First up, in line with the ‘most ideas ain’t original‘ belief, the idea behind this post is taken from Making Ads Pay by John Caples.
Picked it up from the library after work. You’d immediately recognise a good book especially when there are gems found in the very first page. (This book also made it into my top copywriting books, more at ‘Resources That All Successful Copywriters Use‘)
And so this blog post was born!
So back to Darwin’s theory of evolution and your business…
A little background to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
So as a young and curious lad, Darwin was incredibly observant of nature and its players. On one of his extended travels, he collected specimens from the different places he visited (I suspected wanderlust).
As he was unpacking and admiring his souvenirs, he noticed similarities and was intrigued by these discoveries. Thus began his conception and study of natural selection.
In a single sentence, natural selection is the theory that evolution is driven by…natural selection. Well, better traits in a species is selected for through generations of reproduction and eventually the ‘weaker’ manifestation of those traits will be diluted in a population of organisms carrying the better trait.
(For more details, you can read Charles Darwin’s book: “The Origin of Species
It’s a long story, but if that was too complicated. Just forget it and read on to find out how this can boost your business.
How Darwin’s theory of evolution can boost your business
The idea is to incorporate Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (specifically, Natural Selection) into your marketing efforts, by letting your audience select the ads they like and get rid of those they do not.
Step 1: Stalk Your Audience Track Your Ads
Start tracking your marketing campaigns like an obsessed stalker
As we run marketing campaigns, it’s very important to be able to track the performance of each individual campaign. This data may be boring to track, but will be very intriguing to analyse.
Just by looking at the number of people who responded to a particular marketing campaign, you can decide the direction of future campaigns.
Just by looking at the demographics of the people who either interacted with your marketing efforts, or bought from you, you can uncover more details about the type of customers you would like to attract in the future.
Just by looking at the number of people who ACTUALLY BOUGHT from you, you can decide which product (or service) range to focus on in the future.
Step 2: Select the winning ads, weed the losing ads
With proper tracking of your marketing campaigns, you will be able to identify the campaigns that did well against those that burnt.
And, this is when you put Natural Selection into practice.
Let nature (which in this case, is your targeted audience) select the campaign that they like and get rid of those that they did not like.
Once you have run at least 10 different test campaigns, you would most likely have a list of 3 to 5 outstanding campaigns that your target audience responded to with excitement.
Analyse these successful campaigns deeper.
- Compare the traffic that is being driven to these campaigns
- Compare the angle of these campaigns
- Compare the demographics of the people who responded to these campaigns
- Notice any special writing styles that could have increased the interest
Compile these similarities and you will have a clear picture and direction which will prove useful when planning future marketing campaigns. Although not all of these features may be used in a single campaign, you should seek to add as many of these ‘success’ features into your future campaigns.
By giving your target audience what they want, that’s how you boost your business. And to fully understand what they want, that’s when you apply natural selection to allow your marketing campaigns to evolve.