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Leadership must cultivate a test-and-learn culture, in part by penalizing those who act without sufficient evidence. Nothing but a success in a testing environment should be rolled out more broadly. Refine the hypothesis on the basis of the results, and consider testing a variation. Metrics analysts can spot trends over time to pinpoint which efforts aren’t working and potentially why they’re falling short of expectations. This information is essential to making decisions about your strategy moving forward. One tricky aspect of establishing a long-term testing approach is determining when to retest. There is no way to know for sure when a test has become obsolete; an experienced analyst needs to assess whether enough factors have changed in the environment to make previous results suspect. Get Smart With Free Resources If at all possible, it’s always best to go right to the source and speak with audience members directly, which is why focus groups, commentary, and reviews are so ...

Testing costs money (though not as much as widespread rollouts of new tactics that don’t work), and it takes time. Senior managers have to become accustomed to, and even passionate about, the idea that no major change in tactics should be adopted without being tested by people who understand testing. Finally, formal testing makes sense only if a logical hypothesis has been formulated about how a proposed intervention will affect a business. Although it’s possible to just make a change and then sit back and observe what happens, that process will inevitably lead to a hypothesis—and often the realization that it could have been formulated in advance and tested more precisely. Beyond using the tactical-versus-strategic criterion, there are other ways to decide whether formal testing makes sense. For instance, it is useful only in situations where desired outcomes are defined and measurable. Business Banking Mon Likewise, highly specialized tools exist for online-usage testing, such a...