dug 
So I have a lot of colleagues and connections who have #marketing in their titles or resumes. I realise product innovation or product testing isn’t specifically a marketing thing but seeing as everyone is doing everything these days I thought I’d add a question anyway…
I’ll take it down if I get screamed at, but broadly the context is this:
A small business (3 FTE with <1m TO) needs to test #propensitytobuy of a consulting product (like selling health or legal advice etc) or in other words test desirability (you know, as in desirable/viable/feasible) or test the effectiveness of the proposition (does the service allow value creation? Are the proposed pain relievers aligned to the ICPs pains?) and so on.
And given that, the proposed idea is to test the assumptions of the proposition by running some ads on #Facebook or #Reddit or whatever for a month or two and seeing if anyone clicks on the #CTA.
I have doubts / questions (and I haven’t worked in advertising in 15 years):
- Would they be in effect testing the ad creative? The media plan? Or the business proposition itself? How do people normalise that so you know what you’re measuring?
- Assuming it’s not a terrible idea, what is the media MVP; how do you know what a valid test looks like? How many months, how to define target? How can you compare like with like if you run the test on multiple platforms?
- And related to the above, assuming the test isn’t a stupid idea, and assuming you have some sensible way of normalising your data, how much cash burn is required for the experiment to be valid? Do these things take time to embed before you get helpful/valid results? I mean do people do tests like this these days? and if so what does a valid spend look like?
(credit: Florian Bonnet)