Pilot Programs Are A Great Starting Point For Marketing Teams
As a new world thrusts full speed ahead into relying more and more on digital, many marketing teams that I’ve talked with are feeling turned around when being tasked to increase their digital presence. As traditional marketing begins to take a back seat to digital, teams who have never really invested in digital are struggling to find a great place to start.
When I work with marketing managers to structure digital strategies, I’ll recommend that they first consider a marketing pilot program to set the foundation for a new channel of digital marketing that they haven’t explored before. While a pilot program can teach marketers many things, we’re going to dive into some top takeaways that should be recognized at the end of a pilot engagement.
First of all, what is a pilot program?
A pilot program isn’t a new thing. When you boil down what the program is, it’s essentially a marketing test or marketing experiment.
A pilot program is an experiment that helps marketing teams test new marketing strategies within a fixed timeframe.
Try a marketing pilot program to test something new.
Pilot programs can be activated by marketers for any industry. These marketing experiments should be focused on testing new channels, messaging, product fits, or personas.
A pilot should be considered if a marketing team is looking to dip into something new and has the patience to ride out an experiment for a 3-6 month period.
Be aware of marketing pilot program costs.
Marketing and advertising budgets should be pretty sizeable for a marketing pilot program. If the pilot is focused on paid advertising, for example, it’s important to commit a healthy ad spend budget over the course of the engagement. If there isn’t enough marketing budget available throughout the pilot, the experiments run a risk of being too contained and might impact the ability to learn and adapt in the middle of the program. Since each pilot is so different, it’s important to make sure that organizers have the necessary funds for ad spend and management fees (if being run by an agency or consultant).
Three Learning Opportunities From Marketing Pilot Programs
There are so many things that can be learned from executing a marketing pilot, but there are typically three takeaways that marketing teams should be able to extract.
#1) If The Marketing Hypothesis is Correct
When you’re structuring a pilot program, you’ll want think through what you WANT out of the pilot. If there’s a specific market that your business has yet to really invest in, that’s a great starting point. You might have new personas that you have yet to market to, or a new product that you have yet to unveil to the world. If you have benchmarks set from previous marketing campaigns, that will help you as you identify your hypothesis, too.
You should be able to kick off a pilot program saying something like: “I think that introducing X new product to our #1 persona using the same channels that we’ve used previously will generate Y in revenue or Z in sales-qualified leads.”
That way, you have a great framework that you can work within. You’ll be able to cut out the noise and stay laser-focused on your audiences and know if your results are within acceptable key performance indicator (KPI) ranges that matter for your business.
#2) Create A Process For Marketing Experimentation
There are so many times where companies approach marketing without a strategy or a true plan. By using a marketing pilot program framework, you can create a process for running ads and promotions.
- Research
- Build
- Learn
- Adapt
- Repeat (if necessary)
- Conclude/Report
- Create the next program
Your pilot should allow you to learn about the results that you’re seeing, give you a chance to adapt your targeting/messaging, and then wait a bit longer to see if your adaptations moved you closer to your ideal results. Even after your pilot is over, you can take everything you’ve learned to influence how you approach your next marketing strategy.
#3) See If You Work Well With Your Vendors
Oftentimes, businesses will conduct a pilot program test with a vendor, such as a consultant, agency, or platform specialist. This is a great chance for you to test how well you can work with an external resource in a low-risk engagement. By creating a fixed-term engagement, you’re only obligated to work with a partner for a 4-6 month period. In the event that you don’t think your relationship is working, you’ll feel much better knowing that you aren’t stuck in a year-long engagement with partners that aren’t helping you achieve your marketing goals. The pilot program will give your vendors enough time to prove that they are able to deliver on their scope and work well with your teams.
As I said earlier – pilot programs aren’t a totally new concept. If you’re newer to marketing, hopefully, these ideas can help inspire how you can structure your marketing strategies to achieve your desired results. If you have any questions or want to discuss pilot programs more in-depth, feel free to shoot me a comment!