and it shapes the way his businesses respond and react to opportunities, as he recently shared: “Our team have that culture where the minute anything came along, we would grab it and try it. And we would experiment. Sometimes those experiments would flop, most of the time. But if you want your team to get in that mindset you have to reward them for conducting the experiment, not for the outcome of the experiment.”

This approach of rewarding experimental actions, rather than the outcome, encourages teams to operate fast and fearless experiments more often, enabling a business to learn and move forward quicker.

Mitigating risk

To achieve fast growth, leaders need to encourage their teams to push the boundaries and try new things. Changing too much at once obviously creates risks, if you test or change too much at one time the activity you’re executing could go wrong. But doing small, regular experiments such as AB testing different content on your website, changing subject lines in your email activity, or testing new software, lets you measure results and performance over time, building up confidence and identifying risks that need to be addressed.

This gives the business conviction to roll out larger changes, knowing what to expect. Small changes over time are also easier to roll back from should they not go to plan and don’t impact the bottom line as much as a large-scale test.

Data-driven decision making

A topic I’m very passionate about, with the endless data available to us, long gone are the days when marketers need to make decisions based on guesswork or a gut feeling. Using data to drive business decisions not only means you’re taking out the guesswork, but you’re also being more efficient with your time and resource.

Success happens faster when people have the information they need to make good decisions and it increases transparency at every level, by providing the reason ‘why’ behind the decision-making process.

As New York Times bestselling authors and data experts Chip and Dan Heath said: “Data is just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.”

Happy employees

It’s a fact. A study by Forbes revealed happy employees are 20% more productive than those who are unhappy. Working in a culture of experimentation not only provides a higher sense of achievement and accountability (because the fruit of their labor is visible through the data that experimentation provides), but it also creates a more varied and interesting job role.

By actively encouraging your marketing team to experiment with the latest trends and technology and work out the most effective strategies and approaches for your industry and target audience, it provides a more fulfilling environment to work in and has endless benefits to staff morale.

To check out the full list of benefits of a culture of experimentation and how to implement it, download our ebook.