Experimental research is a powerful method to test your marketing hypotheses and measure the causal effects of your actions. It involves manipulating one or more variables and observing the changes in another variable, while controlling for other factors. In this article, you will learn how to use experimental research to improve your marketing decisions and outcomes.
A marketing hypothesis is a tentative statement that predicts the relationship between two or more variables in your marketing context. For example, you might hypothesize that increasing the price of your product will reduce the demand, or that adding a testimonial to your landing page will increase the conversion rate. A marketing hypothesis should be specific, measurable, and testable.
A hypothesis must primarily be formulated in such a way that it can be tested. This means it should be possible to either reject or accept it from the outset. For instance, a hypothesis like "Service quality COULD INFLUENCE satisfaction" is not testable because it is always true. Even if service quality does not influence satisfaction, it remains true. On the other hand, "Service quality INFLUENCES satisfaction" is testable because it can be false. However, it is not very precise. "Service quality positively influences satisfaction" is more precise and allows for a more operational understanding of the relationship between quality and satisfaction.
A marketing hypothesis proposes how a strategy might influence consumer behavior, sales, or a different marketing KPI. It's a prediction made before testing, which guide your marketing experiments. For instance, in a consulting project I did, I hypothesized that a targeted influencer approach would outperform broad-reaching campaigns. We tested this by collaborating with influencers of varying audience sizes and niches. The data showed that influencers with highly engaged, niche audiences drove more meaningful interactions and conversions, confirming our hypothesis. Simply put, it's an educated guess, a "what if" that might influence a merketing metric, which can be tested to draw a conclusion.
A marketing hypothesis is a proposed explanation or prediction regarding the relationship between various marketing variables, such as consumer behavior, product features, or promotional strategies. Experimental research involves designing controlled experiments to manipulate specific marketing factors and observe their effects on consumer outcomes or performance metrics. By conducting A/B tests or other experimental designs, businesses can systematically test their hypotheses, gaining valuable insights into which marketing strategies are most effective in achieving their objectives. This data-driven approach allows for informed decision-making and optimization of marketing efforts to drive better results.
Designing an experimental research requires you to identify your research question and hypothesis, define your independent and dependent variables, choose an experimental design, select a sample and assign them to groups, implement your intervention and collect data, and analyze your data and draw conclusions. When selecting an experimental design, you must consider the validity, reliability, ethical implications, and practical implications. Additionally, random sampling and random assignment should be used when selecting a sample to ensure the groups are comparable and representative of your population. Once the intervention is implemented, statistical methods should be used to test the hypothesis and determine if the intervention had a significant effect on the outcome. The results must then be interpreted to discuss their implications and limitations.
The interest of experimental research often lies in finding a causal link that is assumed (but not tested) in certain analyses such as regression. Experimental research allows for the experimental variation of one variable to assess its impact on other variables. Therefore, it is crucial to have well-established causal hypotheses to know what needs to be experimentally manipulated and what should be impacted by the manipulation. Subsequently, attention must be paid to potential covariates that could disrupt your manipulation (for example, weather conditions, temperature, or sample composition) if they are not the same from one experimental condition to another.
Determine what metrics will help you draw a conclusion based on your hypothesis. Then, decide how you're going to test them and how the results will impact your conclusion. It's important to do this ahead of time to prevent biases when interpreting results later. For example, when working on a mobile game launch, we hypothesized that video ads would generate installs more effectively than image ads. We designed an experiment where half of our target audience saw video ads, and the other half saw image ads. We determined the metrics that would help us draw a conclusion were CTR's and CPI's, among others. The process involved setting clear, measurable outcomes, ensuring we could objectively assess the impact of each ad type.
Designing experimental research involves several essential steps to ensure its effectiveness. Begin by clearly defining the research question or hypothesis. Identify the variables to manipulate and measure, selecting the appropriate experimental design and control conditions. Randomly assign participants to groups and develop the experimental procedure, including stimuli or interventions. Pretest the methodology as needed. Finally, collect and analyze data to draw conclusions about the relationship between variables and assess the hypothesis's validity. This systematic process ensures that experimental research yields valuable insights for refining marketing strategies.
Experimental research can help you answer various marketing questions, such as optimizing your pricing strategy, improving your advertising effectiveness, enhancing your product development, and increasing customer loyalty. For example, you can test different price levels to see how they affect sales, profits, and customer satisfaction. Additionally, you can test different ad formats, channels, messages, and audiences to measure their influence on brand awareness, recall, and preference. Moreover, you can test different features, benefits, and designs to determine their impact on customer needs, wants, and expectations. Last but not least, you can test different loyalty programs, rewards, and incentives to gauge their effect on customer retention, referrals, and lifetime value.
Marketing strategies require significant investment. Experimental research allows you to validate your assumptions before committing resources to a full-scale launch. Test core elements of your strategy with a smaller audience and refine them based on the results. This minimizes risk and ensures your marketing efforts resonate with your target audience from the get-go.
Conducting experimental research in marketing has several advantages. It enables you to establish causality between your variables, measure the magnitude and direction of your effect, and provide actionable insights and recommendations. This allows you to isolate the effect of your independent variable on your dependent variable, quantify the change in your dependent variable, and use your results to inform your marketing decisions and actions for improved performance and outcomes.
Sometimes, the most valuable discoveries are the ones you don't expect. The controlled environment of experimental research can reveal surprising cause-and-effect relationships that traditional methods might miss. These unexpected insights can spark innovation and lead to entirely new marketing strategies you hadn't considered before.
Experimental research can be challenging for marketing, as it requires resources and effort to design, implement, and analyze the experiment. Additionally, manipulating variables can be difficult and risky, so you must consider the feasibility and ethics of your intervention and its potential consequences. Furthermore, the experiment can be limited and biased by your context and sample, so you need to account for its external and internal validity. Ultimately, experimental research can help you understand the generalizability and applicability of your findings to your population and situation.