Condition for successful marketing – validation of marketing assumptions

Everything in marketing is assumptions

Until you validate them with real user behavior

Successful marketing means the right people doing the things they want to do in a profitable way for the company. And that means that marketing, and in our digital age, digital marketing, is rife with marketing assumptions. This is a topic that Zhoro Malchev, managing partner at Xplora, spoke about at a previous edition of a favorite marketing industry event – Online Advertising Conf, organized by colleagues from Netpeak.

On 23rd June 2022 the conference will cover three key areas – Business & Digital Synergy, SEO and eCommerce, and Ivan Panteleev – Account Director and Partner at Xplora, will present together with Lilia Borisova, Digital Marketing Manager at dev.bg, a joint case study on “Digital Branding on the example of the leading portal for IT professionals – dev.bg”.

What is a marketing assumption?

Anything in marketing that rests on a logical construct or simple belief. It could be:

• “Last time …., then …. So it will be the same now!”
• “I believe consumers …”;
• “I think it will be more attractive to women with children.”
• “This banner format will deliver higher quality traffic from target users versus the current format.”

A seven-step model for successful marketing by validating assumptions

At the OAConf edition Zhoro Malchev presented a model for validating assumptions, which includes seven concrete steps:

1. We assume that …
2. We know that we know …
3. We know we don’t know …
4. We’ll check by …
5. Validate (or reject)
6. We apply what we’ve learn and consolidate the findings among all participants in the marketing process
7. Scaling successful marketing

In Xplora’s SlideShare you can find Joro’s presentation from the event on “Validating Marketing Assumptions“.

Agile and data-driven marketing

In 2022, Philip Kotler’s Marketing 5.0 was published in Bulgarian, and the afterword includes checklists on the principles and approaches in Marketing 5.0, prepared by Zhoro Malchev. You will find that marketing suggestions are relevant to the two principles of successful marketing. First – data-driven marketing, and second – agile marketing based on real feedback from any previous marketing information in the form of consumer signals about their interests and behaviours.

Detailed examples of marketing assumptions

If the topic of successful marketing, and in particular successful digital marketing, is interesting to you, we recommend the two special episodes of the Xplore Marketing podcast that we dedicated to the topic.

Marketing hypotheses

In episode 3 of Xplore Marketing, Zhoro and Vankata cover the topic of marketing assumptions in detail. You’ll discover over 10 examples of marketing assumptions and how they can be tested and validated. You’ll be particularly interested to hear about the guesses as to how many consumers would abuse online pomocodes to get a free slice of cake from Pastry Sunday. Ultimately, we should be hyper-realistic and know what consumers a successful marketing campaign is for and with what purpose, and so determine which marketing assumptions are key, how we will validate them and how we will track the campaign.

In the episode, you’ll find many more specific examples of assumptions where knowing what we don’t know is key, in addition to what we do know.

Examples of validated marketing assumptions, and successful marketing based on them

We recommend you episode 4 of Xplore Marketing. In it, Kathy, Social Performance Team Lead at Xplora, and Vankata, Partner & Account Director at Xplora, continue the topic from the last episode about hypotheses in marketing. They look at a detailed example of a campaign in which the gender of the users significantly influences the type of user journey – when what content should be planned and in what way it should be presented through search engines, on social networks and on a company’s website. They also cover the topic of the difference in positioning of a brand in different countries and the different consumer behaviour in different countries.

In this episode, you’ll find many examples of how men and women shop online and how stereotype-based offers can lead a campaign in the wrong direction. You will also hear about “hidden” target groups. And because we always give practical advice – how to find them.

If you haven’t already got a ticket for Online Advertising Bulgaria 2022 – you can email us for preferential terms like our colleagues from Netpeak give to speakers 🙂